Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender who died in U.S. federal custody in August 2019. John Kiriakou has returned to the case repeatedly across the source corpus, and his position has been consistent on two points and has shifted on a third. He holds that Epstein was not a CIA asset but an Israeli access agent; that Epstein died by suicide, for reasons drawn from Kiriakou’s own two years in the Bureau of Prisons; and — more recently — that “access agent” alone understates the arrangement, Epstein having also worked as an intelligence broker peddling material to several services at once.[1]
The access-agent thesis
Asked whether Epstein worked for the CIA, Kiriakou has been categorical: “No way. … To spy on whom? The CIA’s job is to collect foreign intelligence. What foreign intelligence did he have? He’s spying on Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and Prince Andrew? That’s the Israelis.”[1][2][3][4]
The positive case he states at length: “I’ve maintained from the very beginning that this has MOSSAD written all over it. Mossad is incredibly active on U.S. soil — hundreds and hundreds of Israeli intelligence agents active across the United States at any given time. One of the things the Israelis are very good at is the cultivation and recruitment of what are called access agents. Say you want information from Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and Prince Andrew — well, you’re not going to recruit any of those people. So you do the next best thing: you recruit somebody who has access to all those people. Well, Jeffrey Epstein bore all the hallmarks of an Israeli access operation.”[5][6] He dates his confidence to at least April 2023, when he said flatly, “I’m confident he was Intelligence… I’m convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was working for Mossad,”[7] and restated it in late 2023.[8] Asked again in 2026 whether Epstein was a foreign agent for Israel or any other government, he said he had taken criticism from the very beginning for the claim and had not moved: “I accused him of being an Israeli access agent. I still believe he was an Israeli access agent.”[9] Stated on Piers Morgan’s programme, the claim took its most compressed form: “It’s as though you opened up the intelligence textbook and looked up access agent, Jeffrey Epstein’s picture would be there.”[10]
What an access agent is
In the tradecraft sense Kiriakou applies, an access agent is someone cultivated to get close to senior officials and business figures in order to glean non-public information for a foreign service.[11] The recruit is valuable precisely because the real targets are unrecruitable: you cannot recruit a former president or a major CEO directly, so you recruit someone who has regular access to them and can keep them in a controlled environment.[12] On the Morgan programme Kiriakou defined it as someone who “gives a foreign intelligence service access to important people who have important information,” arguing a foreign service would recruit “the guy next to” a high-value target such as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, or Prince Andrew, and might use a honeypot — wiring bedrooms and bathrooms for audio and video — to hold something over the target if needed.[13]
Kiriakou illustrates the principle with an instruction from his own CIA training. An instructor told him the best recruitment he ever made was of a copy-machine repairman who serviced the prime minister’s office; the repairman installed a device transmitting a copy of every document made on the machine back to CIA headquarters. Kiriakou’s conclusion: “I essentially did recruit the prime minister because we got literally everything that the prime minister got.” Applied to Epstein — rather than recruiting Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, or Prince Andrew directly, Mossad recruited the man who had access to all of them.[14][15][16]
Such an agent need not hold a clearance to be useful: “Jeffrey Epstein’s not going to give you classified information because he doesn’t have access to classified information” — the value was getting powerful people to talk candidly with their guard down.[17] Kiriakou has suggested the scientific gatherings on Epstein’s island specifically targeted physicists and researchers working on nuclear research, DARPA projects, microwave weapons, and Havana Syndrome-related technology — work of interest to Mossad.[18] He contrasts this patient cultivation with a CIA “cold pitch” — walking up and asking someone to work for you — which he says almost never works and, in his career, succeeded only once; ordinary recruitment takes a year or two of ingratiation.[19] He holds more broadly that Israel plants access agents like Epstein inside the United States to gather compromising material for shaping foreign policy.[20][21]
The Maxwell connection
Kiriakou’s case for the Israeli attribution extends to Epstein’s principal lieutenant: “His relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father was also a Mossad agent — a known Mossad agent — leads me to believe that they kept it all in the family. His access continued to improve. The wealthier he became, the source of his wealth is still not clear — we don’t know where that money came from. It couldn’t all have come from Les Wexner.”[22] He has described Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, as “a very well-known Mossad asset”[23] and as a “prolific MOSSAD spy” — a characterization he describes as historic fact rather than speculation — arguing that Ghislaine Maxwell’s proximity to Epstein was not coincidental but the mechanism by which Mossad maintained oversight of the operation.[24][25]
Vulnerabilities, and what the service tolerated
Kiriakou’s assessment of what made Epstein recruitable and controllable: “As soon as they realized what his real vulnerabilities were, his vulnerabilities were an absolute love of money and pedophilia.” In his framing, MOSSAD did not merely tolerate Epstein’s conduct — it actively enabled it: “I think it’s obvious that they did. They set him up. Of course. Absolutely.”[26][27] He draws a line between services on that point: “That would never happen at the CIA or at any other intelligence service that I’m aware of. And I think the Israelis were comfortable with it.”[27][28] He describes Mossad’s operating ethos as mirroring the Israeli state’s own “survival or death” mentality — willing to do “literally anything” to ensure Israel’s survival — contrasted with what he calls the more restrained practices of American intelligence, attributable to congressional oversight.[29]
He compares the operation directly to the Eli Cohen case, the MOSSAD penetration of Damascus in the 1960s: “It’s the exact same playbook. On a bigger scale.” The shared structure is to place the asset in a foreign environment, fund a lavish lifestyle, build social connections upward through society, and harvest intelligence continuously. The key difference is motivation — Cohen acted for ideological reasons; Epstein acted for money.[30][31]
Kompromat and the cameras
The operation as Kiriakou imagines it: “His job was to get the most important people into compromising positions, say with underage girls maybe, and to be able to hold it over them — so you could extort information that you could then pass back to the Israelis who would then continue to fund you and to finance your lifestyle.”[32] The access agent needs money to maintain the environment — an island, a mansion — and a temperament that makes high-status people feel comfortable and valued; the secondary purpose is kompromat, with hidden cameras recording behaviour that can be used as leverage.[33]
His single most-repeated piece of evidence is the recording equipment. Epstein’s island had video cameras in every room, including the bathrooms: “Why would he care what was going on unless it was to use that information against people?”[34] He cites Virginia Giuffre’s own testimony as corroboration: she testified there was a room at Epstein’s Caribbean mansion wired floor-to-ceiling with monitors, watched by staff, and that every room and bathroom in the house was wired for video.[35] He has put the point more bluntly since: “Why would you put cameras and listening devices in the bathrooms in addition to every other room in the house? Normal people don’t do things like that.”[36] Elsewhere he points to the audio and video Epstein kept in “literally every single room of his house, including the bathrooms,” and to the unexplained millions Les Wexner gave him, as his two principal exhibits.[37][38][39] He says cameras hidden in bathrooms and in every room of all of Epstein’s houses cannot be explained as ordinary security consciousness — nobody installs cameras in bathrooms for legitimate reasons — and that it most plausibly indicates a blackmail operation.[40]
Kiriakou has also described the surveillance system at Epstein’s properties as itself consistent with an intelligence operation: the cameras were set to reset at midnight and record over the previous day’s footage. In his telling this was not a malfunction or oversight but the designed behaviour of the system, ensuring kompromat could be collected during an encounter while the record was destroyed before it became a liability to the operator.[41][42][43][44]
He allows no alternative reading of the purpose: “What’s the point of running the operation if it’s not to collect compromat?” Presented with the argument that the collection was defensive — insurance rather than leverage — he rejects it on scale. Keeping “a little kernel of a story that you tuck back in your mind just in case” is one thing; “it’s an entirely different thing to 24 hours a day collect intelligence on everybody.”[45][46] He characterizes Epstein’s relationship with the services that used him as one of “perfectly intersecting interests”: Epstein was a sex addict who wanted access to intelligence work, and the agencies used his perversion to further their own interests.[47] He adds that he has never believed the operation was purely blackmail; his view is that whatever service ran it, most likely Mossad, was after material it could hold over the people implicated.[48] He contrasts the method with CIA practice as he was taught it: the agency disliked squeezing people with surreptitious photographs, preferring a source who cooperates from a friendly relationship and, usually, for money — “you don’t want to threaten people. The Russians do that. The Israelis also do that.”[49]
Money, entry point, and cover
Kiriakou treats Epstein’s arrival in elite finance as the structural anomaly that most needs explaining. Epstein never attended college, yet was referred by the Rothschild family as a tax advisor to the wealthiest man in Ohio; that referral, in his assessment, does not happen without a sponsor with a purpose.[50][24] The depth of the Rothschild family’s relationship with Epstein bothers him greatly, he says, given that a family wealthy since the 18th century is not known for skipping due diligence on someone whose actual credential was as a seventh-grade math substitute teacher.[51][52]
On Les Wexner he offers a belief he is careful to mark as unproven: “I personally believe that Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein had some sort of sexual thing. That’s just my belief. I don’t have any proof.” In his reading, that relationship is what explains why Wexner — who had no due-diligence reason to trust a “seventh grade math substitute teacher” who “never went to college” — seeded Epstein’s career with roughly a hundred million dollars.[51][52]
He recounts an email in which Epstein told Elie de Rothschild that Harvard professors were teaching students that Hitler had been cared for in a homeless shelter owned by the Epstein and Rothschild families — a claim she questioned as a conspiracy theory and Epstein insisted was “100% true.”[53][54] He separately flags as suspicious that both Wexner and Bill Clinton, in recent videotaped depositions, volunteered the Rothschild name unprompted, without being asked about them.[55]
The finance operation itself, on Kiriakou’s account, was cover rather than business: “Epstein was a really shitty trader. But if you’re not worried about an ROI, who gives a fuck — you can do anything you want. You just pass the money through.” Epstein’s value to a state intelligence service was specifically the ability to move money under cover of a finance operation that did not need to be profitable.[56] Governments, he notes, are uniquely positioned to launder money undetected, and he identifies real estate, fine art, and racehorses as the three easiest current vehicles.[57] Attorneys and investigators, he says, will confirm it remains straightforward to launder money with access to luxury real estate, fine art or racehorses — “that’s where most of the money laundering is taking place right now” — and Epstein had access to and was a part of all those worlds.[58] He stresses nonetheless that no one knows the source of Epstein’s money, recounting a New York Post reporter who, in the 1990s, could find nothing on the “financial mystery man” backing the New York Sun.[59]
Pressed on when a relationship with an intelligence service would have begun, Kiriakou places it in the Iran–Contra period rather than the Clinton years, and identifies the likely point of contact as Adnan Khashoggi: asked whether that is where Epstein could have been recruited, his answer is “Absolutely,” and “when you put all of these episodes together in a line, that would make sense to me.”[60] He concludes Epstein “had to have had protection at the White House” at that time, “sometime between 1981 and 1984, five.”[61]
Intelligence broker
Kiriakou’s view has widened over time from a single sponsor to several. He describes Epstein’s apparent strategy of seeking access to multiple services simultaneously — the CIA, MI5, MI6, possibly German intelligence, and definitely MOSSAD — as evidence Epstein was attempting to function as “some sort of an intelligence broker to the highest bidder.”[62][63] Asked whether Epstein was an asset or whether the agencies worked for him, he said the latest documents had solidified his belief that Epstein was less an access agent than an “intelligence broker” who collected intelligence and sold it to multiple services — Mossad, and probably the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and the Germans.[64][65] His settled formulation keeps both terms: “I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, he was an Israeli access agent, but he was also what we call an intelligence peddler” — someone who collects intelligence from multiple sources and passes it to other services to bank goodwill, a strategy he says ultimately did not work out well for Epstein.[66][67][68][69][70]
The recurring illustration is Russia. Epstein tried repeatedly to arrange a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin; the Russians refused, countering with an offer of a meeting including additional participants — variously reported by Kiriakou as two security officials, three additional participants, or a group of up to four intelligence officials — which Epstein declined, insisting on a private meeting. The Russians walked away.[62][71][72][73][74] Kiriakou has also said Epstein’s attorneys separately filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the CIA and the National Security Council asking the agencies to confirm any association with Epstein, and that there is no indication either agency ever responded.[75]
Against all of this Kiriakou sets a flat negative from his own service: he says he never heard Epstein’s name at the CIA — unlike Adnan Khashoggi.[76] He arrives at his conclusion partly through a counterfactual about his own trade. Had he been the officer who ran into an unexplained American in the middle of a compartmented operation, the sequence would have been fixed: ask the White House staff “who’s this American, this Epstein guy?”, then tell the FBI — “you don’t need to know what it’s about, but you do need to know that there is a private citizen involved who’s an American, just so you can start a file on him, just in case this is going to be a counter intelligence problem for us in the future.” His conclusion from the record is flat: “It doesn’t look like that was ever done. I can’t imagine why.”[77][61][78]
Asked whether he would have authorized CIA cooperation with Epstein, Kiriakou’s answer was unequivocal: “I would have put a bullet in his brain if it had been up to me.”[62]
The 2006 non-prosecution agreement
On the 2006 plea, Epstein received six months of house arrest with an ankle bracelet for child-sex crimes carrying a five-year mandatory minimum on a first offense. Kiriakou cites Alex Acosta — the prosecuting attorney at the time and later Secretary of Labor under Trump — as having stated he was ordered by the attorney general to offer Epstein the deal. Kiriakou’s observation: only the president can order the attorney general to do something.[79][80]
He has since set out the chain link by link and named the intervening figure: the only person who can order a U.S. attorney is the attorney general, and the attorney general at the time was Alberto Gonzales — a man Kiriakou describes as “legendary for his powerlessness and ill suiting for the position,” who “didn’t brush his hair in the morning without permission from the president or the vice president.” That leaves the question he says nobody has answered: “Was it Bush? Was it Cheney? Who was it that was close enough to Epstein that he would want to swoop in and save Epstein?”[81][82] He believes Acosta genuinely does not know the answer, having been told only that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”[82] He argues the same point from the structure of authority: a US attorney for the Southern District of Florida would not cover up an international network on his own initiative, but would kick it up to the Attorney General, and no Attorney General — “especially not one as weak as Alberto Gonzalez” — would approve it without the president. Constitutionally, only two people can tell a US attorney to stand down: the Attorney General and the president.[83][84]
He rejects the theory that the CIA permitted the arrangement as a favour to Mossad. Asked whether the dark side of the CIA would let the dark side of Mossad compromise American politicians on American soil without taking a cut of the intelligence, he answered: “Not in a million years.” The two services have traditionally hostile relations precisely because the Israelis will not stop spying on Americans, and even had the CIA wanted to, it would have needed the approval of at least the national security adviser and probably the president.[85]
On what can still be done about it he is pessimistic: the statute of limitations on the sex offences is five years and has run, so “there aren’t going to be any charges against anybody” — only civil suits. A constitutional attorney told him the sole surviving route would be to argue that the cover-up itself continued and constituted a conspiracy, so that the charge would be conspiracy to commit the crime rather than the crime, and that even that is a stretch.[86][87] He treats the missing prosecution as itself the scandal, noting that Les Wexner was named a co-conspirator in the documents and had never been interviewed: “Where was the FBI all these years?”[88]
Named figures and the Boies review
Kiriakou names the following as having visited Epstein’s properties, while noting that not all were criminally implicated: Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, Peter Mandelson, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates. His summary: “Most of them did. But not all of them.” He notes most will not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has expired.[89][90][26]
On Clinton and Trump specifically he defers consistently to attorney David Boies — described as “one of the most important criminal defense attorneys in America,” who represented Virginia Giuffre and represents Hillary Clinton — as the person best placed to know. Boies appeared on Piers Morgan to state there are “thousands and thousands of emails” between Epstein and each man, and “zero evidence that either Bill Clinton or Donald Trump committed a crime.”[90] Boies separately told Kiriakou that his staff at the firm Perkins Coie went through every page of the roughly three million released Epstein documents and found no evidence of any crime by either man.[55][91][92][93] Kiriakou relays this as significant precisely because Boies had every incentive to find incriminating material.
What angers him most is the timing. Damaging revelations keep surfacing only after the relevant statute of limitations has expired, meaning “no matter how terrible the revelations become no one will ever face justice. No one.”[94] He notes the standard federal statute of limitations for conspiracy is five years, calling it “what a coincidence” that the revelations are surfacing just over five years since Epstein’s death — which he suggests may make some individuals feel it is now “safe” to let more come out.[95][96]
He also recounts that two of Epstein’s earliest accusers, sisters Maria Farmer and Annie Farmer, were ignored when they first came forward. Maria Farmer worked the front desk at Epstein’s Manhattan office and said Trump visited three days a week; on one occasion, Kiriakou relays, Epstein told Trump about a particular girl, “she’s not for you.”[97] He rejects the reflexive skepticism directed at accusers, noting that people who dismiss the Sean “Diddy” Combs allegations by asking why the alleged victims did not go to the police sooner draw the same comparison to Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, and states he does not believe Ghislaine Maxwell is the only person deserving indictment in the Epstein case.[98] On the Combs case itself he says he followed it closely from the start and — while calling Combs an epithet — did not see a prosecutable crime.[99]
Anomalies in the released documents
Three threads in the released material are ones Kiriakou says he finds hard to explain innocently, and which he has returned to across several interviews.
Ruemmler and the Brennan question
Kiriakou has said he found something in the Epstein document releases that he believed others had missed. Kathryn Ruemmler, Barack Obama’s White House Counsel — described by Kiriakou as “the most important lawyer in America” when serving in that role, and later General Counsel at Goldman Sachs — was, per the documents, in frequent email contact with Epstein.[100][101]
In one email she wrote to Epstein: “John Brennan, the director of the CIA, gave me the CIA’s highest honor this morning.” In a separate communication she wrote about an upcoming Washington visit and asked: “How about if I set up a meeting with John Brennan? He would love you.” Kiriakou raises the question directly — was there contact between Jeffrey Epstein and John Brennan? — and notes Brennan has not commented.[102] He has repeated the finding in later interviews, there naming her Katherine Ruemmler and adding that she repeatedly tried to arrange a lunch between Brennan and Epstein.[103] He has also said that after the connection became public, Ruemmler had to resign her Goldman Sachs post once it emerged that she and Epstein had exchanged roughly 1,200 emails.[104] The same wave of revelations, he notes, drove other prominent departures: a member of the Pritzker family stepped down from a corporate CEO post in the hotel industry, and the Mayor of Los Angeles called for the resignation of the chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee.[105]
The SCIF
Kiriakou considers Epstein’s reported access to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility hard to explain innocently. He describes a SCIF as “a bubble within a bubble”: a badge-controlled classified building containing a code-locked room, inside which sits a further self-contained room with thick, white-noise-filled walls and no windows, requiring another code to enter.[106] For an American SCIF, he says, only Five Eyes countries — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — would ever have any access, and Epstein, who held no clearance, should not have known where a SCIF was located, let alone been invited into one.[107]
The Libyan-assets scheme
Documents reportedly show Epstein associate Greg Brown emailing Epstein about a plan to recover 80 billion dollars — by some accounts as much as 200 to 400 billion — in frozen Libyan assets, proposing to identify and recover 5 to 10% of the money in exchange for a 10 to 25% fee, using contacts described as formerly with MI6 and Mossad.[108] Kiriakou notes that under U.S. Treasury rules a person who effects the repatriation of frozen assets through a legitimate whistleblower complaint can claim a reward of 26 to 34%, which he says is why Epstein was working with a major American law firm to try to claim a share.[109] In his assessment a private citizen could not plausibly pursue such a claim without very high-level intelligence or governmental ties, and he compares the scheme to the arms dealers of the Iran-Contra era who worked directly with Saudi, U.S. and Israeli intelligence.[110]
Death in custody
Kiriakou has been “adamant from the beginning” that Epstein died by suicide rather than murder, and grounds the judgement in his own two years in federal prison rather than in the forensic record.[111] His summary reasoning: “In the Bureau of Prisons everybody has his head up his ass. The cameras never work. The guards are always sound asleep. This happens all the time. These suicides — they happen literally every day in American prisons. Every day. When the only qualifications to be a prison guard are you have to be working on a GED or better and no felony convictions, you get what you pay for.”[2][112][4][113][114]
He fills in the institutional detail from the same experience: the only formal qualifications to become a federal prison guard are a GED (or working toward one) and no felony convictions, and inmates — not guards — handle mail call every day in federal prison because many guards cannot read well enough to sort names.[115] In his own facility, chapel religious services were frequently cancelled because inmates were having sex there, knowing the chapel’s cameras did not work.[116] He says he wrote publicly, based on that experience, that he did not believe Epstein’s death was a conspiracy, because guards are incompetent, cameras are routinely broken or turned off, and mandated cell checks rarely happen.[117] Rounds meant to occur every fifteen minutes, he says, took two hours.[118]
The suicide-watch protocol
Epstein, he says, had expressed suicidal intent and should have been placed on formal suicide watch — stripped naked and given a tear-proof paper gown rather than sheets and clothes, then housed alone in a room glassed on three sides and watched continuously in shifts by other prisoners paid to do it.[119][120] None of that protocol was followed: Epstein kept his sheets and clothes, was not under continuous watch, and was housed with a cellmate — which Kiriakou has heard described alternately as no cellmate at all, or a cellmate who was an accused or convicted serial killer.[121][122] He notes Epstein was taken off suicide watch two days before he died,[123] and that the guard responsible for checking Epstein’s cell every 15 minutes was working an unauthorized double shift and, in Kiriakou’s assessment, was probably asleep, missing checks for at least 30 minutes.[124] His conclusion: “I think he did commit suicide or was allowed to commit suicide in part because of the incompetent boobery of the Bureau of Prisons” — compounded by the fact that many parties, including those wanting to protect Clinton, Dershowitz, and Trump associates, had reason to want him dead.[125] Of all the factions implicated or accused of possible involvement, Kiriakou believes Israel had the most to gain from taking him out.[126]
Motive
On why Epstein would take his own life: “His life was done. He was never going to see the light of day ever again. Do you want to spend the next 40 years in a dank prison? American prisons are like third-world prisons. I don’t think he had the courage to go through life for the next 40 years in a maximum-security prison.”[127] Facing life without parole as a convicted pedophile who could never serve time in a minimum-security facility, Kiriakou believes Epstein simply had no way out[128] — facing life on a “steel prison bunk,” he “would rather be dead.”[129]
The hyoid bone
On the forensic detail that has fueled homicide theories — a fractured hyoid bone, more commonly associated with manual strangulation than hanging — Kiriakou has engaged with the same evidence differently across interviews. In one conversation he cited autopsy literature putting the incidence of hyoid fractures at somewhere between 17 and 76% of strangulation and hanging deaths, underscoring how equivocal the finding is on its own.[130] In a later conversation he noted that forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden called the fracture indicative of homicide by strangulation, and cited a more specific statistic — that only 25% of genuine hangings show one or two of the bones around the hyoid broken, whereas Epstein had all three broken.[131][132] He has called for the government to release any video it has, saying it would settle whether the hyoid bone broke from the sheet or from the fall of his body.[121]
The camera blip
Kiriakou has offered a technical explanation for the widely discussed interruption in the surveillance footage from the night of Epstein’s death, which some observers characterized as evidence of editing. All cameras in Bureau of Prisons facilities reset themselves on a twenty-four-hour cycle, and the blip was the routine reset: “All the cameras in the Bureau of Prisons reset themselves every 24 hours. That’s what the blip was.”[133][134][135] He has described the same mechanism as cameras in U.S. prisons that “reset themselves every night at midnight and record over the previous day’s recording” — explaining the footage anomalies without requiring a conspiracy.[136] He frames the failure to disclose the cycle in advance as unnecessary opacity that created a conspiracy flashpoint out of nothing: officials should simply have announced it — “At X time you’re going to see a little blip in the video. What that is is the camera resetting itself for its 24-hour cycle.”[137]
Whether Epstein is dead
Kiriakou believes Epstein is dead.[138] Asked directly, without discussing method, he has said yes, while adding he believes something troubling lies behind how he died.[139] On photographs circulating online purportedly showing Epstein alive and walking streets in Israel, his assessment: “They’re clearly AI-generated photos. I saw somebody talking the other day saying that they were able to identify it as having been created by Gemini AI.”[28] He has spoken more than once with Epstein’s brother, describing him as a seemingly ordinary, traumatized man who personally identified the body and took it to the crematorium — an account Kiriakou treats as debunking the AI-generated photo of Epstein “walking down the street in Tel Aviv” — and who has himself questioned whether Epstein was murdered.[140][141][142] He doubts the client list will surface soon, noting one black book failed to meet its 100,000-dollar reserve at a Maryland auction house.[143] He has also been careful to distinguish Jeffrey Epstein from Ed Epstein, an unrelated writer who reached out to challenge him over remarks on a “Shadow Commission”; the two men, he says, are not related.[144]
The fight over the files
Kiriakou has tracked the disclosure fight closely. Congress passed a law mandating release of the Epstein files — by his accounts 419 to 1 in the House and variously 100 to 0 or 99 to nothing in the Senate — and the president signed it, then said he would not release any more information, in direct defiance of the law he had just signed.[145][146] Attorney General Pam Bondi declared no more documents would be released, which Kiriakou says is not her call to make.[147] The Justice Department later quietly issued a memo admitting it had released only 1% of the Epstein documents by the December 31 deadline it had set for itself.[148] Roughly three million pages were released, leaving three to three and a half million withheld — which Kiriakou says the president has stated will not be released because they would embarrass friends of his.[149][150][151] He treats the congressional route as unnecessary in the first place: these are executive branch documents held at the Justice Department, and all the president needs to do is tell the Attorney General to release them.[152][153]
Bondi stated on the record that the Epstein videos “have nothing but child pornography on them” and will never be released; Kiriakou argues the real public interest is identifying the men depicted and why they have not been arrested.[154] He says he was initially thrilled by Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to lead the FBI, but sensed something was being withheld when the two reacted defensively to questions about further disclosures, and cites media reports that Bongino got into a shouting match with Bondi at the White House over the files — so angry that he did not go to work the next day.[155][156] He notes that when Democrats sponsored a House bill to force release, Speaker Mike Johnson shut down House business until September, and that Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene joined the Democrats along with several House Freedom Caucus members.[157] He believes the “movers and shakers” — the billionaire and political class implicated in the released documents — are the ones pressuring the Justice Department and the administration to withhold and redact further files.[158] He has suggested the timing of the Maduro capture in Venezuela was partly calculated to push Epstein coverage out of the news, noting zero arrests had resulted from the Epstein scandal against two from the Venezuela operation.[159]
He also records the cost paid by Republicans who backed release — outside super PACs spending thirty-five million dollars against Thomas Massie over a job paying a hundred and eighty thousand a year, a forced resignation, a sitting congresswoman finishing fifth in a governor’s race after losing an endorsement, and another member summoned to the situation room to be pressed into removing her name from the discharge petition.[160][161][162] His summary of the partisan framing is that there is none to be had: “The Republicans are in the Epstein files up to their necks just as much as the Democrats are.”[163]
On how declassification redaction is supposed to work, Kiriakou draws on a CIA assignment in which he spent about a month going through a six-foot-tall backlog of finished intelligence reports for release under the Freedom of Information Act: sources and methods, liaison relationships, and NSA intercepts must be redacted; for Justice Department and FBI material, unindicted co-conspirators and victims may be redacted, but otherwise nothing else should be.[164] He contrasts this with his own experience as a defendant, when the Justice Department released 15,000 pages of classified discovery in his case but only allowed him and his attorneys to read the documents inside a DOJ conference room with a DOJ representative present.[165]
Reception, dissent, and the cost of the claim
Kiriakou has described debating his assessment on the Piers Morgan show against Alan Dershowitz — Epstein’s former attorney — and a retired senior Mossad chief, alongside Scott Horton. His account of the Mossad chief’s name is inconsistent across retellings: in one interview he identifies him as General Danny Ayalon; in his more detailed retellings he initially guesses Ayalon on air, then self-corrects to Danny Yatom, another former Mossad director.[166][167][168] Morgan asked Kiriakou directly whether he thought Epstein was an Israeli Mossad agent; Kiriakou answered, “Absolutely, positively yes.” He has described the exchange as “the equivalent of a WWE Smackdown” and said he was “100% confident” in his assessment.[169] When Morgan put the same question directly to the Mossad chief, the response was simply: “Who knows?”[170]
Dershowitz argued that if Epstein had been a spy, he would have told his attorney, enabling Dershowitz to go to the White House and obtain a better sentence for him. Kiriakou’s response: “If I were the president, I would have hung him from a tree” — arguing that going to the White House to reveal Epstein had been collecting intelligence on American politicians would hardly have functioned as a mitigating defense.[171][172] In a separate account of the same exchange, Kiriakou recalls Dershowitz claiming Israel had not spied on the U.S. since 1985; Kiriakou says he corrected him on air, noting Israeli spies were exposed in Washington as recently as 1991.[173]
The dissent Kiriakou reports most carefully comes from inside the Israeli establishment. Ehud Barak — former Israeli prime minister and a known associate of Epstein — told him personally: “I think he was just a pedophile.” Kiriakou reports this view without endorsing it, using it to illustrate that even within the Israeli security establishment the Mossad-operation theory is not universally held.[25][92]
The claim brought multiple death threats, one of which Kiriakou attributes by name to a New York rabbi who told him there was “a place in the ovens” for him and for Jew haters like him, accusing him of protecting a paedophile and child trafficker because the man was Jewish.[70] He sets his position in a context of ongoing Israeli espionage, noting that three weeks before one 2026 interview the Defense Intelligence Agency had sent an all-hands email warning employees that the Israelis had stepped up activity against the United States.[74]
CIA practice, by contrast
Kiriakou has said he personally witnessed, on one occasion in his own CIA career, a conversation in which colleagues discussed “quietly encouraging” a problem source to commit suicide because the source had become a liability — a conversation from which nothing ultimately came.[174] He contrasts this with his broader CIA training, which held that sexual exploitation and coercion of sources does not work, because it risks turning a source into a double agent — and says he never personally saw anything at the CIA resembling what has emerged in the Epstein case.[175] He has nonetheless said there is no rule barring a CIA case officer from procuring a child for a source, which he says means some officers do so — a policy gap he connects directly to situations like the one involving Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.[176] He separately notes that senior officials at NSA and the Pentagon in the 1980s and 1990s were documented members of the Church of Satan, including one major who later wrote a book about it.[177]
The brother’s account of the body
By March 2026 Kiriakou had settled his position on both of the open questions about the death. He rejects the body-double theory outright: he spoke to Epstein’s brother, who told him he had identified the body, accompanied it to the crematorium and cremated him. “So I believe Jeffrey Epstein’s dead, but I’ve finally come around to the murder issue.”[178]
On the manner of death he cites the delay in response — that it took the FBI, across the street from the Metropolitan Detention Center, seven hours to come over and investigate the death of the most consequential inmate in the building — and his own experience of federal custody, where the cameras never worked and the guards did not walk their rounds.[179][180]
Why he did not run
Kiriakou frames the decision not to flee as the strongest evidence of how safe Epstein believed himself to be. A man with multiple private jets and billions hidden around the world had an available refuge in Israel, which does not extradite Jews; he stayed. “The only thing I can think of is that he believed he was safe” — that he held so much material on so many important people that nobody would dare come after him. “And then they did.”[181]
Set up, or stepped into it
Asked in June 2026 whether a sponsoring government could have been complicit in Epstein’s crimes themselves, Kiriakou allowed that it was “entirely possible” and then redirected to what he treats as the prior question: “it comes down to really the the basic, which is the source of his money. We don’t have any idea the source of his money. Was it a foreign government? Was it Les Wexner? Was it the Rothschild family? We don’t know. He never explained. Investigators were never able to find out.”[182][183]
On that unanswered question he hangs two readings he declines to choose between. A foreign government may have set Epstein up “in in a life of luxury so that he could serve as an access agent for them” — or “it also could be that he kind of stepped into that once he became wealthy.” His conclusion is not a verdict: “We’re we’ll never know. We’ll never know what the truth was.”[183]
The reversal, February 2026
Asked whether the CIA was involved in the Epstein case, Kiriakou answered with a change of position rather than a claim: “a couple of weeks ago I would have said probably not. And now I say probably yes.”[184]
What moved him was the three-million-document release. It showed White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler “tried repeatedly to connect Jeffrey Epstein with John Brennan. We don’t know if that connection took place. I would guess that it probably did — and certainly John Brennan has never said anything about it.”[184][185]
And then, “in the last 48 hours, we’ve learned that Epstein’s lawyers had specifically reached out to the CIA to ask the CIA to confirm its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — whatever that was. There’s no indication that the agency ever responded. There’s no indication that the National Security Council responded. But Epstein was actively seeking some sort of role with the CIA.”[185]
He adds the foreign services he thinks did take him up: “it looks like he may have had some sort of role with MI6 in the UK, as well as with the Israelis, that I think many of us have speculated on over the years.”[186]
Why he expects the files to disappear
Asked in December 2025 why Donald Trump had been so reluctant to keep his promise of an unredacted release, Kiriakou pointed at Elon Musk’s parting claim on leaving the administration that Trump “was all over the Epstein files.” His reading is that Trump “probably didn’t think that he would be, or didn’t realize that he was, when he was making the promise.”[187]
His forecast is pessimistic and bipartisan: “I’m not sanguine that we’ll ever see these files, because this is not a partisan issue. There are Democratic perverts just like there are Republican perverts, and there are a lot of them in positions of very important power. And so I think that they are going to work together to kill this information, to disappear the information.”[188]
On the politics of the demand he sided with the critics: Marjorie Taylor Greene “is right — Donald Trump said that he would release it, he should release it. This is what the MAGA base wanted.”[188]
The vulnerability, and the blind eye
Asked directly whether the espionage and the abuse were connected — whether one enabled the other, gave leverage over the other, or was simply unrelated — Kiriakou gave his clearest answer on the point, and it is neither of the tidy options.[189]
“I think that they were two issues running parallel with one another. I think that the Israelis, or whomever was the recruiter of Jeffrey Epstein, said: this guy has a major vulnerability, and his vulnerability is that he’s a pedophile. We can use that to our advantage. He can get us information, we’ll continue to supply him with money, and we’ll just turn a blind eye to his pedophilia. So they were able to identify that vulnerability, that hook, in order to hook him and reel him in. And then they just let him do his thing… and just let the cards fall where they fell.”
On whether it was a honeypot, his answer is chronological rather than categorical: “I think it probably became a honeypot operation.” What he doubts is the foresight, not the outcome — that any service, “even one as good as the Israelis,” could have seen decades ahead and planned it, though “of course it’s obvious by the late 1990s or the early 2000s that’s exactly what it is: that you can entrap as many of these movers and shakers as you possibly want to.”[190][191]
Cutting slack to important people
Asked at the end of the same interview what he thought people were still missing, Kiriakou named something that is not an intelligence question at all: “one of the things that bothers me very much is that the more important people become in their lives, the more we as a society are willing to cut them slack. And we shouldn’t do that. People are people, and people are sexual beings. God knows what’s in their hearts, God knows what they do behind closed doors — and so nobody should be given the benefit of the doubt in crimes where children are the victims.” He added the personal measure: “I have five children of my own, and if this had happened to one of them, I’m not sure I could control myself.”[192][193]