With an avalanche of new documents released by the House Oversight Committee, and looming legislation mandating further disclosures, the press has renewed its relentless coverage of the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein. Yet, with some notable exceptions, a major part of his life’s work has remained outside the media’s gaze, his relationship with the state of Israel and his prominent role in helping advance the Israeli cyberweapons industry. And so our series continues.

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On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy.

Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein’s New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. The bank’s spokesperson denied any relationship to the notorious American sex trafficker. Epstein was found dead on August 10, 2019.

Four years later, after Epstein’s meeting calendars were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, the bank finally admitted that de Rothschild had met with Epstein as part of her “normal duties at the bank between 2013 and 2019.” Epstein provided introductions to U.S. finance leaders and law firms and provided tax and risk consulting, the bank disclosed, while also helping de Rothschild personally on “a couple of occasions” with advice on estate management.

The bank remained vague about the actual nature of its relationship with the convicted sex trafficker. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild’s personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal that September.

A second set of documents—the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, hacked by Handala and uploaded by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets—sheds light on Epstein’s efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. After Barak’s retirement from government in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces’ secretive Unit 81 technology unit, to source cyberweapons startups from the Israeli intelligence community. Gurvich did not respond to a request for comment.

Private communications between Barak and Gurvich show discussions about a wide range of cyberweapons concepts drawn from Israeli military research, inspired in part by the astonishing scope of U.S. global surveillance apparatus revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Epstein pushed forward a plan to finance Israeli “offensive cyber” startups with the hope of winning de Rothschild’s support.

Epstein often played the role of middleman, handing off messages between the banker and the former prime minister. In one note, Epstein passed along a tantalizing offer from de Rothschild to Barak: “if Ehud wants to make serious money, he will have to build a relationship with me. take time so that we can truly understand one another.” Barak asked for advice, deferring to Epstein’s supposed expertise on women—“I’m ready,” he wrote, “But I need your advise re HOW? (ladies is your forté).”

Neither Barak nor de Rothschild responded to requests for comment from Drop Site News. The Handala hacking team is suspected of having links to Iran, but Drop Site has been able to verify the authenticity of a number of private details in the Barak email database. Many of Epstein’s emails have also been verified via the House disclosures.

It’s not clear whether the Rothschild bank ultimately participated directly in Epstein and Barak’s cyberweapons efforts—but in October 2015, de Rothschild negotiated a $25 million contract with Epstein’s Southern Trust Company, the same entity Epstein used to fund Barak’s intelligence-linked security startup Reporty Homeland Security (now known as Carbyne) earlier that year. According to a proposal reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the multi-million dollar contract was for “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms.”

House disclosures show that Epstein and de Rothschild remained close in the years before Epstein’s death. In an email exchange in 2018 with former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, Epstein gossiped about de Rothschild’s marital issues with Benjamin de Rothschild, heir to the Rothschild fortune. He wrote to Ruemmler, “ariane said ben giving her a very hard time, and did not know about tattoo…she said he wants her to do wife like things. ugh.” Ruemmler replied, “Barf.”

Ruemmler told Drop Site she met Epstein when he reached out after she left the Obama administration on behalf of the Rothschild bank, asking if she’d be willing to represent them in an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into money laundering and tax evasion. Ruemmler accepted and helped negotiate a non-prosecution agreement.

Barak and Epstein frequently discussed regulatory issues facing their Swiss bank partners, as Epstein scouted opportunities to finance Barak’s cybersecurity enterprise. The email datasets, which are mostly clustered between 2012 to 2016, show Barak and Epstein working on a partnership between Ariane de Rothschild and Boris Collardi, then-CEO of Swiss bank Julius Baer. Edmond de Rothschild Group and Julius Baer were both implicated in major tax evasion and money laundering investigations during the same time period. The communications do not reflect Epstein or Barak’s involvement with the bank’s responses to the investigations.

In early 2013, while Ehud Barak was entering the final months of his term as Israel’s Minister of Defense, he was being privately courted by international private banks in Davos, Switzerland, who sought to use his political connections to attract ultra-wealthy individuals as new clients. In March 2013, soon after he resigned from the defense ministry, Barak received a “rainmaker” agreement from Boris Collardi, then-CEO of Julius Baer Group, a Swiss private bank based in Zurich.

The agreement offered Barak CHF 600,000 (over $750,000 USD) for a one-year retainer, while naming him as a “strategic advisor” offering geopolitical advice to bank leadership. In his pitch to Julius Baer, he recommended the bank seek out new sources for capital in “uncharted waters”—proposing in an email, “Russian, probably Chinese as well as Jewish (non US) capital as new major sources for capital.” (Simultaneously, Barak signed a million-dollar contract with Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate, as Drop Site previously reported.)

Three days after the press release about Barak’s hiring was published that July, Olivier Colom, senior advisor to Benjamin de Rothschild’s famous Edmond de Rothschild bank, sent an email to Barak’s close associate, Jeffrey Epstein. “I hear that Ehud Barack [sic] has decided to work for Julius Baer,” Colom wrote. “Too bad, we may have been able to offer him something…too late.”

Epstein forwarded the message to Barak, who replied: “Not a surprise to you, I believe. Let’s talk about it later.”

Epstein enjoyed a close personal relationship with Ariane de Rothschild, then vice-chairman (now CEO) of the Edmond de Rothschild group. Ariane Langner had married into the French branch of the Rothschild dynasty in 1999 and, after her husband’s death in 2021, she became the first person without Rothschild paternity to run the family-owned banking institution.

Barak, however, was not a big fan of de Rothschild. He sent Epstein an article on Edmond de Rothschild’s $300 million investment fund for Africa, in which Ariane explained that the bank hoped to invest in a booming consumer economy, not endless war for resources. “Africa will be the equivalent of China. What is of interest to me is that it is not led any more by mines and energy, but that banks and insurance companies are developing,” she said. Barak was horrified, captioning the article: “Globalization of cultural and media consumption.”

Epstein was similarly chagrined. “I am aware,” he lamented. “She is lost.” It’s no mystery why Epstein and Barak disagreed with de Rothschild’s take on Africa; the two men were simultaneously engaged in mining and energy investments in several African countries, selling Israeli security technology to embattled presidents in Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and beyond. Creating a booming consumer economy in Africa was not on their agenda.

In his emails to Barak, Epstein indicated he viewed Ariane de Rothschild as a misguided byproduct of nepotism. He compared Benjamin de Rothschild’s decision to appoint her as chairman of the bank, to Barak putting his son-in-law (a classical cellist) in charge of the Israeli military: “[She] has many interfamily battles as well as biz. it would have been like you making Yoed [Nir], the defense minister because he was family.”

Whatever misgivings Epstein had about de Rothschild, they didn’t impede his desire to leverage her resources for grander ambitions. Epstein was a super-connector of the world’s elite, and began building a relationship between the former prime minister and the private banking heiress. He invited Barak and de Rothschild to dinner at his New York mansion on September 23, 2013.

On November 18, Barak sent Epstein a link to a news article about Edmond de Rothschild bank opening a new London branch, with the message: “Any news recently from the Lady?” Three days later, Epstein passed along a message from de Rothschild to Barak: “my thoughts were confirmed, when it was said to me, ‘if Ehud wants to make serious money, he will have to build a relationship with me. take time so that we can truly understand one another.’” Epstein told Barak he didn’t respond to de Rothschild’s offer: “I just listened.”

Barak was eager to exploit the opportunity, but he deferred to Epstein on the psychology of women: “I’m ready. But I need your advise [sic] re HOW? (ladies is your forté).”

Epstein told Barak what he must offer to de Rothschild: “time. attention. stable. recurring. PREDICTABLE where what when.”

Barak offered Epstein ideas for a “donor advised VC” focused on strategic sectors of the Israeli tech economy. A donor-advised fund is a philanthropic fund that allows donors to make tax-deductible contributions while recommending which investments and grants to spend the money on. Edmond de Rothschild bank was known for building “umbrella” funds with smaller thematic funds that could attract large amounts of capital from global investors. Barak proposed a small fund (”4-5% of the overall planned volume”) based on Israeli companies in telecommunications, cybersecurity, and biotechnology.

Epstein had been pursuing the concept of a large donor-advised fund for several years, according to unsealed emails from the US Virgin Islands lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase Bank. After the 2008 financial crisis, Epstein tried to convince JPMorgan executives to establish a donor-advised fund backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, until he was forced out of the American bank in 2013. He continued to shop the idea to European private banks after he moved his accounts to Deutsche Bank in August of that year. Barak asked Epstein for help building the relationship with de Rothschild: “I will need some guide along the way.”

Epstein reassured Barak that he was in good company with former U.S. military leaders with lucrative careers peddling intelligence-linked cybersecurity products: former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden and US cyber commander Keith Alexander. He wrote, “ok, consider you michael hayden, and keith alexander. would be easy to [raise] serious money, you wouldn’[t] have to do the dog and pony show.”

On November 25, four days after his conversation with Epstein about the outreach to Rothschild, Barak arranged a private “brainstorm” session with Pavel Gurvich, a veteran of Unit 81, the secret technology unit of Israeli military intelligence. Barak and his business partner Gary Fegel, a former mining industry executive, had recently invested in Gurvich’s cloud security startup Guardicore. Guardicore was later acquired by Akamai, and integrated into the world’s largest web content delivery network, in 2021.

Barak and Fegel were infatuated with offensive hacking tools. They had tried and failed to buy a major stake in a spin-off of the spyware vendor NSO Group, whose products have been used to target dissidents and journalists, including the late Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. After the meeting, Gurvich emailed Barak a map of undersea Transatlantic cables and network access points which had been disclosed by the Snowden leaks, with the caption: “[Imagine] a similar map of Chinese and Russian [computer-network-exploitation] activities.”

Fegel, like Barak, was an elder statesman with limited technical understanding of cybersecurity—but he clearly understood the military and economic opportunity presented by cyberweapons. After receiving the leaked NSA document from Gurvich, Fegel wrote back, “I don’t claim to understand this in detail, but it is striking that such info floats around the whole world. Somebody will always try to obtain such info and/or try not to share such info….that’s why the cyber market will never be satisfied and the problem can never be solved completely.”

Gurvich agreed to advise Barak and Fegel on an investment fund to develop “offensive cyber technology,” by finding promising early-stage companies and products in Israeli military research units. Gurvich proposed several areas of focus for cyberweapons, including an “NSO-like company” that targets cell phones, hacking tools for routers and internet-connected appliances, and surveillance of the Tor network. Gurvich began headhunting for military intelligence personnel working in these domains.

The trio weighed strategies for spinning off Israeli intelligence tools into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups. Gurvich wrote, “We can try to pursue projects like these individually…or consider Ehud’s Idea of building an Advanced Cyber Lab who’s [sic] main purpose could be create Proof of Concepts that we can try selling using Ehud’s connections. Once we see that there is interest in one…we can choose to develop it in the LAB or spin-out a firm dedicated for it.”

In the meantime, Epstein continued to foster the growing personal relationship between Barak and Ariane de Rothschild. On January 30, 2014, Epstein invited Barak to a dinner meeting in Paris with himself, de Rothschild, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Epstein himself bowed out of the meeting shortly beforehand, saying he had a cold. But, in a sign of his close interest in the meeting, he managed all the logistics by email, ultimately arranging for Barak to visit the Rothschild bank’s office in Paris.

The morning after his scheduled meeting at the Rothschild bank, Barak flew to Germany to attend the Munich Trans-Atlantic Security Conference. There, he met with Michael Hayden, the former NSA director whom Epstein had previously name-dropped while coaching Barak on the strategy for financing cyberweapons. Before his flight, Barak’s wife Nili Priell emailed him a dossier on Hayden to prepare him for the meeting.

After the conference, Barak sent an email to Hayden thanking him for the appointment, while referencing an unspecified plan to be set in motion: “It was good meeting with you in Munich. I meant what I’ve said to you and wonder whether we can meet later this month to review the options….Let me know if the whole idea make[s] sense to you.”

Epstein later emailed Barak asking for an update on the talks: “how was munich.” Barak replied: “Munich was ok. Better to talk over the phone.” Barak and Hayden tried to schedule a follow-up meeting in New York City the following week, on February 26; but their trips missed overlapping by a few hours. Hayden promised: “We’ll keep working on it.”

Neither Fegel nor Hayden responded to interview requests from Drop Site.

While plans for the donor-advised fund incubated, Epstein found more opportunities to bring de Rothschild and Barak together under the banner of philanthropy and Israeli national security policy. On March 30, 2014, Epstein sent Barak an e-mail: “I’m trying to figure out how i can be more helpful.” The next day, Epstein passed along a message to Barak from the Rothschild baroness: “Hi Jeff would you mind asking Ehud whether or not he is advising the Herzliya Conference editorial committee on bringing ro [sic] the conference fromer [sic] or current defence ministers/security specialists?”

The Herzliya Conference is an annual national security policy summit run by the Institute for Policy and Strategy, founded by ex-Mossad research chief Uzi Arad. The conference convenes Israel’s top political, security, intelligence, and business leadership to shape the country’s security agenda. Barak was on the Board of Directors of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, which organized the conference.

Barak wanted to be helpful, but he was unsure how to respond to de Rothschild’s message about the conference attendees: “I’m on the Board of the IDC think tank which organizes the Herzeliah (sic) Conference. But what’s the Question?” Epstein replied: “i send you what i received and know” and told Barak “i will be speaking to her in an hour.” Barak asked Epstein to gather more context: “Thx. Use your senses to recommend me.” The next day, Barak shared the conference speaker list with Epstein, to deliver to de Rothschild, with a note: “Pl don’t use this material with others.”

The Rothschild Caesarea Foundation sponsored the 2014 Herzliya Conference in honor of the foundation’s 50th anniversary. Caesarea is a coastal area between Tel Aviv and Haifa, where an ancient Roman and Byzantine port city once stood. In 1921, the British Mandate government leased the Caesarea sand dunes to Edmond de Rothschild’s Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association for 200 years.

The French branch of the Rothschild family was essential to founding the modern state of Israel. “The Jewish State,” the 1896 pamphlet considered the foundation of modern Zionism, was originally titled, “Address to the Rothschilds.” In it, Theodor Herzl appealed to Edmond James de Rothschild—whose family had become prominent financiers of the European colonial enterprise—to finance settlements for Jews fleeing ghettos and pogroms in Europe. The Rothschild heir established the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association to purchase land for Jewish settlers.

In February 1948, the Zionist paramilitary Haganah violently expelled the residents of a fishing village near the ruins of Caesarea, and demolished most of the homes that remained. In 1962, Edmond James de Rothschild and the Israeli government agreed to convert the Caesarea lease into a tax-exempt non-profit foundation in which the foundation would develop the real estate around Caesarea, with profits distributed as grants for higher education in Israel.

But in 2010, regulators discovered the foundation held nearly a half-billion shekels in surplus liquidity at the end of the year, but only contributed twenty million shekels to higher education. The Israeli Tax Authority issued an income-tax assessment for more than 100 million shekels, challenging the foundation’s tax-exempt status. The Herzliya conference branding was a PR strategy for the Rothschild foundation while the case was still pending in court.

Ariane de Rothschild delivered the 2014 Herzliya Conference opening address on the “legacy” of Edmond de Rothschild, titled “Social Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of Pioneering in the 21st Century.” In her speech, de Rothschild addressed the tax dispute: “This deeply ingrained relationship [between the Rothschild foundation and the state of Israel] is being questioned today by our partner. My husband Benjamin and I expect that it won’t be challenged any further.”

The bank executive used the Herzliya platform to promote “venture philanthropy,” the very same non-profit framework Epstein and Barak planned to exploit as a strategy for funding the Israeli technology sector. In an interview at the conference, she observed that Israel was unsustainably dependent on philanthropic grants, as younger diasporic Jews inheriting wealth were reluctant to support Israel.

She said: “Jews abroad struggle with their questions: Are we Jews? Are we Zionists? Are we both?” She proposed applying “pure market tools” to philanthropy, so contributions could become venture investments, rather than endowments. This way, a younger generation of donors could take an “active role” in shaping the outcomes of their charitable contributions: “The startup nation must become the leading social startup nation.”

Barak had been scheduled to speak at Herzliya on June 10, 2014, and he planned to meet with de Rothschild at the conference—then, a few days before the conference began, Epstein informed Barak of last-minute plans for a dinner meeting with Peter Thiel on June 9, at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan. Barak remained in New York, and canceled his meeting with de Rothschild in Israel.

The Rothschild baroness was frustrated by her reception at Herzliya, and Epstein relayed this to Barak in a June 12 email: “are you in [Geneva]? you might want to tell ariane, who hated the [conference].” Barak replied: “I’ll be there next week…that[‘s] what happens where she first pay[s] then check[s], rather than the other way around. I’ll call you.”

After hanging up the phone, Epstein immediately emailed de Rothschild to set up a meeting with Barak. Epstein scheduled a breakfast at de Rothschild’s home on June 18. Before, Epstein privately emailed Barak to brief him: “she has a real [problem] with her [foundation] and the israeli govt. i will need 20 minutes of your time to brief you.” After the meeting, Epstein pinged Barak for an update, writing: “>?” Barak asked for a number to call so they could speak on the phone.

It is unclear what, if any, help Barak could have offered to assist de Rothschild in the foundation’s tax dispute. The conflict with the Israeli government escalated over the following year. In May 2015, de Rothschild explained in an interview that her husband was refusing to visit the country in protest over the matter. “It is a shame there is a misunderstanding about what we do and how we do it. It is insulting that the state casts doubt on us,” de Rothschild said. “If there is a family that does not have to prove its commitment to Israel, it’s ours.”

Finally, in 2018, the Rothschild Foundation and the Israeli government announced that they had reached a new pact. As part of the deal, the foundation agreed to invest over $200 million in education grants in Israel, while releasing land to build 2,000 homes in the seaside town of Or Akiva, a nearly exclusively Jewish community. (The foundation fought efforts, meanwhile, to advance land to the adjacent Palestinian-Israeli town of Jisr al-Zarqa.)

The agreement extended the foundation’s tax-exempt status until at least 2032. In a statement announcing the pact, the Israeli government praised “the considerable contribution of the Rothschild family to the realization of the Zionist vision and to the State of Israel.” Drop Site was unable to confirm whether Barak or Epstein were involved in the resolution to the dispute.

In May of this year, Edmond de Rothschild bank’s Luxembourg unit was convicted of money laundering related to embezzlement from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund between 2009 and 2013. This marked the first time a bank in Luxembourg had ever been convicted of money laundering. The Swiss financial regulator FINMA also found Julius Baer, with whom Barak had a consulting agreement, committed major anti-money-laundering violations during the same period. Boris Collardi, the head of Julius Baer, was personally reprimanded by FINMA.

Epstein and Barak were intimately familiar with money laundering and tax evasion issues facing Edmond de Rothschild and Julius Baer, and frequently discussed these topics with each other—and, occasionally, with the heads of the banks.

In December 2015, Edmond de Rothschild bank entered its non-prosecution agreement under the Department of Justice “Swiss Bank Program.” The bank paid $45 million and admitted they had aided U.S. clients in concealing undeclared accounts with multiple billions of dollars of assets.

One month later, on January 1, 2016, Barak sent a congratulatory email to Collardi on Julius Baer’s settlement on a separate DOJ tax evasion case, in which the bank was accused of helping U.S. clients hide $600 million in undeclared Swiss accounts—the bank paid back nearly the full amount to the U.S. government. Barak wrote Collardi an enthusiastic note, “That’s Really Great!!!” Epstein sent Barak a copy of the the Justice Department’s civil forfeiture demand, requiring Julius Baer to surrender $220 million. Collardi did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

In April 2016, the same month as the Panama Papers leak, the conversations between Epstein and Barak in the former Israeli Prime Minister’s inbox came to a halt. One of the very last conversations between the two men concerned a “discreet” meeting between de Rothschild and Collardi. On April 27, Barak emailed Epstein about “weekend schedules”. Epstein replied, “She said she would call me after the general meeting.”

Two days later, on April 29, Barak wrote Epstein, “I met BC [Boris Collardi] today in Monaco. He is ready. Assured discreetness. Any news from AdR [Ariane de Rothschild]?”

Ehud Barak’s hacked email inbox contains no further emails between Barak and Epstein. But the latest document set released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee in early November shows that Epstein and Barak’s secret plan for Collardi and Rothschild was still progressing, one year later.

On April 30, 2017, Barak shared a cryptic e-mail with Epstein, in an email thread discussing a The New York Times review of the Broadway play Oslo, about Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen – a close friend of Epstein’s who played a part in the 1990s peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. “About time for our actions to turn into theatre and movie pieces,” Barak wrote, cheekily. “Shall we talk? Any news from BC/AdR?” Epstein wrote back, “both have the flu.” Barak replied: “High stress.”

This story is the latest in an ongoing series on Epstein’s ties to foreign intelligence services, and his role in helping fuel a global boom in Israeli surveillance technology.

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