Long Before Epstein: Sex
Traffickers & Spy Agencies
August 23, 2019
Elizabeth Vos reviews the unsavory
history of intelligence agencies providing protection to child sex-trafficking
rings.
The alleged use
of sexual blackmail by spy agencies is hardly unique to the case of Jeffrey
Epstein. Although the agencies involved as well as their alleged motivations
and methods differ with each case, the crime of child trafficking with ties to
intelligence agencies or those protected by them has been around for decades.
Some cases include the
1950s -1970s Kincora scandal and the 1981 Peter Hayman affair, both in the
U.K.; and the Finders’ cult and the Franklin scandal in the U.S. in the late
1980s. Just as these cases did not end in convictions, the pedophile and accused
child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein remained at arms’ length for years.
“For almost two decades,
for some nebulous reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his
billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein, whose alleged sexual
sickness and horrific assaults on women without means or ability to protect
themselves… remained untouchable,” journalist Vicky Ward wrote in The Daily Beast in July.
The protection of sex
traffickers by intelligence agencies is especially interesting in the wake
of Epstein’sdeath. Like others,
Epstein had long been purported to have links with spy agencies. Such allegations documented
by Whitney Webb in her multi-part series were recently published in Mintpress News.
Webb states that Epstein
was the current face of an extensive system of abuse with ties to both
organized crime and intelligence interests. She told CNLive! that:
“According to Nigel Rosser, a British journalist who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001,
Epstein apparently for much of the 1990s claimed that he used to work for the
CIA.”
Vicky Ward, who wrote on Epstein for Vanity
Fair before his first arrest, and claimed the magazine killed one of her pieces after Epstein intervened
with the editor, Graydon Carter said in a Tweet that one of Epstein’s clients was
Adnan Khashoggi, an arms dealer who was pivotal in the Iran Contra scandal and
was on the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) payroll. This was also
noted in a book “By Way of Deception” by former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky.
The Times of Israel reported that Epstein was an “active business
partner with former prime minister Ehud Barak” until 2015, adding: “Barak
formed a limited partnership company in Israel in 2015, called Sum (E.B.) to
invest in a high-tech startup…. A large part of the money used by Sum to buy
the start-up stock was supplied by Epstein.”
Webb wrote he “was a
long-time friend of Barak, who has long-standing and deep ties to Israel’s
intelligence community.” On the board of their company sat Pinchas Bukhris, a former commander of the IDF
cyber unit 8200.
Epstein’s allegedly protected
status was revealed by Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who
gave Epstein an infamously lenient plea deal in 2007. Acosta, who was forced to
resign as President Donald Trump’s labor secretary because of that deal, reportedly said
of the case: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it
alone.”
Kincora Boy’s Home
Several cases in the
unsavory history linking intelligence agencies and sex scandals put the
allegations against Epstein in context. Among these was the U.K. Kincora Boy’s
Home, where at least 29 boys
were reported to have been targeted at the Belfast, Northern Ireland, facility
from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s, until it was shut in 1980. It also
involved the alleged protection
of child sexual abusers at the home and among their clients.
The Irish Times wrote that “destitute boys were systematically
sodomized by members of Kincora staff and were supplied for abuse to prominent
figures in unionist politics. The abusers – among them MPs, councilors,
leading Orangemen and other influential individuals – became potentially
important intelligence assets.”
The Belfast Telegraph also quoted former Labour Party MP, Ken
Livingstone, who said: “MI5 wasn’t just aware of child abuse at Kincora Boys’
Home – they were monitoring it. They were getting pictures of a judge in one
case, politicians, a lot of the establishment of Northern Ireland going in and
abusing these boys.”
Three staff were
eventually convicted of sexually abusing minors, which included the housemaster
William McGrath, a loyalist “Orangeman” and allegedly an MI5 agent, according
to the Belfast Telegraph in July 2014.
Although the U.K.’s Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry ultimately
found “no credible evidence” to support the allegations, two former U.K.
intelligence officers maintained their claim of MI5’s involvement: Brian Gemmell says he alerted MI5 to the abuse at Kincora and
was told to stop his investigation; and a former army intelligence officer,
Colin Wallace, “consistently claimed that MI5, RUC special branch and military
intelligence knew about the abuse at Kincora and used it to blackmail the
pedophile ring to spy on hardline loyalists,” according to The Guardian.
The Irish outlet, An Phoblacht, wrote: “The systematic
abuse of young boys in the Home and the part played by the British intelligence
organizations to keep the scandal under wraps ensured that one side of the
murky world of Unionist paramilitarism and its links to the crown forces was kept
out of the public domain for years.”
In the U.S., the New York
State Select Committee On Crime in 1982 investigated
nationwide networks of trafficking underage sex workers and producing child
pornography. Dale Smith, a committee investigator, noted that call services
using minors also profited from “sidelines,” besides the income from peddling
prostitution. Smith said they sold information “on the sexual proclivities of the
clients to agents of foreign intelligence.” Presumably, this information could
be used to blackmail those in positions of power. Smith added that one call
service sold information to “British and Israeli intelligence.”
The Hayman Affair
Another U.K. scandal included allegations that Sir Peter Hayman, a British diplomat and deputy director of MI6,
was a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
Police discovered that two
of the roughly dozen pedophiles in his circle had been writing to each other
about their interest in “the extreme sexual torture and murder of children,”
according to The Daily Mail.
In 2015, The Guardian reported that former Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher had been “adamant that officials should not publicly name” Hayman,
“even after she had been fully briefed on his activities….formerly secret
papers released to the National Archives shows.”
Still, Hayman was unmasked as a subscriber to PIE in 1981 by M.P. Geoffrey
Dickens, who also reportedly raised the
national security risk of Hayman’s proclivities, implying they were a potential
source of blackmail sought by intelligence agencies.
The British tabloid The Mirror reported that intelligence agencies, including
the KGB and CIA, kept their own dossiers on U.K. establishment figures involved
with PIE and the abuse of minors, to blackmail the targets in exchange for
information.
Hayman was never
charged for his
association with PIE: The U.K. attorney general at the time, Sir Michael
Havers defended the decision and denied claims that Heyman was given special treatment.
Labour Party MP Barbara
Castle allegedly gave a dossier she compiled on pedophiles in positions of
power to U.K. journalist Don Hale in 1984 when he was the editor of the Brury Messenger. Hale alleged that soon afterward, police from the “Special
Branch, the division responsible for matters of national security,” raided his
office and removed the Castle dossier. They then threatened him with a “D-notice,”
which prevented him from publishing the story on the threat of up to 10 years
in prison.
The Finders Cult
Another group accused of
trafficking children, which had links to intelligence agencies, was the “Finders”
cult. In 1987, The Washington Post reported that two members were arrested in
connection with the alleged abuse of six children. Investigators found
materials in Madison County, Virginia, which they said linked to a “commune
called the Finders.”
Besides nude photographs of children, a Customs Service memo written by special agent Ramon Martinez refers
to files “relating to the activities of the organization in different parts of
the world, including “London, Germany, the Bahamas, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia,
Africa, Costa Rica, and Europe.”
Martinez’s memo notes that
a Finders’ telex ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong. Another
expressed interest in “bank secrecy situations.” The memo also documents
high-tech transfers to the U.K., numerous properties under the Finders’ control,
the group’s interest in terrorism, explosives, and the evasion of law
enforcement.
Martinez describes the
swift end to his investigation. He wrote that on April 2, 1987, he arrived at
the Metropolitan Police Department and was told that all the data was turned
over to the State Department which, in turn, advised MPD that “all travel and
use of passports by the holders was within the law and no action would be
taken. Then he was told that the investigation into the Finders had become a
CIA internal matter. The MPD report was classified, not available for review”
and “No further action will be taken.”
Martinez was not the only
person with unanswered questions. The U.S.News
& World Report wrote that N. Carolina Rep. Charlie Rose (Dem.), chair of the
House Administration Committee and Florida’s Rep. Tom Lewis (Rep.) asked
“Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization
and turned their backs on these children? That’s what the evidence points to,”
says Lewis, adding that “I can tell you that we’ve got a lot of people
scrambling, and that wouldn’t be happening if there was nothing here.”
The leniency showed by the
State Department and the fact that the CIA would designate the investigation of
the Finders group as “an internal matter” raises serious questions. What motive
might have driven the CIA to associate with or protect a child abuse ring?
The Franklin Scandal
The Franklin Scandal
erupted in 1988, centering on a child-trafficking ring operating in Omaha,
Nebraska, by Lawrence E. King Jr., a former
vice-chairman of the National Black Republican Council: It was alleged that
children were provided to politicians in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, among
other illegal activities.
The late former state Sen.
John Decamp alleged in his book “The Franklin Coverup” that a special committee
of Nebraska, Legislature launched a probe to investigate the affair, which involved
King being indicted for embezzling money from the Franklin Credit Union. The
committee hired former Lincoln, Nebraska, police officer Jerry Lowe, whose
reports suggested that King was involved in “guns and money transfers to
Nicaragua,” and was linked with the CIA.
James Flanery, an
investigative reporter at The World Herald who
reported on the scandal, told associates that King was “running guns and
money into Nicaragua,” and that the CIA was heavily involved.”
Like many scandals before and since the Franklin case ended with no prosecution of the perpetrators. However, Paul Bonacci, one
of the alleged victims, was indicted for perjury. He had alleged that he was
sexually abused as a minor in Nebraska and around the country where he was
flown by Lawrence King.
In 1999, the Omaha World Herald reported Bonacci was awarded $1 million in
damages due to his lawsuit against King and other alleged perpetrators. Decamp,
who was Bonacci’s attorney, told the newspaper “Obviously, you don’t award $1
million if you don’t think he (Bonacci) was telling the truth.”
Given the history of child
trafficking rings that were allegedly connected with or enjoyed the protection
of intelligence services, it is possible that similar claims about Jeffrey
Epstein is something the authorities, though unlikely, should investigate.
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter and regular
contributor to Consortium News.
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