Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain, and Harrison Berger
Dec 19, 2025
Jeffrey Epstein helped Leslie Wexner repurpose the CIA’s Iran-Contra planes from arms smuggling to shipping lingerie.
This week, the New York Times awoke from its slumber to publish an extensive investigation on Jeffrey Epstein that purported to put to rest the question of how the man made his money early in his career. In it, the Times dismisses the possibility that Epstein could have worked for or adjacent to intelligence agencies. “Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune,” the paper wrote.
To the paper’s credit, their journalists have put into the record some details that took an impressive effort to track down. For instance, the paper reported about Epstein’s business associates in the early 1980s:
Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for [Douglas] Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)
The Times deserves credit, we suppose, for digging up that nugget from his one-time broker—but had the paper decided to look up rather than look down, they may have noticed something a bit more revelatory in their own reporting.
Stanley Pottinger, as it happens, was a notable figure in the scandal that became known as Iran-Contra, in which the CIA used Israel as a middleman to move off-the-books weapons to Iran. In the early 1980s, under the CIA’s supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas “dummy companies”—in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling “tax-avoidance” strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. Pottinger’s system eventually gave rise to a network of covert intermediaries shipping arms around the world; the CIA’s profits became a slush fund used to illegally bankroll the insurgent Contra army, who waged a war against Nicaragua’s leftist government while simultaneously trafficking cocaine to the United States.
The other figure from Epstein’s past, Douglas Leese, meanwhile, is described by The Times as “a defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry and the British government.” What he did with those connections and where he trafficked those arms is left unexplored by the paper—a look at Bermuda financial records and Leese’s own lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Miami, suggests he was working with the U.S. government and linked to a Chinese arms manufacturer. The Times also failed to note that Epstein and Leese had a mutual associate in Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious money launderer and weapons trafficker—who was also a central player in the Iran-Contra affair.
The Times did find that Epstein was “a relentless scammer” who “abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money.” The contrast between what The Times found noteworthy about his relationship with his penthousemate Pottinger—he initially stiffed the broker!—and what they failed to notice is stark. In order to acquit Epstein of any connections to intelligence agencies, the paper of record instead crafted Epstein into an antisemitic caricature of historic proportions. We put this take to The Times, and were told by spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha, “We report on facts that we are able to confirm, not supposition.”
Of course, it could be an extraordinary coincidence that Epstein shared a penthouse with an Iran-Contra lawyer, worked for an Iran-Contra arms dealer, and then, as we report below, moved the Iran-Contra planes to Ohio for use by billionaire retail mogul Leslie Wexner. It may simply be a coincidence that Ehud Barak, one of Epstein’s closest friends, was the head of Israel’s military intelligence during the planning for Iran-Contra, and he supervised the CIA’s first delivery. But it might also be something The Times should look a bit closer at, if they’re so inclined.
Until then, Drop Site’s reporting will have to do, and we can’t do it without readers. If you haven’t yet upgraded your subscription, please consider doing so today. And remember that contributions to Drop Site–which you can make here–are fully tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.
.
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a spectrum of views as possible.
