Was it a honeytrap?

Never get into an elevator with a Polish blonde”

David M. Evans, Consular/Economic Officer, Warsaw, 1964-1967

Cold War era Greek poster warning Greek officers not to yield to oddly friendly women.

The British newspaper The Guardian seems to think so, but The Guardian tends towards the salacious.

It would explain, however, a lot.

We speak, of course, of Epstein Island and the ongoing cover-up of what occurred there.

Yes, cover-up.  The U.S. government is covering it up.

A honey trap is an age old espionage technique.  A country sends somebody, make or female, to have compromising sex with the target.  Once he's compromised, he, and it's almost always a he, is really compromised.  Sexual sins can be amongst the very worse, even in this libertine age.

The Soviet Union was a master at the honey trap. Max Hastings, in his book on World War Two espionage, details this quite a bit and well known examples abound.  While not often put this way, Soviet recruiting in pre World War Two and early Cold War Britain was based on honey traps, with the added element that they wer\e homosexual honey traps.  Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time as well as devastating to a person's reputation, but surprisingly common in the "public school" system.  The Soviets learned who would be well placed at some point to be a spy, and provided the sexual target to bring the person in.

The more common female honey trap is of course well known, and was also well deployed by the Soviets, as well as other nations.

Maria Butina is a recently example who buddied up to the Trump administration and the National Rifle Association to gather intelligence from Conservative power brokers, although there's no accusation that she employed sex in her efforts.

Fang Fang, as Christine Fang had sex with two US mayors and targeted Democratic politicians in what US officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China.

Why wouldn't the Russians use it?

What we know about Epstein Island at least gives us every reason to question whether or not it was a honey trap.  The number of very wealthy and connected men that went t hrough it, from all over the globe, made it somewhat unique, although the wealthy and powerful travel in certain circles and there are likely other places that meet this criteria.  What those other places probably didn't have, however, was mid to late teenage girls who were on the dinner menu.

There's utterly no way that the Russians did not know this.

We are told that just because men traveled to the island doesn't mean that they had sex with underage teenage girls.  Quite a few men whose names have been exposed denied every doing that, or denied every knowing that this was going on.  No doubt, that's true min many instances.  Mere wealth is enough to cause some of the wealthy to go to a place. The appearance of wealth attracts the wealthy like shit attracts flies, and I use that analogy intentionally.  But that doesn't mean ever single man who went there ended up in bed with a 15 year old.

Having said that, however, it's clear that girls about that age were there for the offering, and that's the next point.  A honeytrap isn't a rape of the target, it's an offering that tempts the target.  Some men might very well go through a place, particularly perhaps like Bill Clinton did with his wife, and never be tempted, maybe, or even know what's going on.  But to not have some clue strains credibility.  One thing that's showing up, and thank to the Guardian you can see them, is photos of hte young girls.  Their faces are blacked out, and in some cases their boobs, but what's interesting is they are of a type.  They're thin girls and look like teens, not the heavy chested women of the Playboy magazine type.  They look, evin in the redacted photographs, just like what they were, thing flat chested girls who should have been in high school.

The look like the girl that Donald Trump drew on Epstein's birth card.

And all the more appropriate for a honeytrap.

World War Two Navy era poster.  If the Honeytrap thesis is correct, it's not the girls who were actually the spies. They were only used to compromise the targets, if that happened.

If you are attracting the flies in this fashion, you have to have something to attract them to, and something that compromises them.  Back in the 1970s illicit sex alone would have done that, but in the 2000s?  Maybe not.  And on top of it the guests on Epstein Island were flying in and out, although some did that quite a bit.  Offer a super model up on the plate might not work for a variety of reasons, one being that the supermodel would probably say no.  You aren't going to get any Kate Uptons on Epstein Island.

But  you might very well get the desperate and confused.  Pretty girls on the economic and domestic edge, whose parents are desperate as well.  They'd make ideal entries on the sexual menu.  They are like the prostitute who is murdered to set up the Senator in The Godfather, Part II.  Girls with nothing who "never existed".

You only have to offer them up to the willing, have a camera around, and voila, the target is compromised.

Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, need we say more.  Posted under fair use exception.

What we know for an absolute certainty is that there were a lot of rich and powerful men who went to Epstein Island.

We also know for sure that a selection of them screwed teenage girls there.

We know for certain that the first time that Epstein was arrested, he got a mysteriously sweetheart deal from a Federal Prosecutor.¹  He was being protected.

He was being protected, because his clientele was being protected on some level.

We also know that people who claimed to be horrified about what was going on and to have cut off their connection with him, didn't when they claimed to.  Even while he was in prison he was receiving contacts from the rich and pwoerful.

We know that right now only a little over 50% of the materials the government has on him has been released and we are informed that the rest will not be.  We've learned of more of the names, but we haven't learned the names of the girls. Their anonymity isn't protection, it makes them a hostage.

We now that there's been a diehard effort to keep material from being revealed and that the names of the victimizers have not been fully revealed, or even really slightly revealed.

What we just don't know, is why.

What we also know is that early on Trump claimed to be for releasing the files.  He radically changed his view when he was in office, but we don't know why.  It could be that his name shows up more than he thought it would, even if so far nobody has come out and said this material shows he screwed teenage girls.²   Or it could be that there's something so compromising in these files that its hugely damaging to somebody he's protecting.

Without a full release of the files, we don't know what that is.  But it'd have to be pretty bad.  

Sex with underage males will still bring a figure down, we know this.  The story of Kevin Spacey proves that.  But what about teenage girls?  A lot of the men that are in Trump's circle already, including Trump himself, have lived a life of sexual license, would teenagers be the line they couldn't cross?

Well, maybe.  Coerced sex proved the downfall of Harvey Weinstein.  Drugged sex brought down Bill Cosby.  Maybe teenage sex is still a bridge too far. We can all hope so.  And frankly somebody who would stoop so low as to engage in this activity in this situation may have well brought additional perverted elements into this.

But what would espionage do?

First, is there any evidence of it at all.

It does turn out that there were girls from what had been the USSR who showed up on the island.  Model  Ruslana Korshunova went there at age 18, and then went out a balcony window three years later in what was ruled a suicide.  Model Anna Malova is known to have flown with Prince Andrew to the island, but at the time the now 52 year old woman would have been 25.  And there are other accusations, but they are pretty murky.

There's enough, however, that Poland is launching an investigation into connections between Epstein and Russian intelligence.

Would this mean that Trump was compromised?  No, not at all.  But it might very well mean that somebody in his orbit was, and he's protecting him, or them.  There's precedent for that.

It's pretty clear that Truman attempted to bury information that the Roosevelt Administration had been compromised by Soviet spies, and frankly, the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and 1950s pretty much succeeded at that effort. The Roosevelt Administration was definitely compromised, but the effort to squash the efforts to reveal that were so successful that they destroyed the reputation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and have caused there to be a common belief that all of his acquisitions were baloney.  They weren't.  They were pretty much dead on.

And this would somewhat explain Trump being extraordinarily careful with Putin.  He's not always in Putin's camp, but he often is.  It's been hard to grasp, although there are other explanations for it.  Keeping a lid on whatever is in the Epstein files might be good for Trump. . . and Putin, and really bad for both of them if it turns out that the US, and perhaps other Western, governments were, and maybe are, heavily penetrated by Russian intelligence.

And, as a final wild note, for years now people have claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.  The accusations frankly are not credible, but if you are going to entertain them, why isn't a Russian connection a possibility?  MAGAs have claimed that the Clinton's had him murdered, which is absolutely absurd. Frankly, it's make more sense for the Republicans to have him murdered, which would also be absurd, but make a little more sense.

If anyone was going to murder him, the Russians make the most sense.

Now, I don't think that occured.

But I don't think Harry Dexter White was murdered either.  Just compromised.

A Russian honeytrap?

We really don't know, but it is an intersting possiblity.

Footnotes.

1.  Chris Christie spoke about this on the last This Week, noting he was a U.S. prosecutor at the time and that all the U.S. Attorneys wondered what on earth was going on.  His comment was "now we know".  He didn't say, exactly, what we know, but what he meant was that we know that something was going on inside the Administration at that time that secured Epstein a deal where he was allowed to go home every day and just slept in the prison.

2.  It's not true that he hasn't been accused of that.  He has been, but so far law enforcement has not found those accusations credible, and they're never going to find them to be credible during the current administration, no matter what the situation regarding them may be.