Jeffrey Epstein's Place In The Great Game

Part Two: From Robert Maxwell to the War On Terror

• Establishment media cheers as Epstein issue divides Trump supporters

• Distraction from controversial legislation, healthcare for migrants, stable coin bill

• The bigger they come, the harder they fall, one and all

• Epstein-Maxwell legacy of drugs, arms, terrorist laundering under Iran-Contra

• Which tells you they are not the top of the tree

• The more the press talks of blackmail, the more you can relegate that

Part One: Jeffrey Epstein's Second Vanishing - And the spirit of Robert Maxwell (Jul 12, 2025)
Part Two: Jeffrey Epstein's Place In The Great Game - Part Two: From Robert Maxwell to the War On Terror (Jul 17, 2025)
Part Three: Jeffrey Epstein's Drama of the Superior Gene - The money grab under cover of Covid

Related:
Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced —Twitter censors trial coverage as FBI connections broached (Dec 10, 2021)
Lieber Case: Crossed Wires and Parallel Lines — Part 1: Nanoscientist's case is quarantined, despite Maxwell-Epstein links (Dec 17, 2021)
Lieber Case: Filling In The Blanks — Part 2: Double agent or compromised? Chemist finds himself in no-man’s land (Dec 24, 2021)
Quandt And The Post-War Order - Part 2: Did the WW2 settlement cloak plans to revive the fascist project? (Oct 28, 2021)
Ghosts Stalk Trump Investiture - In Bid To Hijack U.S. Treasury Market (Jan 20, 2025)

See the documentary, The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire - How Britain transformed from an imperial power to a financial power (2017) by Michael Oswald.

(2,700 words or about 12 minutes of your company.)

July 17, 2025

The legacy media is loving Jeffrey Epstein's ability from afar to split the Trump camp. It serves the media's role of getting you to look "over there" rather than closer to home.

The technique of reporting news as discrete events, masking sequence or context.

The bureaucracy has taken full advantage of this distraction — Congress voting for "political gimmicks and carveouts" (the Tax Foundation on the Big Beautiful Bill), extending surveillance and banning states for 10 years from regulating AI. Then there's legislation for the government to regulate the $250 billion stable coin market (GENIUS Act) perhaps a precursor to digital currency.

Political strategists say the row is a chance for the Democratic Party to portray Trump as protecting the powerful and win back blue collar voters and veterans.

We'll take a longer view. The first article examined the towering figure of Robert Maxwell (1923-1991), without whom one might argue there would have been no Jeffrey Epstein.

The Godfather

Maxwell had fought in the Second World War and played a role in the post-war settlement, partly to his own profit; he played a big role in arming the young Israel, and later in espionage. But the world that shaped Maxwell no longer exists.

He died with an era.

He had been born in Czechia, 15 years before its occupation by Germany. His death, on November 5th 1991, came two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and one month before the dissolution of the USSR.

He had made his fortune in the chaos of post-war Europe, by arbitraging scientific publications on the other side of the "curtain."

In July 1991, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International had been exposed as the bank of boondoggle and CIA. It was also the bank through which drug money had been laundered to finance the mujahideen, buy weapons for Iran, the so-called Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s.

Maxwell was just one of a network of arms dealers who took part in the trade; dealers like Adnan Khashoggi and Sir Douglas Leese, who would form Epstein's circle. [1]

Krimo Permanente

Iran-Contra is not your average political scandal, nor a corrupt defence deal with kickbacks, and not confined to Iran and Nicaragua, or the geopolitics of West Asia and Central America.

It gave rise to a covert financial, diplomatic and military structure that circumvents checks and balances on government. It was the framework that created Continuity of Goverment or the Bush-era total information awareness surveillance state.

It is big enough to have got many people assassinated — and we use the present tense because by some accounts it is a criminal enterprise that's ongoing. It is a parallel social order with its own ethos and objectives. We'll return to it below.

Hope and change

The world was and is changing; in particular the financial system.

By the 1960s the American economic machine was faltering. The U.S. had lost its trade surplus and with it the ability to support the dollar, which had underpinned currencies since 1944.

In 1970, Henry Kissinger, not yet U.S. Secretary of State, asked his colleagues how the U.S. could retain its hegemony. The answer attributed to Paul Volker, who was a Federal Reserve economist but not yet on the Board of Governors, was we retain our hegemony by making other people pay for it.

The surplus profits around the world — whether from pumping oil in the Gulf, making Mercedes Benz and BMW cars, or Japanese electronics and Chinese manufacturing — would be invested in U.S. stocks and bond, hedge funds and insurance companies.

Stayin’ Alive

"The American empire is the first empire in human history that has managed to make the wealthy of the rest of the world, of the conquered, voluntarily send their wealth to Wall Street," says Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister.

"They closed the recycling loop whereby the American trade deficit operates as a vacuum cleaner sucking into the American market the net exports of everybody else — Germany, France, Italy, Japan and primarily China... 70 per cent of their profits going back into real estate, into the stock exchange and into the insurance businesses."

This was and is achieved in part by intelligence agencies.

Duane Clarridge (1932-2016) one of the highest ranking CIA operations directors to speak publicly, favoured aggressive clandestine operations to promote national security — and the same applied, in his view, to U.S. business interests.

The Echelon surveillance programme, established in the late 1960s by the Five Eyes, was used by U.S. signals intelligence for corporate espionage. U.S. agencies would spy on foreign companies and pass the information to the American competition, according to a report by the European Parliament in 1994. [2]

Epstein's contacts came from precisely this circle: big money that the intelligence services direct to the service of the Anglo-American establishment, which in turn established control over south west Asian (Mid East) whose oil was the engine of 20th century economy.

Spider's Web

The decline of the Western economic machine and the loss of manufacturing was accompanied (perhaps engineered) by stock market booms and repeated banking collapses.

Successive financial crises resulted in perennial low interest rates to bail out financiers. Free money (for some) chased returns into every crevice of commodified society.

But this flow of money also empowered covert and parallel government.