Epstein as an agent of the Rothschilds? The shoe seems to fit. By Escape Key.
Drawing on the Rothschild Archive London — correspondence from over one hundred business agents working for the various Rothschild houses — [Rainer] Liedtke documented a recruitment and intelligence operation that spanned the European continent and reached into Latin America for most of the nineteenth century.
The paper describes a system in which agents were placed in locations where the Rothschild banks did not maintain a permanent presence. These agents carried out business transactions, gathered political and economic intelligence, and forwarded information that enabled the family to make decisions ahead of competitors and, frequently, ahead of even governments. …
A private network built on trust:
The recruitment criteria tell their own story. Trust was paramount, and two principal routes existed for earning it: being a relation of the family, or having worked within one of the houses for a considerable period. Marriage was the preferred option, and these marriages ensured that important business locations were ‘covered in the long run by trustworthy representatives’.
Liedtke is explicit about one boundary: “… such men never gained access to the decision-making circle of the family but instead maintained their own business interests separately, albeit profiting significantly from contacts to the Rothschild network.”
The agents were operationally essential, but they remained permanently outside the core. Only born Rothschilds were fully trusted. …
He also documents a deliberate policy of heterogeneity. Despite being Jewish, the Rothschilds employed non-Jewish agents as a matter of strategy. A homogeneous network, Liedtke explains, would be ‘self-referential’ — limited to the social circles its members already moved in. …
What the network does nowadays:
In the early decades, the network’s value lay in raw market data — commodity prices, exchange rates, shipping movements. After the telegraph commoditised this kind of information in the mid-nineteenth century, the agents’ importance shifted towards strategic political assessment: who was likely to form a government, which minister could be cultivated, what policy was being contemplated before it was announced.
The period during which Liedtke’s archival coverage begins to thin — the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — coincides precisely with this institutional migration. The private functions the agent network had performed for a century were being absorbed into formal organisations: the BIS for sovereign clearing, the League and later the UN for political mediation, the CFR and Chatham House for transatlantic policy coordination. Cecil Rhodes’s vision for the latter — a network of elite influence bridging the Anglo-American world — ran through Rothschild financing from its inception.
The agent network did not disappear, but its function changed.
Where the nineteenth-century agents had managed the family’s direct business, the twentieth-century successors would manage the institutional architecture that replaced it — operating not within the Rothschild banks but within the sovereign and multilateral bodies that now performed the Rothschild banks’ historical role at a vastly larger scale.
The family’s reach extended into state intelligence as well.
Victor Rothschild served in MI5 during the Second World War, and his London flat functioned as a gathering point for fellow members of the Cambridge Apostles — a secretive Cambridge society whose membership in the early 1930s, according to MI5’s own files, was ‘nearly all’ communist. Several of those who frequented the flat, including Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, were later exposed as Soviet agents. …
Victor later served as research director of Shell, where in 1966 he commissioned James Lovelock to write an essay titled ‘Some thoughts on the year 2000’. Lovelock has acknowledged that this work was instrumental in setting him on the intellectual journey that produced his Gaia hypothesis — the view of Earth as a self-regulating organism that would, decades later, provide the conceptual foundation for planetary-scale environmental governance. … [Shell provided a £10,000 donation in 1972 to help establish the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, whic is the home of the carbon dioxide theory of global warming.]
The shoe:
Across four independent academic studies the method is clear: agents placed where the family requires presence but does not wish to reside, recruited through marriage or long service, compensated through access rather than salary, deliberately heterogeneous, publicly visible and socially prestigious by association, but permanently excluded from the family’s decision-making core.
What these sources collectively describe is a private intelligence operation — one that enabled the family to act ahead of competitors and governments for the better part of a century.
The question is whether this method continued into the late twentieth century.
The shoe fits:
The three Epstein essays published on this Substack over the past week traced a network of connections radiating outward from Jeffrey Epstein to figures associated with the Rothschild family …
The correspondence establishes a three-tier reporting line running from Jacob Rothschild through Ariane to Epstein.
- Jacob initiates — drafting family governance letters, brokering introductions, offering to raise acquisition opportunities with bank CEOs.
- Ariane [de Rothschild] executes and reports — every significant Jacob communication forwarded to Epstein’s inbox, usually with a one-line reaction.
- Epstein manages downward — Ehud Barak, Larry Summers, the operational network — and reports upward to Ariane, who defers upward to Jacob.
The $25 million contract, the DOJ coordination through a former White House Counsel, and the systematic forwarding of confidential intra-family correspondence all run in the same direction: the family principal visible only through the intermediary’s forwards, the intermediary operationally present and signing contracts, the agent below managing intelligence and operations.
When Epstein was asked, he denied. On 30 August 2016, Boris Nikolic emailed him a two-word question: ‘Jacob Rothschild?’ Epstein replied: ‘No’. He denied knowing Jacob, yet sat on large amounts of Jacob’s forwarded emails.
The parallels with Liedtke’s framework are visible in almost every element of the documented network.
Epstein was positioned in locations — New York, the US Virgin Islands, Paris — where the Rothschild banks did not maintain direct operational control but had significant interests.
He gathered intelligence of the most privileged kind: Treasury meeting minutes forwarded by Peter Mandelson while serving as Business Secretary, advance notice of the €500 billion Euro bailout, strategic assessments of Rothschild inter-branch dynamics relayed to him by Ariane herself.
In March 2014, Ariane told Epstein she wanted to discuss Ukraine in an upcoming meeting; he replied that the upheaval ‘should provide many opportunites, many’. This was the kind of political assessment that Liedtke describes as having replaced raw market data once the telegraph made commodity prices universally available.
He was compensated through access to deal flow and investment opportunities rather than a salary. The $25 million Rothschild contract was ostensibly for ‘risk analysis’ and ‘algorithm-related services’, with payment explicitly linked to outstanding matters between the Edmond de Rothschild group and US authorities. The $158 million in Leon Black advisory fees and the Wexner property transfer followed the same logic — each was payment for services within a specific domain. …
His lack of institutional affiliation served the same function as the ‘foreignness’ Liedtke identifies. Epstein held no government office, ran no bank, led no intelligence agency, held no academic post. His allegiance ran to the network, not to any national or corporate body within it.
The network around him was remarkably heterogeneous: Israeli military intelligence, British royalty, American Treasury secretaries, Silicon Valley founders, Yale network scientists, Latvian cryptographers, Mongolian presidents, Gulf sovereign wealth. Each node gave access to institutions and individuals the others struggled to reach — precisely the rationale Liedtke identifies for the Rothschilds’ deliberate recruitment across social, religious and national lines.
And the boundary held. Epstein was operationally essential, but he was never part of the inner circle — someone who ‘profited significantly from contacts to the Rothschild network’ while maintaining ‘business interests separately’….
The one vulnerability to the Rothschild network:
Only one vulnerability recurs in the archive. August Schönberg, dispatched to New York and later known as August Belmont, declared himself the Rothschild agent on Wall Street without authorisation. The distance between New York and London made control impossible. Belmont could not be dislodged, and the family was forced to tolerate an agent who had, in effect, gone rogue. …
The system’s single recurring failure [is] the agent who accumulates enough independent knowledge to threaten the principals. …
Going rogue:
When Epstein was denied his fee on the Gates-JPMorgan impact investing vehicle he had helped design, the correspondence shows his shift in behaviour….
Epstein attempted to leverage himself through disclosure. The switchboard that knew what each node had done — because it had facilitated the connections — turned on the network when denied its fee. …
On 29 July 2019, Epstein’s lawyers met with FBI and SDNY prosecutors and raised, in general terms, the possibility of their client’s cooperation. A cooperating Epstein would not have been a peripheral witness. He would have been the routing table documenting itself — every introduction, every strategic instruction, every intelligence flow mapped from the only position that saw all of them simultaneously.
Twelve days later, he was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. …
The marriage recruits:
The marriage-recruit pattern documented by Liedtke, Kuper and Ferguson for the nineteenth century has direct contemporary parallels beyond Ariane de Rothschild.
Lynn Forester married Sir Evelyn de Rothschild in 2000, with the introduction reportedly facilitated by Henry Kissinger at the Bilderberg conference. … The correspondence between Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Hillary Clinton, documented in the Podesta and Clinton server emails, shows a reporting pattern similar to the Ariane-Epstein channel. …
The long service path:
Marriage, however, was only one of Liedtke’s two recruitment paths. The second — long service within the house — also has contemporary candidates. …
- Emmanuel Macron worked at Rothschild & Cie Banque before entering the Élysée and the presidency10.
- Thierry Breton served as a senior adviser at Rothschild & Cie — a detail he omitted from his EU Commissioner CV — before taking charge of the European Commission’s internal market portfolio …
- The Spectator noted the pattern as early as 1988, listing Rothschild alumni across Downing Street and the Treasury and observing that the bank’s privatisation expertise — developed advising the British government — was then exported to Spain, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile and Turkey. …
- The firm’s public alumni roster lists, among others, a former French president, a former German chancellor, a former governor of the Bank of England, and a former US commerce secretary.
The nineteenth-century agents operated within the family’s private banking network. Their twentieth and twenty-first-century successors operate within the institutional architecture that absorbed and replaced it — the central banks, the multilateral bodies, the regulatory commissions, the sovereign governments that now perform at state level what the Rothschild houses once performed privately.
Ross at Commerce, Macron at the Élysée, Breton at the European Commission — these are not placements into the family’s business. They are placements into the institutions that now carry out the family’s historical function at sovereign scale.
At the top:
David de Rothschild has stated publicly that he is the only Rothschild permitted to conduct banking. This is not a historical observation. It is a living member of the family restating Liedtke’s core finding — that only born Rothschilds were fully trusted …
That is not a parallel with the nineteenth-century method. It is continuity, stated by the family itself.
The marriage recruits, however prominent, remain outside. …
The recurring architecture — is this the heart of globalism? So one decision can be applied globally?
The three-tier structure Liedtke documents — inner circle, trusted agents, everyone else — is not unique to the Rothschild network. It recurs with striking consistency across every governance architecture examined in this series, and its recurrence across such different domains suggests something more fundamental than coincidence or imitation.
In the system of ratification theatre, technical committees write the rules, finance ministers and secretariats transmit them, and elected leaders rubber-stamp what has already been decided. The technical committees never answer to the general assembly. The general assembly never rewrites the technical standards.
In the Noahide framework documented in Cohen’s Religion of Reason and developed in Laitman’s teachings, the structure is explicitly not ethnic. Laitman redefines ‘Israel’ as a state of consciousness achieved through correction of egoism — anyone who completes the process becomes ‘Israel’ regardless of ethnicity or geography.
Most actual Israelis would not qualify under his definition. The top tier consists of only those who fully internalise the governing ethic, the second tier of those who accept the basic code, and the third of those who refuse both and are excluded from ‘inclusive capitalism’. …
The cognitive layer defines standards and truth, the evaluative layer assesses compliance, and the behavioural layer executes. …
The evaluative layer rarely reaches the cognitive layer. It generally only applies what has been handed down. Issue a ‘complex global shock’ predicted by ‘black box’ modelling under the UN Emergency Platform, and all feedback is eliminated….
The pattern holds at every scale.
- The inner circle [the cognitive layer] sets the standard.
- The middle tier [the evaluative layer] operates within it and enforces it
- The outer tier complies or faces exclusion.
The critical boundary — the one that rarely opens — sits between the first tier and the second.
From religious law to environmental stewardship to sustainable development to financial stability to public health — the ethic rotates, but the structure does not. …
What matters is who occupies the cognitive position: the translation layer that converts whichever ethic prevails into operational standards that the tiers below must follow.
- The climate scientist genuinely believes they are preventing catastrophic warming.
- The AI researcher genuinely believes they are making disclosure more efficient.
- The central banker genuinely believes programmable payments serve financial inclusion.
They need only see their own component. The people who see the full assembly operate through informal channels that produce no working papers, publish no documentation, and answer to no parliament.
What we know for sure:
What can be said, on the basis of published academic research, is that the Rothschild family operated an agent network for over a century using a method with a clearly defined structure — and that the network visible around Jeffrey Epstein exhibits those same characteristics in considerable detail.
The recruitment, the intelligence, the compensation, the heterogeneity, the public visibility, and the permanent exclusion from the inner circle all align. So does the single recurring vulnerability: the agent who knows too much. And so does the resolution of that vulnerability — though the modern version is considerably more final than anything Liedtke detailed in the archive.
Liedtke concludes his paper with an observation about loyalty: “… very few business partners or agents dared to cross the Rothschilds. Disloyalty was an extremely rare occurrence, because almost nobody wanted to put a usually profitable relation with the foremost financial dynasty of its time at risk.”
Jeffrey Epstein is not around to give evidence. But the method — documented across two centuries by four independent academic studies — requires no speculation at all.
The cockpit:
In October 2019, CNN profiled David de Rothschild … as the navigator of ‘Spaceship Earth’. An environmental explorer. A sustainability advocate. Founder of a lifestyle brand. Ambassador for the UK government’s Year of Green Action. Working with the UN, National Geographic, the World Economic Forum. ‘I think, predominantly, I’m just David’.
In December 2025, the Network for Greening the Financial System announced an ‘independent’ scientific advisory committee to oversee the climate scenarios that calibrate global banking capital requirements.
It is said that, after their major successes in early and mid 1800s, the Rothschilds controlled over half of all manufacturing industry in the West. An enormous fortune like that does not fade away except by incompetence, because capital begets more capital. The Rothschilds were always anything but incompetent.
So, what do you do with truly stupendous wealth? You hide it, or else you become a target — so complex company ownership structures etc. Then, you might set out to arrange Spaceship Earth to your liking. Media can be bought, then narratives controlled and launched on a grand scale. People like Epstein grow your influence and allow you to steer many public figures. Maybe that’s where we are today. (And, of course, you’d be very interested and secretive about advances in physics.)
