Evaluating Epstein: Conspiracies and a Review of One Nation Under Blackmail

How does one evaluate the evidence for a conspiracy?

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, Volumes 1 & 2 

By: Whitney Alyse Webb

Volume 1

Published: 2022

805 Pages

Volume 2

Published: 2022

648 Pages

Briefly, what are these books about?

The alleged connections between organized crime and national intelligence agencies which led to the numerous illicit operations including Watergate, Iran-Contra, the JFK Assassination, and of course the entire Jeffrey Epstein mess. 

A key component of these operations was the tactic of collecting blackmail and using it to convince people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.

What's the author's angle?

Charitably, Webb is an autodidact with an enormous command of facts and connections.

Uncharitably, she’s someone with a weak evidentiary filter making conspiratorial mountains out of tenuously connected molehills.

Who should read these books?

No one should just read them. You should either ignore them or study them intently as part of an “Intro to Conspiracy Theories” curriculum. Of the two I would recommend the former. Read on to see why.

I- How does one approach a book like this? 

The book starts in 1942 with a discussion of Operation Underworld, a collaboration between the Office of Naval Intelligence and the New York mobs to prevent German sabotage during the war. It ends in 2019 with the death of Jeffrey Epstein and a discussion of Peter Thiel and his intelligence gathering company, Palantir. Webb spends 1500 pages on this period and shovels out gigantic info dumps on every suggestive piece of information she could digg up. 

I use the term “info dump” intentionally. You might think that with 1500 pages to play with, Webb could afford to leisurely walk you through a narrative of events and people, but no, even with that much room, there’s far too much to cover. To illustrate the density, here’s a representative paragraph from the book, selected at random:¹

In addition, Leese and Khashoggi were both involved in the 1985 arms deal with Saudi Arabia, known as the Al-Yamamah Deal, albeit on different sides. Khashoggi represented the French weapons industry, while Leese, along with Khashoggi rival Wafic Said, represented British defense interests, which ultimately won the day. Khashoggi later claimed that the deal had been secured for Britain, in part, due to the involvement of Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son whose peripheral role in Iran Contra is discussed in Chapter 7. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister at the time the Al-Yamamah Deal was signed, whereby Saudi Arabia paid for weapons largely manufactured by BAE Systems in oil, and accusations later arose that Britain only won the deal due to having bribed Saudi leadership. Corruption investigations into Al Yamamah were later shut down thanks in large part to the efforts of Tony Blair as well as Prince Andrew, with the latter being a well-known Epstein confidant.

This paragraph represents the entire discussion of the Al-Yamamah Deal. It apparently involved two British Prime Ministers, and the royal family, and was maybe connected to Iran-Contra? But it only rates a single paragraph.

So, what is one to do with this paragraph, and the thousands more like it? It would take me a few hours just to feel like I had a decent background on just this one deal, and it might take several days for me to really dig into it enough that I could take a position on it in a debate. 

Multiply that by a thousand—yes, I realize there would be an economy of scale, but still—and that’s time I clearly don’t have. Must I just take Webb at her word, then? Or are there other epistemic tools I might be able to use to help me separate the wheat from the chaff?

II- Making connections

Let’s start by examining some methods for identifying chaff. I think it would help if I told you a story about a man named Fred Summers:

In 2006 Fred Summers met several times with a close associate of A. Q. Khan, the notorious Pakistani nuclear scientist who was instrumental in North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Shortly thereafter Summers left the company he was working for, supposedly to do a startup. Whatever the truth of that, within a few months he was conspiring with shadowy members of the Russian underworld to commit wire fraud and defraud people on the internet. This took the form of collecting large amounts of personal information and routing people to shadowy websites run by internet “influencers”. Eventually many of these “influencers” were thrown in jail, but Summers himself miraculously escaped any punishment.

When the influencer scam started to dry up, Summers moved to working with a relative who made software used by the federal government. This software collected sensitive information which could be used to blackmail countless people. Clearly one can see this move as a step up in his nefarious activities. Information collection on the internet is useful, but information collection through a backdoor into the federal government is much better. Tellingly, when considering Summers' relationship to these various software entities, he was later sued for theft of intellectual property. 

If we allow ourselves to draw lines between the dots it seems plausible that he was using the Russian underground to route nuclear secrets from Khan to other foreign powers and using the information he had acquired through his software contacts to keep law enforcement from investigating him. How else did he escape jail when so many of his associates served prison time?

The connections may seem a little thin, but it sounds somewhat suspicious right? A lot of stuff was happening with this guy, too much for it not to be a coincidence right? Are you ready for the punchline?

There is no Fred Summers. All of this happened to me, and everything I described is basically true. Certainly truer than some of the stuff in Webb’s book (I’ll get to that), but cast in the most negative light possible.

Here’s what actually happened:

• In 2006 I worked with a young IT consultant from Pakistan. He had grown up in the upper echelons of Islamabad society. This brought him into contact with various people in the government including Khan. He even dated one of Khan’s daughters and said that Khan would definitely know who he was, but it was just an interesting story. No actual espionage took place.

• After my startup failed I ended up in a business where we did software for internet marketers.² One of our big clients was a company in Canada, we ended up merging with that company. Our new Canadian business partner brought a bunch of contacts with him. This included his source for internet traffic: a Russian gentleman who seemed to acquire this traffic through shady means.³ I never met the guy, and I think I only talked to him once. 

• Shortly after our merger the Canadian’s biggest client was raided by postal inspectors and shut down for mail fraud. At this point I barely even knew what the client did. But if you wanted to accuse me of working in the shady end of the internet, you wouldn’t have been totally off base.

• Also around this time there was a big crackdown on internet marketers. The one that really made the news was a guy named Jeremy Johnson, who went to jail for seven years and arguably should have gone to jail for a lot longer. I knew lots of people who worked with him, though we never did. 

• As far as my relative, I don’t want to get too detailed. He doesn’t need any problems, but his company makes software for the federal government. Webb goes into significant detail about how government software similar to his was used as part of the sprawling blackmail conspiracies she’s talking about. In fact I could even make a tighter connection to some things Webb says, but again, I don’t want to risk getting my relative in trouble.

• Finally as long time readers of this blog will know I did get sued and it was alleged that I had stolen software.  

If you can make little old me seem like the suspicious nexus of a nefarious scam to transfer nuclear secrets by dressing stuff up and adding a few weasel words here and there, how much easier would it be to do that with someone who’s actually part of the government? Someone who is going to be, just by the nature of their job, incredibly well-connected?

I am not going to use this example as an excuse to dismiss all of Webb’s claims, but it should be enough to make one very skeptical. Clearly she’s doing some of the same things I did in telling the story above. As one brief example take this excerpt from the book:

According to Jerry Merritt…not long after Wexner hired [Jeffrey] Epstein as a financial adviser, Wexner “had started collecting guns, but [Wexner] didn’t know which end of a gun worked.” Nevertheless, Wexner invited Epstein to shoot targets with him in rural Ohio. Even though Merritt had arranged for a “world-class trap shooter to teach Wexner to shoot,” Wexner instead wanted Epstein to teach him.

This could have happened because Epstein, at this point, had had considerable connections to powerful, intelligence-linked arms dealers and may have privately disclosed these connections to Wexner. It’s certainly possible, given that Epstein is reported to have said “[Wexner] knows everything about me. He knows every experience I’ve had.”

Webb uses the fact that Wexner wanted Epstein to teach him how to shoot as evidence that Epstein was connected to “powerful, intelligence-linked arms dealers”, because Wexner would know that, and why else would he want Epstein to teach him? This isn’t the only evidence Webb gives of Epstein’s connections to intelligence and arms dealing, but it’s a good example of the kind of “facts” she includes. 

At this point I would be remiss if I didn’t mention @Bentham’s Bulldog’s piece on this topic Conspiracy Theorists Aren't Ignorant. They're Bad At Epistemology. As I have already done, he points out that they have a “shockingly large store of knowledge”. Imagine how much research it must have taken to uncover this fact about Epstein teaching Les Wexner to shoot. But at the same time this also represents Webb’s poor epistemology. The connections she draws, the examples she gives, and the “evidence” she provides actually lead her farther away from the truth rather than closer to it. 

The vast majority of what she marshals comes from a place of motivated reasoning. She wants to believe in a huge conspiracy between American and Israeli intelligence which starts in World War II and culminates in the giant scandal that is Jeffrey Epstein. As a result her threshold for viewing a connection as suspicious is just a lot lower than mine. This leads her to accept as evidence things that she probably shouldn’t. Which takes us to…

III- Investigating the actual evidence

I wasn’t very far into these books before I came across Webb uncritically repeating the claim that J. Edgar Hoover engaged in flamboyant cross-dressing. I didn’t know anything about Operation Underground, or the New York mob situation in 1942, but I did know that the claim about Hoover had been pretty thoroughly rejected by serious historians, even those hostile to Hoover. Sure, there’s some chance it’s true in spite of these rejections, but by including it, Webb is once again demonstrating her flawed epistemology. She includes it because it fits her preferred narrative, not because it meets a rigorous epistemological standard. To put it another way she is incentivized to cast a very wide net, and then to not be too particular about what it brings up.

If, despite this early warning, I went on to accept everything else, I would be falling for the Gell-Man amnesia effect; being very skeptical of things I do know about, but forgetting Webb’s sloppiness the minute I moved on to something I didn’t. There was no way I could fact check every claim, but what if I took one of the events she described and spot checked it? Ideally it would be an event that was widely reported on, and where I had at least some familiarity as a point of entry. Also it would be nice if this event had some parallels to the Epstein conspiracy.

With those criteria in mind I decided to look into what she said about the suicide of Vince Foster. What could I find out in an hour of digging?

The first interesting thing I noted was that Wikipedia is far more sympathetic to accusations that Hoover was a cross-dresser than the idea that Vince Foster was murdered. Now I have many problems with Wikipedia, (TracingWoodgrains’ report was absolutely and utterly damning) and it’s easy to detect both a liberal and a recency bias in the Foster article. Nevertheless, it’s suggestive. In their telling the Ken Starr report was definitive:

The report established that Foster owned the handgun used in the suicide, and confirmed that the body had not been moved from its position prior to its discovery by police. The report concluded "In sum, based on all of the available evidence, which is considerable, the OIC [Office of Independent Counsel] agrees with the conclusion reached by every official entity that has examined the issue: Mr. Foster committed suicide by gunshot in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993."

I don’t know if the Ken Starr report was definitive, but I do know that he spent way more time on it than I’m ever going to be able to spend.  But we should give Webb a chance to speak. These two paragraphs seem like good ones to investigate.

Other oddities include the fact that the murder weapon was unknown to Foster’s wife and family, as he had owned a silver gun, not the black gun observed in photographs of the scene. Furthermore, the bullet that killed Foster was never found.³⁰ In addition, the FBI appears to have intervened in the investigation by telling eyewitnesses not to report that they had seen cars of other people beside Foster present at the scene. In addition, the FBI was accused of altering the statements of several eyewitnesses.³¹

The autopsy of Foster’s body was also controversial. For instance, Dr. James Beyer, who performed the autopsy, unexpectedly moved the time of the autopsy so it took place a day earlier than planned, meaning that he performed much of the autopsy without observers who had been at the crime scene, as is custom.³² When those police observers had finally arrived, Beyer had conveniently already removed Foster’s entire tongue and upper palette, obfuscating evidence of the alleged “mouth-neck,” as opposed to “mouth-head,” injury that had been observed in the field by Dr. Haute.³³ Beyer had also spoken to Park Police about the results of X-rays of Foster’s body, but then subsequently claimed those X-rays never existed.³⁴

I’ve left in the footnote numbers so you can see that it is heavily cited. What happens if we look at those citations? It turns out that despite there being five separate notes they all refer to one of two documents. The one referenced most frequently is an article titled “AIM Report: Evidence Proving Foster Was Murdered” by Reed Irvine. Should you follow the link Webb provides you’ll get a 404 error page. Fortunately the Wayback Machine has a copy. The article does include all of Webb’s claims, but it’s an article hosted on a very conservative website written by someone so conservative that they are credited as paving the way for conservative talk radio. Most tellingly of all, that article includes no sources for any of the claims.

So the majority of the “evidence” is from an article that is no longer hosted by the people who originally published it. (One can only speculate why that might be.) When one does manage to track it down, it turns out it’s a dead end with no further citations to primary sources. One more piece making a lot of claims with no way to independently verify those claims. 

The other source is a congressional report: “Hearings Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr.” This seems more promising, though the copy I was able to find was a scanned, non-searchable PDF. 

…but this should be no problem, because Webb helpfully supplies page numbers. Apparently there’s damning information on pages 95, 412 and 419. 

…unfortunately the report is only 69 pages.

…there is an endnote 95 which seems like it might relate to Webb’s claim, but even the endnotes only go up to 290. 

…maybe I’m looking at the wrong thing? But the titles match, and it appears complete.

…is she talking about line numbers? 

After spending some time skimming it, I did find corroboration of her claim that X-rays were not taken at the autopsy though the autopsy report mistakenly indicated that there had been X-rays. And yes, that is suspicious, but it’s not a lot to craft an entire conspiracy on. 

I looked through some other footnotes and the most damning accusations followed a similar format: Webb linking to other conspiracy theorists who claimed, without evidence, that something had happened.⁴ To be honest, the citations were more shoddy than I expected. Now perhaps I didn’t dig enough, or perhaps the two things I looked at just happened to be particular weak points, but it seems more likely that the entire book is like this.

IV- So where does that leave us?

As you might be able to tell I was pretty disappointed by these books. Not only was the evidence weak and presentation choppy, but Webb scrupulously avoided laying out exactly what she thinks happened with Epstein. It’s clear that she thinks he was murdered, but other than pointing to a lot of people who might have wanted him dead, she doesn’t offer even a hint towards which of these people might have done it, and how they might have accomplished it. Regardless of whetherI would have found such a narrative convincing, for me that was the whole point of the book, and reaching the end without encountering anything like that made it feel like more of a waste.

However, as much as I’ve been bashing Webb, it’s also clear that there is something going on, and that while she overstates the extent of the phenomenon, all of the following are true:

1. There are psychopaths in positions of power who do incredibly amoral things. 

2. Some of these amoral things include collecting evidence that can be used to blackmail people into doing what they want.

3. Intelligence agencies have, from time to time, employed these tactics. (And probably also hire their share of psychopaths.)

4. And finally, it’s clear that some suicides were actually murders. 

If we grant these items, then we should probably also grant that if they were ever going to all apply to a single individual they would apply to Jeffrey Epstein. And indeed the book is strongest when it’s discussing his life and misdeeds. This shouldn’t be surprising. Webb is hardly alone in being interested in Epstein. So much has been said in so many different venues about him and his associates that you really don’t need a 1500 page exposé to think that something was going on. Heck, even Matt Yglesias is willing to believe that Epstein might have been murdered. 

Still, the book did add some useful tidbits to my picture of Epstein’s activities. Particularly their breadth. Also, given that this is being published on election day, I will say that Epstein had closer ties to Trump than I had previously realized. I think Trump and the Republicans want to frame themselves as the anti-Epstein faction, but Trump’s hands are definitely not clean in this matter. But so many other people had such close ties with Epstein (see for example Epstein’s 17 visits to the Clinton White House, often accompanied by female guests) that you kind of end up with a “in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” situation.

Given the enormous amount of confirmable information about Epstein both in the book and elsewhere, what do I think happened? I would say that at the moment I finished the book, I would have said the chances that Epstein was murdered were about 80%. But such is the nature of encountering an enormous amount of evidence. Since that moment the percentage has steadily declined. A lot of that decline came from writing this post. I was reminded of how dubious so much of Webb’s evidence was. And while I did check out a lot of her claims about Epstein, I didn’t check out all of them. 

Also I was directed to a piece on the website Less Wrong (which some of my readers are certainly familiar with) that made a pretty good argument for Epstein committing suicide. I say only pretty good because the author gave too much weight to some things. Also he eventually concluded that the most likely scenario is that Epstein paid the guards to look the other way while he committed suicide. Okay… but once you start talking about bribing the guards you open up a lot of potential scnearios. Finally he dismissed the issue of William Barr far too easily.

One of the pieces of evidence he placed a lot of weight on was that while the cameras directly monitoring Epstein suspiciously malfuncitoned, the cameras covering the approach to Epstein’s cell were working. So no one could have approached the cell without being spotted. As proof of this the Less Wrong article makes much of the fact that the footage was reviewed by the Attorney General himself, William Barr. As I said, I’m skeptical of guilt by association, but Epstein’s connection to Donald Barr, William’s father is one of the weirdest aspects of this whole story. Donald, a former member of the OSS, hired Epstein as a teacher at a very prestigious school he ran, despite Epstein not being particularly qualified. This is also the place where Epstein’s meteoric rise began. Given all this the idea that William didn’t know Epstein pretty well seems laughable. 

Now combine this by imagining that Epstein represented a colossal mess for the various intelligence agencies. (Which is almost certainly true. Even the Less Wrong author definitely agrees that Epstein was working with the CIA.) And, yes, the intelligence agencies have dealt with other messes in ways that didn’t require murder, but this mess seems particularly bad. The underage girl angle was the most toxic thing imaginable in 2019. So while this well-argued counterpoint did further lower my assessment of the probability Epstein was murdered, at this point I would still place the odds that Epstein was murdered at 55%. Which is to say slightly more likely than not.

Beyond that specific takeaway, there are a couple of other takeaways I’d like to close with. First, getting to the bottom of anything is tough, and I hope that documenting my own efforts in this space might prove helpful. I’m not saying that the methodology I described has the best ROI, but it has to be close. (For most things just ignoring them might work best.) Second, and this probably deserves its own post at some point, these smaller scale conspiracies are a lot harder to debunk, in part because they’re more logistically straightforward. It wouldn’t take more than a handful of people to arrange for Epstein to be murdered, while the number of people required to fake the moon landing is enormous.

All of which is to say epistemology is tough, and it’s only getting tougher. Answering questions like whether Epstein was murdered is something of a sideshow, but it’s part of a skillset which is becoming increasingly necessary. Particularly in the days to come as one half or another of the country ends up facing a reality they’d rather not accept. 

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It’s 9:00 pm Mountain Time on election night as I write this. I had hoped that the election would end up not being as close as the polls were predicting. Unfortunately, for once it looks like the polls were correct. (Though it may still be too early to say.) I think we may be in a situation where reality ends up being whatever will cause the most chaos. Let’s hope that I’m wrong. 

1. I picked a page at random, using random.org. Once I was on that page, I exercised more selectivity on which paragraph to use.

2. If you’ve ever stumbled onto a website that had a huge wall of text describing how someone had completely changed their life using this one simple trick (available as an e-book for $4.99) those were our customers. Of course while you were checking out they would offer gradually escalating additional deals culminating in the unbelievable opportunity to be part of their exclusive mastermind group, which would normally be $2500, but for the next 30 seconds it could be yours for only $1200. A total steal, since the information disclosed in this mastermind would easily translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

3. One of the key components to making sites like this work was access to “traffic”. You couldn’t rely on search engine optimization, or even Google Ads, they would take too long. No, you had to journey to the dark recesses of the internet and find people who had already harnessed a firehose of attention, and convince them to point it in your direction. The term I used for it was “a river of stupid people”.

4. The most interesting article I came across was from a guy writing in 2018 to oppose the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. His opposition had nothing to do with the sexual misconduct allegations. He was opposed to it because Kavanaugh sabotaged the Vince Foster probe. This guy then proceeded to lay out a very detailed narrative of exactly what had happened, in incredible detail. It’s a gripping, and entirely unsourced, read.