The official “rom com” version of how “Ghislaine met Jeffrey”, endlessly recycled by the mainstream media over the years, goes like this: when Ghislaine’s father, Robert, died in November 1991, having walked off/fallen off/been pushed off his yacht, and left behind a disastrous financial wake of, among other things, £500 million missing from his Daily Mirror pension fund, the Maxwell family was devastated and disgraced.

Ghislaine, in mourning for her dear father, and for the pulverized fortunes of the once mighty Maxwells, needed to escape. To reinvent herself. To start over.

 So, she fled London’s hostile cage – on the Concorde - and came to the freedom of America, landing in New York City in late 1991, to begin to pick up the pieces. She granted an interview to Israeli journalist Daphne Barak a year later, and was the picture of both grief and resolve, exhibiting the trait her father had boasted about, that nothing could stop the Maxwells.

Sitting on a bench in New York City’s Central Park, Maxwell told Barak “Survival in my case means getting up every morning and figuring out a new life… I’m lucky, I get to start again.”[1]

Starting again by falling in love with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy young financier whom she met at a memorial dinner for her father on November 24, 1991, at the Plaza Hotel, owned at the time by Donald Trump.

It’s a nice conceit, that Ghislaine would find love at an event honoring her mother and remembering her father at YIVO, a Jewish institute in Manhattan. In looking at the photo of Ghislaine smiling in infatuation at the dashing Epstein, in his white tie, a viewer could think that a new chapter in young Ghislaine’s life had just begun. Yet it is the expression of her dining companion to her left, the actor Tony Randall, whose face tells a different story.

We don’t know what Randall knows, but if he doesn’t believe that the duo have just met and are falling in love before his very eyes, he’s right.[2]

Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein had known each other since the mid 1980s. And they were introduced by none other than Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s dear old dad.

“Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein met in the early ’80s,” said Ari Ben-Menashe, a former agent in Israeli Military Intelligence who was Robert Maxwell’s “supervisor”. Or in layman terms, a “handler”.

“Robert Maxwell was working for Israeli Intelligence,” Ben-Menashe said.  “He was an operative for quite a long, long time.  He was a senior operative, as a matter of fact, for the Israeli Government.”

Robert Maxwell saw in Jeffrey Epstein a potential husband for his daughter, and a potential business partner for himself.

“[Robert Maxwell] was really happy to have her with him,” said Ben-Menashe.  “He thought he’s going to get a nice Jewish boy to marry his daughter.  As they say in Hebrew, he wanted to make a shidduch for his daughter, Miss Maxwell, who was clearly enthralled by the ambitious Epstein. And Jeffrey Epstein was the shidduch.”

In Orthodox Judaism, the branch from which Robert Maxwell comes, the shidduch is a system of matchmaking in which Jewish singles are introduced to one another for the purpose of marriage. Indeed, Ben-Menashe is convinced that Maxwell saw Jeffrey Epstein as his future son-in-law. And that’s why he introduced Epstein to Israelis spies.

            “He wanted his future son in law to have a good job,” said Ben-Menashe, so Robert Maxwell introduced Epstein to “several people in Israeli Intelligence, just recruiters, but he finally made up his way to Ehud Barak who was, at the time, Director of Military Intelligence.  He was our boss and became Prime Minister of Israel many years later.  But he was Director of Military Intelligence at the time.”

What was Robert Maxwell doing with Israeli intelligence that would allow him to connect his daughter’s boyfriend to Ehud Barak?

To understand how he got there we need to go back to World War II and reconnect with Maxwell’s arrival in Britain with his Czech comrades after escaping the Nazis. Once on English shores, he was promptly jailed by the British.

 In the British prison camp, Maxwell made friends with a fellow inmate, a Czech Communist named Vladimir Clementis. The two bonded over their hatred of Nazis, and everyone who hated Jews. This connection soon proved especially important to the future State of Israel.

 Maxwell got out of prison, won distinction in battle, and received his promotion to captain shortly after his 21 first birthday. And now the British saw other uses for this handsome, multi-lingual Czech.

The initial plan was to parachute him behind enemy lines, a low survival rate mission, but they changed their minds and sent Maxwell to Paris. He posed as a Czech black marketeer, selling forged documents to Nazis who had gone into hiding. Maxwell was good at this, and it is this skill which put him on the radar of Britain’s MI6—the country’s international spy bureau.

When the war ended, the British secret service had plans for Maxwell, because they needed intelligence interrogators who would speak German. Maxwell was sent to Spandau Prison, where many high-level Nazis were imprisoned. His great discovery there was that the British had deceived the Free French forces by parachuting them into certain death on D-Day to trick the Germans as to the invasion’s true location. Maxwell’s British commanders were impressed by his cleverness and urged him to join the army as a career.

Maxwell said no, as he discovered that he loved espionage, and was good at it. In March 1946 he was officially recruited by MI6 and appointed to supervise elections in the Soviet sector of Berlin.

This is where he got his next big idea that began his career as a media baron. In Berlin he met Ferdinand Springer, a German Jewish scientist who survived because the Nazis valued his scientific expertise. Maxwell and Springer started a publishing business of scientific papers, which Maxwell had discovered were a lucrative field, thanks to his interrogation of Nazi scientists. He had begun selling these papers for profit in London.

It was at this time that top British scientists were concerned that while British science was excellent, it’s publishing of science was not—it was inefficient and financially insecure. The British government decided to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths with the renowned German publisher Springer, to draw on the latter’s expertise. Butterworths would learn to turn a profit on journals, and British science would get its work out at a faster pace.

Maxwell had already established a business relationship with Springer, and the Butterworths directors, being ex-British intelligence, hired the young Maxwell to help manage the company, along with another ex-spy, Paul Rosbaud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi nuclear secrets to the British through the French and Dutch resistance, as scientific editor.

In 1948, Springer and Maxwell merged the company with the Butterworth Press, and called it Pergamon Press—Pergamon being one of the Seven Cities of Asia Minor, and the place which the Book of Revelations identifies as the throne of Satan.  In 1951, Maxwell bought 75% of Pergamon Press for £13,000 (worth £411,000 today). And so began his publishing empire.

His connection to the State of Israel—which didn’t yet exist in 1946 – came when Maxwell learned that the British were going to back ex-Nazis in a Czech civil war. The Nazis killed his parents, his grandfather, three sisters, a brother, as well as aunts, uncles, cousins, and childhood friends. He had risked is life and nearly lost it to fight them. And now the British were going to commit this outrage?

`Maxwell remembered his Czech prison pal, Vladimir Clementis. He contacted Clementis to tell him about the plot. Clementis, with Maxwell’s help, became the Foreign Minister in the new Czech government, which came to power in 1948 thanks to the scandalous alliance between Nazis and Fascists that Maxwell helped Clementis to expose. And now Clementis owed Maxwell.

What Maxwell wanted was to arm the nascent State of Israel. At his very core, he was not MI6, and he was not yet a friend to the KGB, which he would become, but a true Zionist. Just like his mother.

“Managing Robert Maxwell was easy,” said his Israeli handler, Ben-Menashe. “He wanted to be valued as an Israeli asset.  He always played the Zionist card.”

And Maxwell had lost his family to the Nazis, so he wanted to do everything to help his people establish their own state when no one else would.

Maxwell worked with Clementis to ship arms and aircraft to Israel in. Four Messerschmitt planes arrived just in time to stop the Egyptian Army for taking Tel Aviv, and the tide of battle was turned. For a few weeks in 1948, Maxwell’s shuttle service from Czechoslovakia provided 90% of the arms, aircraft, equipment, supplies (such as walkie-talkies) and food to the Israelis. And when Israel came into existence in May 1948, Clementis made sure they had an airfield in Czechoslovakia to keep the arms flowing.

For his work to save Israel, Vladimir Clementis was hanged by Stalin in 1951 --the year Robert Maxwell bought Pergamon Press. In Israel, Maxwell was seen as a hero of the nation, and that’s why he received a hero’s burial on the Mount of Olives in 1991 five days after his body was dredged up. Even if Israel might have put him in that watery grave.

It’s also why he was working with Israeli intelligence and Ben-Meneshe in the 1980s, and why he connected Jeffrey Epstein to the country. Epstein had come to Britain in the mid-1980s after he was “thrown out of Bear Sterns and he was blackballed in the United States,” said Steven Hoffenberg, who would later hire Epstein for his debt collection firm Towers Financial in 1987, which was discovered to be a Ponzi scheme in 1993—one that Hoffenberg claims Epstein ran, and defrauded Hoffenberg of more than $100 million. Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to bilking investors out of $475 million and was sentenced to 20 years in prison (18 of which he served), plus a $1 million fine and to pay $463 million in restitution. Epstein had cooperated with investigators and walked free.

Epstein “had lost all his licenses that he had when he was at Bear Sterns based on his violations of the rules by the Securities and Exchange Commission” Hoffenberg said. Indeed, Epstein had left Bear Stearns after being investigated for insider trading, and fined $2500, though other reports said he’d lied about an expense report. 

      According to Julian Leese, Jeffrey Epstein had come to England in 1981. Julian Leese is the son of the late Douglas Leese, an intensely private British businessman, and in late 2020, he gave his one media interview to podcast Defiance[3], which was investigating the Ghislaine Maxwell story. In that interview Leese said that Epstein’s girlfriend, Paula Heil Fisher, met his brother Nick Leese at a birthday party for a Texas oil man. She and her boyfriend Jeffrey were coming to London, and could they look them up when they landed?

“They were invited around for a drink.  My father was incredibly busy, but came down and met Jeffrey,” said Julian Leese. “I think immediately everyone realized here was a guy who was 27 years old, very intelligent, very good fun, very bright, and the relationship started there.”

 Douglas Leese had built the rack-and-pinion steering business he had inherited from his father into a large and successful enterprise, one that was eventually sold to Americans. From there, Leese developed business relationships with the defense industry. “Arms dealing was a very big part of Sir [sic—Leese was never knighted] Douglas Leese’s business,” said Hoffenberg, as well as “money laundering. Jeffrey Epstein did substantial money laundering and arms dealing, that is not regulated the same way in America. The American rules are very much more conservative than the various countries in the Middle East and in Asia.”

Julian Leese, who was 16 years-old at the time, disputes that his father was an arms dealer in the sense of the term that means a ruthless merchant of weapons of mass destruction. He says his father recognized that “Jeffrey came from a less privileged background and wanted Jeffrey to get more involved in business and Jeffrey became a very close family friend.”

Leese and Epstein eventually had a falling out, when Leese discovered that Epstein was booking flights on the Concorde and rooms in five-star hotels on Leese’s account. Still, the Englishman retained a grudging admiration for Epstein. It was Leese who introduced Epstein to Hoffenberg in London, telling the American that Epstein was “a genius, he’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.”

 According to Hoffenberg, Epstein introduced himself to Robert Maxwell. “Jeffrey Epstein presented himself to Ghislaine Maxwell and Robert Maxwell jointly as a Wall Street investment banker, financial expert that could advise Robert Maxwell and Ghislaine Maxwell in the problems they were having on Wall Street and in financing stress.”

Hoffenberg said the Maxwells needed a $50 million bridge loan and Epstein helped them secure it.

According to Ari Ben-Menashe, Epstein needed a job and Maxwell provided it, and then Epstein brought Ghislaine into the mix of his work with her father. “Jeffrey Epstein sort of took her in and recruited [her]. She wasn’t supposed to be working.  She was supposed to be his girlfriend.  But then she got into it.”

The “it” to which Ben-Menashe, Robert Maxwell’s Israeli espionage “handler” refers to, is nothing less than international blackmail.

“They used to compromise people in different ways,” said Ben-Menashe. “Especially embarrassing them or catching them in sexual misbehavior with underage girls.  That’s how they used to compromise them.”

Ben-Menashe said that Epstein “started working with the Israelis, bringing them information about the people he was meeting and so on and so forth, and then he made them an offer.  He said, ‘I can do this.’”

And the Israelis also appreciated the work of Ghislaine.   “Ghislaine Maxwell was a value to Israeli intelligence because she was of value to Epstein,” said Ben-Menashe.  “She was supporting him.  And he needed that support.  You can’t work alone.”

The work was trapping people in what spy craft calls the “honeypot”. John Kiriakou was a CIA agent for nearly two decades and saw how honeypots worked up close. “What any intelligence officer wants to do, needs to do to get promoted, to make a name for himself or herself is to recruit spies to steal secrets.  The job really is as basic as that.  Your job is to recruit spies to steal secrets. And one of the oldest tricks in the intelligence book is the use of what are called honeypots.  What 50 or 60- or 70-year-old man doesn’t want to have a beautiful blonde on his arm, right?  And usually, men who are powerful and wealthy are willing to pay for it.”

 Kiriakou also noted that the spy agencies like to work with families. Robert Maxwell’s daughter would have been of value because Maxwell had been of value in passing on information to Israel (and Britain and the Soviet Union), as part of her DNA.

“When I look at Ghislaine Maxwell, my immediate thought is, ‘What a terrific natural operations officer’” Kiriakou said.  “She was a social butterfly, she liked the parties, she liked being out there with people.  She was an extrovert.  She’s good looking.  She had plenty of money.  People want to be around her. If I were a case officer looking for someone to introduce me to a target, I would want Ghislaine Maxwell.  Can you imagine how great it would be if you were an operations officer to go up to Ghislaine Maxwell and say, ‘Hey, can you introduce me to the Iranian ambassador?’"

Epstein and Maxwell fully engaged in their blackmail business once Maxwell had set up in New York City, which she officially did after the death of her father. But Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were together in London in the mid-to-late 1980s, and ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou believes that Epstein was helping Maxwell hide his money—money that would eventually land back in his lap with Ghislaine.

“One of the things that people aren’t talking about is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father’s money,” said Kiriakou.  “He had his own criminal past.  It involved vast sums of money.  He’s been accused of all different kinds of financial crimes over the years, and I can’t help but to think that he helped her hide her money, she helped him hide his money.  Epstein helped him hide his money, and vice-versa.  Can you imagine how complicated this is?  Can you imagine the details involved in hiding these vast sums of money?”

And in order to understand just how much money could have been “hidden” we need to go back to March 1991, when Robert Maxwell was the toast of New York City, for buying and saving the city’s iconic paper, the Daily News. His daughter Ghislaine was in the city as well, working with her father on his latest media baron venture. And during that time, she was laying the foundation for her work as a sex trafficker and blackmailer with Jeffrey Epstein.