Prince Andrew — since stripped of the title, and referred to by Kiriakou as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor[1][2] — is a British royal who appears in John Kiriakou’s account of the Jeffrey Epstein case in two distinct roles: first as an illustration of the access agent principle, and later as a criminal suspect whose alleged conduct Kiriakou reads as proof of espionage.
The un-recruitable principal
Andrew is one of the names Kiriakou returns to when explaining why a foreign service would recruit Epstein rather than the powerful people around him. A service wanting closely held information from figures such as Bill Clinton, Bill Gates or Andrew cannot recruit them — they do not have the traditional vulnerabilities that would allow it, and money does not motivate them — so it recruits somebody with ready access instead, and gives him plenty of money.[3][4][5][6][7][8] The formulation is one of the most-repeated in the corpus, and its point of comparison is usually the head of state Kiriakou says every case officer wants and nobody gets: “we all want to recruit the prime minister… we’re not going to recruit the prime minister.”[9][10]
The asymmetry that makes Andrew useful is that Epstein himself held nothing. “It’s not necessarily going to be Jeffrey Epstein that has access to classified information, but Peter Mandelson certainly does, and Bill Clinton does, and the former Prince Andrew certainly does.”[11][12] The mechanism Kiriakou describes is not simply proximity but leverage: the Israelis, he says, used Epstein to get close to Clinton, Andrew, Gates and the others and then into compromising positions.[13]
He does not treat the logic as self-evidently worth it. Turning the question round, he asks whether “the intelligence that you’re going to gather from Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson” can really be so important to running a country as to justify the risk — and answers himself: “it must have been.”[14][15]
The absence of charges
Before the 2026 proceedings, Kiriakou repeatedly raised Andrew as an example of the case’s selective enforcement, asking why charges had never been filed against him and saying he should be charged with crimes against children, as should the other adults who had sex with minors on Epstein’s island.[16] He has listed Andrew among the “A-list people who we know for a fact were at that house” about whom nothing was heard for years.[17][18]
His impatience with what has been published instead is specific. The material in circulation is photographic — the picture of Clinton in a hot tub, the picture of Andrew “laying across the laps of five young women” — and Kiriakou’s objection is that hours are spent on the snapshots while grand jury testimony goes unexamined.[19][20]
Asked how such photographs came to be taken at all, given that the subjects appear entirely at ease, his answer is that they were not taken with handheld cameras — the rooms and the bathrooms were wired for audio and video, which is the part nobody does by accident.[21][22]
On the conduct itself he abandons the analytical register entirely: “the shame is that these important people aren’t going to prison and many of them should be hanging. You know, Prince Andrew, what a monster. The guy’s a monster in addition to being a pervert and he should pay a price for that.”[23][24]
The documents
By March 2026 Kiriakou was describing a changed situation: Andrew was no longer a prince, had been stripped of his royal residence and “essentially just thrown out into the street”, and had been arrested and would be prosecuted for allegedly giving Epstein classified defence ministry documents.[25]
He gives the legal shape of it precisely. Two separate pieces of evidence indicate that Andrew and Peter Mandelson both gave Epstein classified documents from the British Ministry of Defence; that would be a violation of the Official Secrets Act, the British equivalent of the American Espionage Act, and the British “are far tougher than we are” on such violations.[26][27] He expected Mandelson to go to prison and thought the affair might be enough to make Labour backbenchers force a leadership vote — “it could be the end of Keir Starmer in the next couple of weeks” — while noting the contrast that the United States “appears to be the only place where nobody’s taking these Epstein revelations seriously.”[28][29]
Kiriakou treats the nature of the material as the decisive fact. “Why in blazes would Jeffrey Epstein want classified UK defence ministry documents unless he’s spying for a foreign power?”[30] He makes the same argument about Mandelson and British trade-negotiation positions: Epstein had no personal use for either, so the collection was for somebody else.[31][32]
What he expects to happen
Very little, on the American side. Asked whether Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten Windsor could be compelled before an American court or would simply be left to fade away, Kiriakou chose the second: the statute of limitations on the crimes visible so far has expired, so there will be no international arrest warrant and no grand jury impanelled, and “they’re just free to lick their wounds and go off into the sunset.”[33][34] His general prediction for the whole affair is the same — civil suits, but nobody charged with a crime.[35][36] What the files did produce, he says, is knowledge: “we learned a lot about the likes of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson and Peter Mandelson and Alan Dershowitz.”[37]