Edward Jay Epstein

Edward Jay Epstein (December 6, 1935, to January 9, 2024) was an American investigative journalist and the author of more than twenty books, among them Inquest (1966), Legend (1978), Deception (1989), Dossier (1996) and How America Lost Its Secrets (2017). He took his bachelor's and master's degrees in government at Cornell University and a doctorate at Harvard University; the obituary placed by his family gives the doctoral field as Urban Studies. He died at home in New York City after a brief struggle with Covid.¹

Inquest and the CIA dispatch of January 1967

Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth was published by Viking Press in 1966. It was his master's thesis at Cornell.¹² In the December 1966 issue of Esquire he published a further article that the CIA later described as explaining away objections to the book.³

A CIA dispatch to chiefs of certain stations and bases, titled "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report" and dated January 1967, stated that the trend of opinion about the Warren Commission "is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization." Its sixth paragraph stated that "another kind of criticism has recently emerged, represented by Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest," that he "adopts a scholarly tone, and to the casual reader, he presents what appears to be a more coherent, reasoned case than the writers described above," and that Richard Rovere and Lord Devlin, "previously backers of the Commission's Report," had changed their minds. The seventh paragraph stated that "Epstein's competence in research has been greatly exaggerated," giving as examples the date on which the CIA passed a Mexico City photograph to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (November 22, 1963, not November 18 as Inquest had it) and a Secret Service interview report that Inquest said had been withheld from the National Archives; the dispatch stated that an Archives staff member told a CIA officer that Epstein asked for the document, was told it was classified, and ended a two-day visit before the Secret Service declassified it. The eighth paragraph compared Epstein and other "intellectual critics" with Richard H. Popkin, the author of The Second Oswald, whom it described as showing "love of theorizing and lack of common sense and experience." The action paragraph directed that "a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher Knebel article and Spectator piece for background."⁴

Reader's Digest, Angleton and Legend

Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald was published in 1978 by Reader's Digest Press.² A Reader's Digest condensation stated that the magazine's editors had asked Epstein to examine the world through which Lee Harvey Oswald moved, that over two years he had studied "more than 10,000 pages of previously classified documents pertaining to Oswald" and had conducted, "with a staff of assistants, more than 400 interviews."⁵

Cleveland Cram, a CIA officer, reviewed the book in a 1993 monograph for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. Cram wrote that Epstein learned of the case of the Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko through Reader's Digest, that this led to his acquaintance with James Jesus Angleton, that Angleton became his major source on Nosenko, and that Reader's Digest sponsored his research "to the tune of $500,000." Cram wrote that Epstein's articles and the book "publicized for the first time" the clashes inside the Agency between the Counterintelligence Staff and the Soviet Division over Nosenko, that Epstein "stated that he had spoken occasionally with James Angleton" without acknowledging him as the source, and that in Deception, which Cram placed in the year after Angleton's death on May 11, 1987 (the catalog record gives 1989), Epstein admitted that from 1977 onward he had obtained large amounts of highly classified information from Angleton, Newton Miler, Tennent Bagley and others in the CIA who shared Angleton's views. In his review of Deception Cram wrote that Epstein described Angleton as his major source since 1976, when they first met, and that Angleton had referred him to Miler and Raymond Rocca, to the retired CIA officer William Hood, to the FBI officers William Sullivan and Sam Papich, to the former MI6 officer Stephen de Mowbray in England and to Bagley in Belgium. Cram listed from Epstein's source notes for Legend Gordon Stewart, Stansfield Turner, Richard Helms, Angleton and members of his staff, Sullivan and Papich.⁶

Cram also wrote that Henry Hurt, a Reader's Digest writer, helped with the research for Legend and was introduced by Epstein to Angleton, and that "nothing was officially done" to caution Angleton about leaking classified information, whereas when the CIA found that Clare E. Petty had leaked classified material to the press "he received an official warning letter." He described Legend as having given "enormous stimulus" to the thesis that Nosenko had been sent by the KGB as a cover story for Oswald, wrote that Deception, which Epstein published after Angleton's death, "like Legend, is propaganda for Angleton and essentially dishonest," and described the book as having "the smell of attic dust" and as Epstein's "last hurrah" in the world of intelligence, adding that "with glasnost, he apparently sensed that the days of the conspiracists were numbered. It was time to take the money and run." Cram also wrote that in an interview with Vanity Fair in May 1989 Epstein admitted that Golitsyn shaped Angleton's views and possibly was a liar, and ended the interview with the remark "Actually, I don't know whether to believe Angleton at all!"⁶

In a letter published in the New York Times on September 27, 1981, answering a column of William Safire on the source "Fedora," G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 to 1979, wrote that he had directed an investigation of Nosenko and had concluded, with a unanimous committee, that Nosenko had lied to the FBI and the CIA in 1963 and 1964 and to the committee in 1978. He wrote that the committee had reviewed Epstein's allegations about a relationship between Fedora and Nosenko and concluded, "contrary to Epstein's assertion," that the bona fides of Nosenko were not inextricably intertwined with those of any other defector.⁷

The Office of Security file

A CIA Office of Security memorandum for the record of July 18, 1978, by Bruce L. Solie, Chief of the Security Analysis Group, bears the subject "EPSTEIN, Edward Jay #488 768" and the record number 104-10113-10396. It states that it identifies the Office of Security files reviewed by staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations; that certain items were not reviewed, were placed in sealed envelopes, and were returned to the security file; and that material placed in the file at the time of the review is marked with a green dot. A review sheet naming the Committee's reviewers and the dates of review is described as attached and is not part of the copy released.⁸

George de Mohrenschildt, March 29, 1977

On March 29, 1977, George de Mohrenschildt was found dead of a gunshot wound in the Manalapan, Florida, house where he was a guest. A Washington Star account filed under March 30, 1977, in CIA files, reported that Sheriff Richard Wille said, "We're 99 percent certain he killed himself," and that Wille and State Attorney David Bludworth questioned witnesses until shortly before midnight, among them "free lance writer Ed Epstein, who had told the West Palm Beach Post Monday night that he had been interviewing de Mohrenschildt in connection with a book he was doing about Lee Harvey Oswald." The AP account stated that de Mohrenschildt was traced by a House Assassinations Committee investigator to the Florida address and returned to the house at about 2:45 p.m., and that about an hour later he apparently shot himself. The sheriff said that a call to the house was believed to have been placed from Miami by the House investigator Gaeton Fonzi. After the questioning Epstein said, "the police told me not to talk."⁹ A memorandum from the CIA's Dallas office over the name of J. Walton Moore records that on March 31, 1977, a Dallas Morning News reporter telephoned to ask about the Agency's relationship with de Mohrenschildt, and that Moore told him the relationship was documented in the Warren Commission Report and that he had nothing further to add.¹⁰

Later articles and books

The Rise and Fall of Diamonds was published by Simon & Schuster in 1982.² In The Atlantic for March 1983 Epstein published "The Cartel That Never Was," with the subtitle "Saudi Arabia finds in the perceived unity and power of OPEC a convenient illusion."¹¹ A 1982 clipping in CIA files carries an article by Epstein titled "Disinformation," on the verification of arms-control agreements, from a periodical not named in the copy.¹¹

In 1985 The New Republic carried Epstein's article "The Spy Who Came In to Be Sold," circulated in galley by June 26, asserting that the memoir Breaking with Moscow by the Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko, published by Alfred A. Knopf, had invented the "supermole" account of Shevchenko's work for the CIA. The Associated Press reported that Epstein wrote, "What is fabricated here are not just car-chases, meetings, conversations, reports, dates, motives and espionage activities, but a spy who never was." The editor of the book, Ashbel Green, said his own contacts in the intelligence community "have always confirmed Shevchenko's role" and described Epstein as "a well-known conspiracy theorist." The Associated Press reported that the memoir, published by Knopf, had sold 180,000 copies and been serialized in Time magazine.¹² William A. Reuben, writing in The Nation, quoted Epstein's conclusion that "Shevchenko's book is a fraud on the same level as Clifford Irving's fake about Howard Hughes."¹³

Deception (Simon & Schuster, 1989), The Assassination Chronicles (Carroll & Graf, 1992) and Dossier (Random House, 1996) followed.² In a review of Dossier in the Baltimore Sun, Scott Shane wrote that Epstein, drawing on Soviet archives, FBI files and secret tapes Hammer made of himself arranging bribes, described Armand Hammer as having used his business at the direction of Soviet intelligence to move money to operatives abroad, having moved millions from Occidental Petroleum to a Swiss account, and having had a woman on his payroll change her name legally; Shane wrote that Hammer died in 1990.¹⁴ In Commentary, Daniel Silver wrote that Epstein concluded Hammer "was more of an agent than an opportunist," basing the conclusion on interviews, Soviet archival material and tape recordings Hammer made secretly of his own transactions, including acts of bribery; Silver wrote that Epstein described a Libyan oil concession obtained through kickbacks to Libyan officials, illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign that led to Hammer's only criminal conviction, and a personal estate at his death valued at no more than $40 million, and that Epstein left open how long Hammer was an active Soviet agent and whether he acted under orders from Moscow.¹⁵ The Big Picture (Random House, 2005) and How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), about Edward Snowden, appear in the library catalog records.²

Acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein

In September 2019, after Jeffrey Epstein died in custody, Air Mail, the online magazine of Graydon Carter, published Epstein's "My Tea with Jeffrey Epstein," which he told The Daily Beast was Chapter 46 of an unpublished memoir.¹⁶ The opening paragraphs of the article, which are public, state that he met Jeffrey Epstein in 1987 at the annual Halloween party of the film producer Coco Brown, where he was standing with Isabel Goldsmith when Jeffrey Epstein and his brother Mark Epstein joined them, and that at a tea the following Thursday Jeffrey Epstein asked whether he would write about his business for his monthly "Wall Street Babylon" column in Manhattan, inc. magazine.¹⁷ According to the Daily Beast's report of its interview with him, on later occasions Jeffrey Epstein arranged first-class airline upgrades that proved to be bogus, and he accepted lodging in a Santa Monica apartment rented for Eva Andersson. He told the Daily Beast that a Simon & Schuster executive he had introduced to Jeffrey Epstein at his birthday dinner on December 6, 1988, later said he had given Jeffrey Epstein $70,000 to invest in a takeover of Pennwalt and had received no papers; the Daily Beast reported that it could not confirm the executive's identity. He said he used a computer program Jeffrey Epstein gave him to read financial records, found "dozens of demands for the return of investment money" and a twice-bounced check, and wrote a 1989 column describing Jeffrey Epstein without naming him, after which Jeffrey Epstein stopped speaking to him; the Daily Beast reported that the column brought attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the same report, contact resumed in 2013 after Epstein published an essay on Vladimir Nabokov in the New York Review of Books, and continued with visits to the East 71st Street house, walks in Central Park and emails until 2019.¹⁶

Epstein told the Daily Beast that he "hung around with Jeffrey because I was fascinated with him," that "Everything about Jeffrey was a con," that Jeffrey Epstein had claimed to him to be a private detective and to fly monthly to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin, that he never discussed the allegations about underage girls with him, never flew on his plane, never visited his homes other than the East 71st Street townhouse, and was never offered a massage. He called Jeffrey Epstein "the poster boy for rehabilitation" after his 2008 plea and suggested that the July 2019 federal charges were an act of bad faith on the part of the government.¹⁶

Correspondence in the Jeffrey Epstein estate documents

Documents released by the Department of Justice in its Epstein Library include emails between the two men dated 2012 and 2013. On March 8, 2012, Epstein wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, "My book in dsk is just about finished. My title is 3 DAYS IN MAY:the DSK THRILLER. When in ny it would be great to see you"; Jeffrey Epstein answered "next week??" and Epstein replied "Next week is good for me."¹⁸ On April 14, 2012, Jeffrey Epstein sent Epstein a message about a scandal involving United States Secret Service agents in Colombia; Epstein answered that he had just landed at Kennedy airport and had "Spent day with dsk yesterday" (the book concerned Dominique Strauss-Kahn); Jeffrey Epstein wrote "Come by at 645 if you are free," and Epstein replied "I can't tonight."¹⁹ In an exchange of April 16 and 17, 2012, an assistant of Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein, who signed himself Ed Epstein, arranged his arrival at Jeffrey Epstein's home at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 17.²⁰ On February 9, 2013, Jeffrey Epstein forwarded to an assistant an invitation from the author Michael Wolff to a party on March 5, 2013, in honor of Epstein's book The Annals of Unsolved Crime, with the note "and remind me to call him on the 19th."²¹

Death

Epstein died on January 9, 2024, at his home in New York City, aged 88. The family obituary states that he had "built an astounding network of dear friends."¹