Please hear me out. This is along article. If you read it, you will fully comprehend the big picture with Jeffrey Epstein, no matter the unresolved details. You will also understand Israel’s relationship with Big Tech in a way that makes sense, and in a way that will absolutely blow your mind. Because this is complicated information, I have put some words in bold when they are particularly important to keep your eyes on the most important part (think of them like breadcrumbs left behind to lead you out of the forest). I hope that helps, rather than annoys you.
SUMMARY: For thirty years, the Israeli government has been quietly achieving cyber dominance over the United States - not through espionage per se, but through commerce. It begins with Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, whose distribution of compromised software to American government facilities in the 1980s established the template: get the spy target to install it themselves, then call it innovation.
Israel has invested more in cyber intelligence infrastructure than any nation on earth, and the crown jewel of that investment is Unit 8200. The way the Soviet Union once identified promising children and poured resources into them to make them Olympic athletes, Israel is producing cyber operatives instead of gymnasts. They are groomed early, trained on live intelligence operations as teenagers, and graduate with skills no university curriculum can replicate. Their mandatory service keeps Israel at the cutting edge of signals intelligence, cyber warfare, and information dominance.
But military service was never the primary return on that investment. The real purpose of Unit 8200 only becomes clear after its veterans graduate. They are seeded into American tech hubs with millions of dollars in startup funding from Jewish sources (often from international banks whose executives are loyal to Israel, giving them preferential treatment with generous lending terms no one else could get) and tasked with commercializing the same surveillance technology that began its life in American government research programs (DARPA innovations, In-Q-Tel investments, intelligence community tools) shared with Israel through decades of intelligence-sharing arrangements, refined inside Unit 8200, and then repackaged for sale back into the American private sector.
The pipeline runs in a circle. American taxpayers fund the research. American intelligence shares it with Israel. Israel militarizes it. Unit 8200 alumni commercialize it. American cities, counties, hospitals, and schools buy it. And the data those systems collect flows back to people who, by any honest accounting, are operating as agents of a foreign government within American industry. Clear as mud? Good. Let’s get to the details.
You’ve probably known for years about Jeffrey Epstein’s cameras, the ones in the bedrooms aimed at the beds, recording powerful men doing things powerful men pay fortunes to keep quiet. Those cameras made Epstein untouchable for decades, not because of what he did, but because of what they did while his lenses were running.
But what if I told you that you’ve been thinking about the wrong cameras, because while America fixated on a dead pedophile’s private island, the international intelligence apparatus that produced him quietly went to work on something that makes Little St. James look like a bathroom peephole at a truck stop. In other words, buckle up. We’re about to go down the rabbi hole.
Rabbit hole. I mean rabbit hole, not rabbi hole. Freudian slip.
GEN 1 OF ISRAELI SPY DOMINANCE: ROBERT MAXWELL AND RAFI EITAN
Robert Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in a small Czech village in 1923, which sounds like the origin story of a super villain. Ultimately, he became one of the most resourceful human beings of the twentieth century. He survived the Holocaust, decorated himself in the British Army well enough to receive the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery personally, reinvented himself as an English gentleman, built a publishing empire, bought newspapers, befriended heads of state, and somewhere along the way made himself indispensable to Israeli intelligence in ways that the Israeli government has never formally confirmed and has never seriously denied.
Basically, there are two types of people when it comes to rumors that Maxwell was an agent or asset of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. The first type believes that Maxwell worked for Mossad. The second type knows that Maxwell worked for Mossad. Except for Mike Huckabee - according to his interview with Tucker - this is an established fact in the mind of almost anyone familiar with his life story and résumé.
The confirmation for many came at his funeral in 1991, after his body was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean having apparently fallen from his yacht, named the Lady Ghislaine after his daughter, in circumstances that three pathologists could not agree upon and that the official inquest ruled accidental while somehow also ruling out both murder and suicide, which is a remarkable feat of forensic gymnastics even by the standards of cases involving people who knew too much. The Israeli President attended his funeral. The Israeli Prime Minister attended. At least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence attended. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir delivered the eulogy, calling Maxwell “a man who had done more for Israel than could be publicly acknowledged,” which in the context of an intelligence chief’s eulogy is roughly equivalent to handing someone a posthumous medal for spying.
You do not get that funeral for owning some newspapers. You get that funeral for spending decades as the most useful commercial cover operation in the history of a country that has elevated commercial cover operations to something approaching a national art form.
The circumstantial case for Maxwell as a Mossad asset is substantial enough that calling it “circumstantial” feels generous. It’s a certainty. He was born Czech, fought for Britain, acquired Israeli citizenship, and somehow managed to be simultaneously working for MI6, the KGB, and Mossad, which has to be the most impressive triple-agent arrangement in Cold War history. A legit triple-agent. Although, to be fair, it wasn’t that Maxwell was an agent, per se. It’s not that he drew an Israeli paycheck regularly. He was not quite a spy, yet much more than an informant. He fit the caricature of a true international man of mystery.
Maxwell worked for the highest bidder. Former Israeli Military Intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe stated flatly that Maxwell worked for Mossad and that he personally saw Jeffrey Epstein in Maxwell’s office in the 1980s, a detail that tends to reframe the entire subsequent history. Investigative journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon documented Maxwell’s intelligence relationships across two books, describing his publishing empire, Pergamon Press, as “a vehicle for intelligence gathering dressed in academic clothing,” and his later media acquisitions as “a mechanism for shaping Western coverage of Israel with the kind of editorial consistency that is difficult to achieve through purely commercial motivation.”
Maxwell also, in 1986, personally informed the Israeli Embassy in London that nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu had revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets to the press, after which Mossad kidnapped Vanunu off the streets of Rome and smuggled him back to Israel for eighteen years in prison, which is the kind of service to a foreign government that typically comes with some form of reciprocal arrangement (fun fact: I inducted Vanunu into Smite Cub last year; he snitched on Israel’s nuke programs becuase he became born-again and felt spiritual conviction over it).
MAXWELL CREATED THE NEW WORLD ORDER’S SURVEILLANCE STATE
Maxwell’s greatest contribution to the art form of espionage was a piece of software called PROMIS, and understanding PROMIS is essential to understanding everything that followed, because it was there that the New World Order’s surveillance state was born.
PROMIS, which stood for Prosecutor’s Management Information System, was originally developed by an American company called Inslaw for the United States Department of Justice as case management software designed to track defendants, witnesses, and judicial proceedings, and it was genuinely excellent at its job, which is precisely why Mossad’s Rafi Eitan wanted it. Eitan, traveling under cover as an assistant prosecutor from the Israeli Ministry of Justice, acquired a copy of PROMIS from the Department of Justice and immediately set about having a Silicon Valley contact install a backdoor in it, a hidden channel that would allow Israeli intelligence to read everything the software processed without the user’s knowledge or consent. The modified version was then handed to Robert Maxwell for distribution.
And distribute it, Maxwell did. He sold the compromised software on behalf of Mossad to the intelligence agencies of over twenty countries, including China, Russia, Bulgaria, Egypt, and, most consequentially, to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos, two of the most sensitive nuclear research facilities in the United States, with the assistance of U.S. Senator John Tower. Tower was the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, so he became Maxwell’s access point to the two highly confidential labs. In exchange, Tower was paid $200,000 by Maxwell in four payments from a Swisse bank account.
AN ASIDE: Seven months before Maxwell’s mysterious death, Tower in a helicopter crash due to “mechanical wear.” The plane was four months old. Curiously, his Senate colleague John Heinz, Republican of Pennsylvania, died the day before, April 4, 1991, when his plane collided with a helicopter over a Philadelphia suburb. Two senior Republican senators with deep intelligence and defense connections died on consecutive days in separate aircraft incidents. Make of that what you will.
Rafi Eitan later admitted that Israeli intelligence had successfully penetrated PROMIS databases in unidentified U.S. government agencies, which is the intelligence community’s polite way of saying that Israel had been reading America’s classified mail for years and only copped to it after the statute of limitations on embarrassment had run out.
WHAT? WHO IS RAFI EITAN, YOU ASK? I just kinda threw his name out there, didn’t I? Let me explain. He is the man who masterminded the PROMIS operation with Maxwell. His bio is that Eitan joined the Haganah (Jewish terrorists who later became Mossad) at age twelve, crawled through sewers as a teenager to blow up British radar installations, and personally led the 1960 Mossad operation that pulled Adolf Eichmann off a Buenos Aires street, got him drunk, and smuggled him back to Israel on a commercial passenger flight for trial and eventual execution. He subsequently served as operations chief of Shin Bet, deputy operations chief of Mossad, counterterrorism adviser to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and in 1965, posing as an Israeli government chemist, visited a nuclear fuel processing plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, after which a significant quantity of enriched uranium was discovered to be missing (which he obviously stole).
By 1981 Eitan headed Lekem, the Defense Ministry's Bureau for Scientific Relations, a signals intelligence unit that operated directly out of the Prime Minister's office and whose existence the Israeli government successfully denied until Jonathan Pollard's arrest in 1985 made denial operationally inconvenient. When Pollard was exposed and the scandal threatened to derail U.S.-Israeli relations, Israeli officials described the entire operation as unauthorized and rogue, after which Eitan told journalists he had acted with "permission and authority," which is the intelligence community's equivalent of a mic drop.
The FBI issued an arrest warrant for Eitan, who declined to return to the United States to discuss the matter and lived to age ninety-two, dying in 2019 with Netanyahu calling him "among the heroes of the intelligence services of the State of Israel."
What Eitan and Maxwell put together with PROMIS was genius, conceptually. Maxwell and Eitan did not hack their targets. They sold their targets the hacking tool and let the targets install it themselves, pay for it, maintain it, and brag about their modernized case management systems while Israeli analysts read every byte that passed through it. The targets did not experience a breach. They experienced an upgrade. That distinction, between covert penetration and commercial adoption, is the foundational insight that has driven Israeli intelligence strategy in the technology sector ever since, and it is the insight that makes everything else in this article possible.
GEN 2 OF ISRAELI SPY DOMINANCE: EPSTEIN AND GHISLAINE
According to numerous well-sourced accounts (Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy by Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas, and Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas), by 1991, Maxwell was in a Mexican stand-off with Mossad. Credible reporting alleges that Mossad had run its own honeypot blackmail trap on Maxwell while he was working with Sen. Tower to spy on U.S. nuclear facilities, and had compromising footage of him of a sexual nature. Meanwhile, Maxwell had financial difficulties due to bad investments and a runaway lifestyle, and had allegedly embezzled 450 million dollars from his employees. Maxwell had told Mossad that if they didn’t give him the cash he needed to cover some of those debts, he would go to the media and tell them where the dead bodies were hidden (so to speak). He was dead shortly thereafter.
Whatever arrangements Maxwell had with Israeli intelligence died with him publicly, but privately, those arrangements with Israel continued with his daughter, Ghislaine. Ghislaine inherited his network, his lifestyle, his connections, and, according to multiple former Israeli intelligence officers, including Ari Ben-Menashe, his operational role. A significant portion of the embezzled money wound up in offshore accounts, which explains the source of Epstein’s wealth that, about that same time, appeared to have come from absolutely nowhere (literally, no one knew where Epstein got his cash, at least to start). The honeytrap and blackmail apparatus that Robert had run in the service of Mossad was allegedly passed intact to the next generation, with one significant upgrade: where Robert had used compromised software to penetrate institutions, Ghislaine and her associate Jeffrey Epstein would use compromised people.
Jeffrey Epstein’s entry into this story runs through Leslie Wexner, the Ohio retail billionaire who built Victoria’s Secret into a national institution and who apparently decided that his most valuable philanthropic contribution would be handing a registered sex offender control over his finances, his properties, and his professional network. Wexner gave Epstein power of attorney, a Manhattan townhouse, and introductions to everyone from royalty to heads of state, and funded the Wexner Foundation, which in turn paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak $2.3 million between 2004 and 2006 for “research” that Barak mostly did not produce. The newly released DOJ documents confirm that Epstein personally approved that payment, which means the man who was simultaneously trafficking underage girls was also personally authorizing wire transfers to the former head of Israeli military intelligence. Make of that what you will, and then make of it something worse, because that’s probably closer to accurate.
Epstein’s genius, like Maxwell’s before him, was not the sex. The sex was logistics. The genius was the cameras, the leverage, and most importantly, the understanding that the most powerful surveillance tool in the world is not a satellite or a wiretap but a terrified man who will tell you anything you want to know and do anything you want done because the alternative is the video going public. What Maxwell accomplished with software, Epstein accomplished with flesh, and both accomplished the same thing: penetration of Western political, financial, and intelligence infrastructure on behalf of a small country that had correctly identified technology and leverage as the force multipliers that would compensate for its size.
The leaked Barak email cache, over 100,000 messages spanning nearly a decade, reveals something that reframes the entire Epstein story for anyone paying attention to the right details. Epstein was not primarily interested in the sex. He was obsessively, compulsively interested in surveillance technology, in intelligence networks, in the intersection of private capital and government monitoring capability.
Epstein emailed Barak articles about Unit 8200. He arranged meetings between Barak and Peter Thiel. He networked with Russian oligarchs and Gulf state investors to invest in Israeli technology ventures. He facilitated a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war. He brokered sales of Israeli surveillance technology to Mongolia and Côte d’Ivoire. The island was a side project. The main event was building the infrastructure for the next generation of what Robert Maxwell had started.
GEN 3 OF ISRAELI SPY DOMINANCE: UNIT 8200
To understand what came next you need to understand Unit 8200, which is Israel’s signals intelligence corps, the rough equivalent of America’s NSA, except that the NSA does not have a formal policy of placing its alumni inside Silicon Valley startups as a deliberate national strategy, whereas Israel does, and Benjamin Netanyahu has said so out loud on multiple occasions without apparent concern that anyone would object.
The unit’s veterans go into the technology sector the way American veterans go into defense contracting, except that the Israeli version is more systematic, more coordinated, and operating inside your county’s emergency dispatch system rather than building aircraft carriers in Connecticut.
The Unit 8200 alumni network has produced an extraordinary catalogue of technology companies that have embedded themselves in Western infrastructure: Check Point Software, which dominates enterprise network security; Cellebrite, which makes the phone-cracking tools used by law enforcement worldwide; NSO Group, which made Pegasus spyware famous enough that even people who cannot spell “spyware” have heard of it; Verint, which was one of two companies contracted by the NSA to insert backdoors into American telecommunications systems, continuing the PROMIS tradition with admirable institutional consistency; and CyberArk, Waze, Mobileye, and dozens of others whose names you may not recognize but whose products almost certainly touch your daily life in ways you have not examined. Each company is a node. Each node is a potential access point. Each access point was installed by a willing customer who called it an upgrade and signed a procurement contract.
FOR EXAMPLE: Consider Waze, foudned by three Unit 8200 cyber warriors. Until today, I used it. All the time. Everywhere I go. First, because my pickup's speedometer is inaccurate, I put on those giant, up-sized hillbilly tires on ridiculous 22-inch rims. Secondly, because I like to warn fellow travelers where the “law enforcement” Road Pirates are parked in the bushes, trying to harass commuters rushing to get to work. Guess what? The chance of Mossad knowing my “pattern of life” from that is near 100%. They know what day of the week I go to the bank, to the feed store, to church. What route I take. My shortcuts. How fast do I drive? My braking habits (it keeps the same data that Progressive’s safe-driving app uses, and reports it back to the company). It makes someone very, very assassinatable. That’s how Unit 8200 creates a global surveillance state for Israel.
Netanyahu put the policy plainly: placing Unit 8200 members in multinational technology companies is a deliberate Israeli state strategy to ensure Israel’s role as a dominant cyber power and to combat boycott movements by making Israel economically indispensable to the Western technology infrastructure. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a sitting head of government describing his country’s intelligence strategy at a press conference, apparently confident that the people being penetrated would not pay sufficient attention to object. He was, as events have demonstrated, correct.
Into this ecosystem, in 2015, stepped Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak, with approximately one million dollars, and an Israeli startup called Reporty Homeland Security, later rebranded as Carbyne, a considerably less alarming name. The company was founded by Amir Elichai, a Unit 8200 veteran, and Alex Dizengof, whose previous job was handling cybersecurity for the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, a kind of resume entry that suggests a man has seen some things that do not appear in press releases.
The company’s first director was Pinchas Buchris, the former head of Unit 8200. The board included former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose presence presumably helped with American market access, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose presence presumably helped with everything else. The investment structure was deliberately designed to conceal Epstein’s involvement, a detail that Buchris himself confirmed, apparently without registering that confirming a deliberate concealment scheme is not typically the most effective reputational rehabilitation strategy.
JUST ONE NODE (WHICH GIVES YOU A PEEK INTO THE MACHINE)
Carbyne markets itself as a next-generation emergency communications platform, a 911 upgrade for the modern era, and in purely technical terms, that description is accurate, the same way describing a fishing net as a swimwear option is accurate: technically true, comprehensively misleading. What Carbyne actually is, stripped of press-release language, is a signals intelligence collection architecture embedded in civilian emergency response infrastructure.
When you call 911 in a county that has deployed Carbyne, the platform captures your phone number, device ID, cell tower location, and call timestamp before you have spoken a word or agreed to anything. The system then streams your live video, your precision GPS coordinates accurate to within fifteen feet, and a silent text channel to the dispatcher (in case you’re being held hostage). The video is recorded in the cloud. The dispatcher can remotely activate your phone’s camera to photograph your surroundings, and those images are stored on Carbyne’s servers rather than on your device, meaning you cannot delete them. All of this flows into what Carbyne calls c-Records, a behavioral profiling database that stores and analyzes every call you have ever made, every location you have ever called from, and every pattern of behavior visible in that history, explicitly designed, in Carbyne’s own documentation, to “enable decision makers to accurately analyze past and present behavior of callers, react accordingly, and predict future patterns.”
That last phrase deserves to be read twice. Predict future patterns. That is not emergency response software. That is pre-crime software masquerading as emergency response software. And the county commissioner, bless his heart, approved the contract because it came with a presentation about faster response times and a promise of $250,000 in annual savings, and nobody in the meeting asked who would have backend access to the behavioral prediction database or what sovereign interests might be represented among the parties with keys to the cloud.
The cloud in question is Microsoft’s U.S. Government Cloud and Amazon Web Services GovCloud, which sounds reassuringly American until you recall that Microsoft has documented contractual provisions requiring it to secretly notify the Israeli government when U.S. courts issue data orders related to Microsoft’s Israeli operations, and that AT&T, which invested in Carbyne’s most recent funding round, has a documented history of allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment in its network facilities. The data is stored in America. But the cloud is accessible in Israel.
THIS IS WHERE IT GETS SPOOKY
Carbyne’s platform also integrates, through an open API architecture, with smart city sensors, municipal surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, traffic sensors, building access systems, and Internet of Things devices, meaning that when your address becomes relevant to any incident, the platform can automatically query every connected sensor in your vicinity without requiring additional consent from anyone. Your smart television. Your Ring doorbell. Your Nest thermostat. Your connected appliances. Every device on your home network that reports its status to any cloud service is a potential data point in an integrated emergency communications platform operated by a company founded by veterans of Israeli military intelligence, funded in part by a man whose investment was deliberately concealed from public view, and now owned by Axon Enterprise, which also owns the body camera systems worn by your local police officers and the dominant evidence management platform used by American law enforcement.
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