Peter Mandelson is a British politician. John Kiriakou describes him as “the former British ambassador to Washington” and named him among the figures whose conduct at Jeffrey Epstein’s properties has become publicly known.[1][2]
As of the time of the interview, Kiriakou said Mandelson “is likely going to be charged with serious crimes” in connection with Epstein, noting the information had emerged in the preceding “three, four weeks.”[1]
Kiriakou cited Mandelson in the context of his broader argument that MOSSAD wired Epstein’s properties for audio and video surveillance — with figures such as Mandelson representing the kind of high-value targets that MOSSAD could subsequently “smash over the head” with compromising material.[1]
The UK’s criminal investigation
In a separate interview, Kiriakou says the UK government is criminally investigating both Lord Mandelson and Prince Andrew — not over sex crimes, he stresses, but because a newly released tranche of Epstein documents shows each gave Epstein classified British government documents: Mandelson secret economic-negotiation documents, and Prince Andrew documents from the Ministry of Defense. Kiriakou asks why Epstein would have wanted classified documents at all unless he was working for the Israelis.[3][4]
The denials and the photographs
Kiriakou has set out the sequence in Mandelson’s case as a straightforward collapse of a denial. Mandelson — former British ambassador to the United States, former minister, member of the House of Lords and a senior figure in the Labour Party — repeatedly said that he did not even know Epstein, that he had met him once, that he did not have his number and had never been to the island.[5]
The latest tranche of documents then produced photographs of him in his underwear with a sixteen-year-old girl, taken by a hidden camera. He was arrested.[6]
Kiriakou’s interest is in the charge rather than the photographs: Mandelson was charged with providing Epstein classified British trade-negotiation documents. Epstein had no use for trade negotiating positions. “It was for a foreign power.”[6][7]
The lie that got bigger than the lie
Speaking in February 2026, days after Mandelson left the House of Lords, Kiriakou put the danger not in the original association but in the denials built on top of it: “he’s in so deep now, after lying and lying and lying that he barely knew Jeffrey Epstein, that this risks collapsing the British government.” He noted calls that same day from Labour members for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign “because he had been so easily duped by Peter Mandelson,” and summarised: “the stakes are very, very high here. This is really serious.”[8][9]
On the legal exposure he draws a comparison the corpus does not otherwise contain: the state secrecy law in the United Kingdom “is far, far tougher than the espionage act is here in the United States.” On that basis, “Peter Mandelson could find himself spending the rest of his natural life in prison.”[10]