ESPIONAGEA Whiff of Espionage Around the Epstein Files Points to How Intelligence and Influence Interact
The Epstein papers have thrown up speculation about whether the late financier and sex offender might have performed services for one or another of the big intelligence agencies.
For obvious reasons, the secretive world of intelligence agencies and the people who revolve in its orbit remain opaque. So much so, that some of those people may not even be aware of any involvement in the secret world.
The Epstein papers have thrown up speculation about whether the late financier and sex offender might have performed services for one or another of the big intelligence agencies. And in the wake of that speculation, it has been noted that the father of Epstein’s one-time girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was the late Robert Maxwell, well-known as a larger than life publisher and newspaper proprietor in the UK from the 1950s to the early 90s. He, too, was the subject of much speculation that he might have been involved in intelligence work.
Epstein is now better known for his sex trafficking network and Maxwell for stealing from his employees’ pension funds. But their examples point to how intelligence, high finance and influence work.
Generally speaking there are three main classes of people involved in state intelligence gathering. “Officers” are full-time employees of state intelligence agencies such as MI6. They run their groups of “agents”, who are not formally employed by the state but who deliberately and knowingly gather intelligence and perform tasks for intelligence officers. And there are what is known as “intelligencers” (or sometimes assets) who may not even know they are providing information to a spy agency.
The currency of human intelligence is access, knowledge and often the ability to compromise officials and influential people.
We often think that intelligence agencies and their agent runners seek to directly recruit people with the access and motivation to pass on state secrets. While this is undeniably the case – and the examples of the American Aldrich Ames and the Briton Melita Norwood provide good evidence of this – intelligence agencies are equally interested in recruiting what’s known as “access agents”.
Access Agents
The value of an access agent is not the secrets they have access to, but the social and professional access they provide to people who do. People in high-end society, scientific research, banking, politics and culture make excellent targets for access agents. And from an agency’s point of view, the best thing is that these agents are deniable and under the radar.
