Epstein and more than one service is John Kiriakou’s amended account of whose intelligence service Jeffrey Epstein was working for, given after the release of a further tranche of documents.
The question put to him
A viewer asked whether it is a cop-out to lay Epstein at the door of Israel, and lately Russia, when everything happened on American territory and the deal Epstein received came from the American Justice Department.[1]
Kiriakou’s first answer was that the question does not have a single answer. “I don’t know. This is complicated. It’s complicated. Listen, I think this is this is one of those situations where everybody’s guilty. And and I don’t think I don’t think anybody’s given anybody a pass.”[1]
The revision
He then restated his own long-held position and extended it. “I believe very strongly that Epstein was working for the Israelis. Uh, but now we know from this latest trunch, he was probably working for for the Brits and probably working for the Americans and may have been working for the Germans. And you know, he was just one of those guys.”[1]
The Israeli claim itself Kiriakou has always framed in the vocabulary of the access agent rather than the recruited spy — a service that cannot reach the principal recruits the person who has regular access to the principal. The revision does not abandon that framing; it multiplies the number of services that could have been running him on the same basis.
What he treats as irrecoverable is the confirmation. Asked whether the worst part of Epstein’s death is that the whole story will never be known, Kiriakou agreed without qualification — “no” — and answered the follow-up about interviewing him in the same register: “It would be great. Yeah, it would be great, but it’s not going to happen.”[2]