The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime

In this interview, investigative journalist Whitney Webb discusses her book, “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein.” The book is so long, it was cut into two volumes. Volume 1 alone is 544 pages, but it’s a fascinating read and incredibly well-referenced.

When asked what drove or inspired her to become an investigative journalist and to write this tome, Webb reviews some of her personal history that made her question adults and authority in general and, more specifically, the systems that run our world, including health care and politics.

“I became acutely aware of a lot of these issues with health care and big pharma, environmental issues and political stuff ... There's just a lot of things you realize as you start to investigate, like how many people have been, for lack of a better word, screwed over, or had things robbed from them ... their lives or their loved ones on the extreme end ... 

Obviously, it’s a system that isn't working for people. It's not designed to work for people. It's designed to weaken people for the benefit of the powerful. I don't want to live in a world like that, and now I have kids, and I don't want them to live in that world.

What I've noticed, especially over the past several years, is [how] dangerous people with power [target] children, to significant degrees ... Really, these things cannot continue ... More of us have to speak up. I felt that ... knowing this stuff, I had to do something. Thankfully, for me, it eventually turned into a career, but it wasn't planned.” 

Reading the Signs

While COVID-19 took many by surprise, the globalist cabal has in fact, for decades, telegraphed that they were creating a New World Order, and even that one or more global pandemics might pave the way for this one world global governance. There were also signs that something was being planned to derail the 2020 elections in the U.S.

“I think some people were sort of anticipating something,” Webb says. “By late 2019 and in January 2020, I did a report titled something like, ‘How U.S. Intelligence Is Preparing the American Public for a Failed Election in 2020.’ This was before COVID, [but] it was basically clear that there was going to be some ... push for this domestic terror agenda ... and that there was going to be a lot of complications around 2020. 

That stuff was out in the open by the end of 2019, and COVID [arrived] in January. You could sort of see that something was going on there, but it wasn't quite clear the extent of what was going to go on. I think some people were anticipating some sort of 9/11 2.0, but it ended up being a biosecurity 9/11.”

Operation Underworld

Webb’s book, “One Nation Under Blackmail,” is an essential primer that provides the framework to understand not just the role and function of Jeffrey Epstein, but also, more broadly, the mess we’re now finding us in. She goes back almost 100 years, to World War II, detailing the connections between the intelligence community in the United States and organized crime, and how the web of corruption grew from there. As explained by Webb:

“The mafia and the mob were professional criminals. Their businesses were basically rackets of illegal activity, most often sex trafficking or prostitution and drug smuggling, and, obviously, those activities necessitate a lot of financial crimes like money laundering, among other things, in order to expand and maintain those rackets. 

That's basically what organized crime is in a nutshell. You have someone like Epstein, who's the focus of Volume 2 of the book, ‘Down the Line,’ who's engaging in sex trafficking. But he was also involved in arms trafficking and money laundering to a significant degree — the same rackets of organized crime going back to the '20s and '30s.

That was their realms, but also became the realms of intelligence agencies. Definitely, U.S. intelligence has engaged in those activities, but several intelligence agencies around the world, specifically intelligence agencies that collaborate or are allied with the CIA, [such as] intelligence agencies in Latin America, when you're talking about drug smuggling.

One theme throughout the book is the different areas and scandals where U.S. and Israeli intelligence have cooperated in the expansion of these rackets — things like Iran Contra, for example, which is probably an accessible scandal to a lot of people. 

It was a lot more extensive than just arms for hostages’ situation. At the end of the day, it was an arms trafficking and drug trafficking situation, with the idea of financing secret wars around the globe with a focus on the Contras in Nicaragua, but also elsewhere ... 

And as I point out in the book, the fusion of organized crime and intelligence became formalized in World War II in something that's known as Operation Underworld, where the office of Naval intelligence with the CIA's precursor, the OSS [Office of Strategic Services], formally aligned themselves with the New York mob — what was at the time referred to as the National Crime Syndicate, which was basically a merger of the Jewish mob and the Italian mafia.

The reason that happened is because the mob had taken over most of the unions, and in doing so, they had also taken over most of the Democratic party, as their power base was unions at the time. So, the mob took over the unions and then they took control of the Democratic party in New York, and that preceded Operation Underworld.”

Blackmail and Organized Crime

The origin of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) was the Coordinator of Information Office, which became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the direction of William Donovan during World War II. The OSS coordinated espionage activities for all branches of the armed forces. In 1947, networks developed as part of the OSS became what we now know as the CIA. It basically centralized all these intelligence networks into one.

“The main theme of the book, in keeping with Jeffrey Epstein, is to show how sexual blackmail is something that was used by organized crime even before U.S. intelligence existed. They then get together and essentially start cooperating in a lot of these rackets, things like sex trafficking, arms trafficking, drug trafficking. They sort of fuse together and have this symbiotic relationship.

One of the ways they protect those rackets and expand them is by compromising powerful people ... I'm basically tracing the continuity of those activities, and a lot of these same financial crimes, well beyond when these groups first came together. I point to numerous examples of the same groups and the same people from then, through the '50s, the '60s, the '70s and into the '80s.

People are aware that there was a point where organized crime was known to have had a lot of influence, clout and power in the United States. And unfortunately, people had been brainwashed to believe that it's gone, and that's not what happened. 

Instead, sexual blackmail took over our law enforcement agencies at a very early stage with the blackmail of Jay Edgar Hoover, who himself was also very into blackmail and blackmailed other people.

Essentially, what this boils down to is that this is control of information, access to privileged information and the weaponization of information. That's sort of what blackmail is in a sense ... At this very early stage, you had the head of law enforcement of the FBI completely compromised by organized crime.

And he refused to go after organized crime pretty much the whole time he was FBI director, which he was for the majority of the 20th century.”

The ‘Tough on Crime’ Charade 

One really important point Webb covers in her book is that while it may appear as though organized crime is being combated, this is rarely ever the case. Stories of cracking down on organized crime are cover stories to hide what’s really happening, which is the consolidation of organized crime territories. Webb explains:

“Basically, the people that are most powerful, especially the organized criminals in bed with intelligence, they have state protection, in a sense, of their rackets, so that is a huge boon for them. And they can weaponize it through their influence and power over the CIA and groups like that ... and have their competition taken out. 

This is something that's been going on for a very long time. One early example I give in the book is Thomas Dewey. He was governor of New York and a contender for U.S. president at one point, but he became famous as a prosecutor of organized crime, and he was actually involved in Operation Underworld, which was the alliance of intelligence and organized crime. 

He later became a business partner of the mob himself by the '50s and '60s. Another politician that also became tied with organized crime was William O’Dwyer. He was mayor of New York for an extended period of time. [Dewey and O’Dwyer] were prosecuting a mobster and they were praised in the media as being tough on crime. 

But really, that particular mobster they were going after, Lepke Buchalter, had basically been consigned to death by all the other guys in the mob. They wanted him out. So, he was sold out and they took over his territory. But these prosecutors were praised as tough on crime and they were elected on this tough on crime image, but really, they're in bed with organized crime. 

You see this with someone like Rudolph Giuliani decades later in the 1980s. He's prosecuting Italian organized crime, but becoming very close to other sides of the National Crime Syndicate as it existed in that period.

He’s consolidating territory by only going after certain mobsters whose time had essentially already set. And then he has this ‘tough on crime’ image that he uses to build his political career, while still having these alliances behind closed doors. This is a recurring theme ...

Harry Truman made O’Dwyer U.S. ambassador to Mexico to shield him from criminal charges related to organized crime activity of the mayor's office. He later had to testify to the Senate Committee on Organized Crime, the Kefauver Committee, and was basically guilty as sin.

But Harry Truman had stepped in, because at that point, the Democratic Party, especially the New York Democratic Party ... was completely built on the system of unsavory alliances, and that's just the nature of power.”

If we’ve learned anything these past couple of years, it’s that things are not always as they appear to be. Thankfully, we have people like Webb to help us understand what's really going on.

Where’s All the Money Going?

Naturally, massive amounts of revenue are generated through these organized crime activities. Where is it all going? What’s it used for? Originally, intelligence agencies sought ways to finance secret wars, off the books, and cooperating with the crime syndicate allowed for the amassing of black funds.

For a long time, this was justified as necessary to fight communism, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, that excuse collapsed, and from that point on, the nexus of power split into two divergent factions, each with their own cherished intent.

“You see it in U.S. politics today,” she says. “You have people that are hungry for a return to the Reagan era where America's on top and use these same types of illegal activities to further U.S. imperialism ... and then you have the internationalist camp, the globalists that want global governance. 

You sort of have them competing, but both factions go back to Iran-Contra and these intelligence organized crime groups. The Clintons, for example, you see them being involved in Iran-Contra, and I would definitely place them in the internationalist camp. 

It's pretty clear that Epstein moved in that direction by the ‘90s as well, and that sort of explains some of his interactions with the Clinton White House throughout the 1990s, which were very scandalous and have major implications for national security, in a way that I think really few Americans understand. I certainly didn't understand until I did the research and wrote this book. 

But then you have people rally around Trump. For instance, you have an adviser to him, Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese, who was also ... involved in criminal activity ... 

Your original question, ‘What are they doing with the money?’ Well, we don't really know, but if you look at someone like Epstein, who was in these financial networks — a key financial criminal ... who doled in sex crimes. He's involved with Iran-Contra, then he gets involved with Clinton White House stuff, then he gets involved with building up this new model of philanthropy typified by the Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ... 

You see him over time getting really involved with eugenics and transhumanism. A lot of these 'philanthropies' are also promoting policies that lead us in those directions. From a very early stage ... you have Epstein, in 2012, trying to sell genomic sequences of people to big pharma for this gene tailored medicine that now, in the COVID era, we're hearing about in a big way. 

So, as you're centralizing control and taking control of all the money, eventually you don't need any more money. It becomes about power and control, and how to entrench yourself in that position so that you maintain the status quo that benefits you. Obviously, that doesn't benefit the American public. That benefits these career criminals.”

It’s About Power and Control

So, to summarize, the incentive behind all this criminal activity is not merely the hoarding of money to live in the lap of luxury. It's about the power and control that money buys. And, over time, the desire to control gets more intense, just as simple greed for wealth can get more intense the more money you accumulate, to the point they now seek to control people at the biological, genetic and molecular level.

Epstein, while dismissed as a simple sex criminal, was far more instrumental to the globalist cabal than that. For example, he was so influential in science that when Gates decided he wanted a Nobel Prize, he tapped Epstein to help him get it. He didn’t get it, but that's how he got a meeting with people involved in selecting that prize.

Epstein was also very influential in the world of philanthropy. “I think he was a middle management for a whole bunch of these different rackets that are tied to people like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton,” Webb says.

Epstein also had a relatively close relationship with David Rockefeller, who personally appointed Epstein to the board of Rockefeller University. Epstein was also a member of the Trilateral Commission, created by David Rockefeller, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Even after Epstein was outed as a pedophile and sex criminal, they kept him as a member.

“Ultimately, what you're seeing with this group, over time, is that they can't believe they get away with it so often, for so long. They become so wealthy, so rich, they don't have any use for any more money, and it becomes about power and control,”Webb says.

“Also, they see the rest of us as subhuman, because they think we're such saps that they can just screw us over and we'll do nothing, all the time. A lot of this is generational. Some of it's not, but there are families involved here, where you have several generations of them and they're basically taught that the rest of us are just idiots.

There's this classism there, where ‘We are the elite and we are herding these people along; they're complete idiots and we can treat them however we want and exploit them.’ You see that manifest in the sex trafficking activities of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, where Maxwell is calling the girls they're trafficking ‘trash.’ But they view all of us like that.

They see themselves as elite, and a lot of people call them that because they have become an economic elite. But they have become an economic elite through criminal activity, not through honest means, the vast majority of them. 

That's what I try to chronicle in the book, because you can't understand Epstein unless you understand this network, and that network precedes Epstein's existence by decades, and it continues even after he is gone. 

That's what I want people to really take away from the book, because we're basically being told by mainstream media that now that Epstein is gone, the one bad billionaire in the world has been dealt justice and now everything's fine, go back to sleep. 

It’s very important to realize the extent of his involvement in financial crimes. It's not like the sex crimes, which were perpetrated against X number of minors. Obviously, those are horrific crimes, but the financial crimes, pretty much every American's been affected by that to a significant degree.”

The Clinton Crime Syndicate

In the interview, Webb names a number of individuals with ties to criminal activity, among them, the Clintons, who have had an impossible number of people around them die under mysterious circumstances.

“I definitely think the crimes of the Clinton family are just so egregious and out of control that it's just stunning to me that they have been able to evade any sort of legal case ... This criminal stuff has entrenched their power in that particular camp which is more allied with the internationalist side of things. They’ve just sold the U.S. down the river in a way that is truly mind-boggling.”

The Suspicious Death of Mark Middleton

One example of a Clinton-related death is that of Mark Middleton, special assistant to the chief of staff at the Clinton White House, who was responsible for setting up Epstein’s visits to the White House. He was suicided earlier this year, right when Webb was writing her book. What did he know?

“Mark Middleton was recruited for that position as part of the 1992 election. [He was] basically placed in that position because of his role as a fundraiser during that election cycle. But by February 1995, he had to resign, and the circumstances of his resignation are very suspicious.

The investigation into Mark Middleton is so suspicious that the George W. Bush Administration invoked executive privilege for the first time, just weeks before 9/11, to keep documents about the investigation into Mark Middleton out of the hands of Congress. That is astounding, because it's not even the same administration, ostensibly an administration against the corruption of the Clinton era, we're told.

Invoking executive privilege for the first time to protect a guy that's special assistant to chief of staff — obviously, Middleton was involved in some very suspect activity. And those investigations don't deal with Epstein, they deal with other people that Middleton was meeting with ... 

It's ... remembered as China Gate. I think that's sort of a misnomer. China's definitely involved, but it's more fair, I think, to call it Riady Gate. Riady referring to the family of Mochtar Riady, an East Asian oligarch of Chinese origin, but they're Indonesian. 

They bankrolled the Clintons back when Clinton was governor of Arkansas and through his presidency. By the early 1990s, they had become official business partners of China, so they were involved in infiltrating and targeting the commerce department. This is part of why Commerce Secretary Ron Brown ends up dead in this plane crash in 1996 ... and Epstein is in the middle of it. 

While Epstein is meeting with Middleton, he is [also] courting the very airline at the center of Iran-Contra and Mena, Arkansas, drug running and arms smuggling — Southern Air Transport — to run cargo between China and the U.S., ostensibly for the businesses of Leslie Wexner. 

But given who he's meeting with at the time, and all of this other stuff, it points to some sort of illegal arms smuggling into the United States. A lot of these guns ... ended up in the hands of gangs in American inner cities at the same time that the same network created the crack epidemic, which has been reported by people like the late journalist, Gary Webb. No relation, by the way.” 

Epstein Co-Conspirators Turn Up Dead

As explained by Webb, the same group of people responsible for creating a drug epidemic in America’s inner cities was simultaneously setting up a system of privately owned for-profit prisons — something implemented during Clinton’s time in the White House — thereby creating a new model of defacto slavery for African Americans arrested on trumped-up drug charges.

They also imprisoned people for gang violence, which they exacerbated by smuggling illegal weapons into the U.S. from China. Aside from the Clintons, Chinese military intelligence and companies that had business relationships with Epstein dating back to the 1980s were all involved in this elaborate scheme.

“So, there is a lot of scandalous stuff that went on the Clinton administration that I think most Americans don't even have a handle on anymore. And conveniently, the investigation into it was totally upended by 9/11 ...

Last December was the first time we got the full visitor logs of Epstein at the White House, and what had previously been thought to have been five meetings with Mark Middleton at the White House turned into about ... 17 in total for Epstein ... 

Almost all of them tied to very crazy and very illegal fundraising activity by the Clintons, either in the ‘92 election or the ‘96 election, and Epstein was in the middle of that. He of course becomes involved in the creation of the Clinton Foundation after Clinton leaves office, which as most people know now, is basically their slush fund.

So, [Epstein] is important ... for these people and there's a reason that so little attention has been paid to his finances. If you look at the Epstein case, the only innocent person to turn up dead was the son of the judge that was going to oversee the Epstein Deutsche Bank case. 

There was a hit on the family of the judge ... I don't think they want people going into the Epstein Deutsche Bank relationship, the Epstein, JP Morgan or Bear Stearns relationship, for a number of reasons. 

Unfortunately, I didn't get to cover this in the book ... but it seems like Epstein's role in the collapse of Bear Stearns was very significant. And this is troubling, because the collapse of Bear Stearns basically started the 2008 financial crisis, which was a huge wealth transfer, again, just like the 1980s ...

But basically, all the other people in the Epstein case that have ended up dead in the last couple years have been co-conspirators of Epstein: Jean-Luc Brunel [and] Steve Hoffenberg ... 

And in terms of Mark Middleton's death, it’s also very suspect. He was found hanging from a tree by the neck — it was an extension cord, not a rope — a shotgun wound to the chest, ruled a suicide.

No pictures or video footage of the death scene are allowed to be made public by a judge order in Arkansas. So, it's just nuts, to be honest. And the property the tree was on, where he was found dead, is tied to the Clinton Foundation. It's called Heifer International.”

A Reason To Be Fearless

When asked if she’s concerned about her own safety after exposing the activities of one of the biggest organized crime syndicates in the world, she says:

“I'm not, and part of that is because I feel the way to really beat these people is by not being afraid of them ... people who are afraid are easy to control. So even if you know everything about these people, if you're afraid of them, they have power over you. The only way for, not just me, but anyone, to be free from them is to be free of fear of them. You can't be scared of these people.

Actually, they're scared of us, and they're scared of regular people waking up because, obviously, there are more of us than there are of them. And, if exposed for all their criminality, as I'm trying to do in the book, the more people that are aware of that, the more quickly it can unravel. 

I think, with a lot of the stuff in the past couple years especially, they've really overplayed their hand. If they did something to me, it would just make my book a bestseller. More people would read it. I don't think they want that ...

What I've produced in these books are just the facts. It's very well sourced, not just in terms of the number of citations, but the quality of the sources. There's a lot of material there for people to chew on and do their own research. It's a resource for people and it's a starting point.

They don't want people to engage with that type of information because, obviously, their narratives about these events won't hold up because they're not presenting the facts, they're presenting propaganda ...

You can't be afraid of them because ... a lot of what we're fighting now is, in a sense, a fight for the soul of the nation, the soul of the world. It's a spiritual war, on some level. So, if you're giving in to fear, you're losing, no matter how much knowledge you've accumulated about how things work and how these people are. If you're afraid of them, you're giving them power over you.”

We Can Take Our Power Back Anytime 

In Chapter 21, Webb explains her reasons for believing Epstein won’t be replaced with a cadre of new blackmailers. They don’t need people like him anymore, thanks to modern surveillance technology.

They can access everything, all your accounts, cameras, phones, microphones, surveillance cameras, you name it. They can find blackmail material on anyone these days. Of course, this tech is also being used to enslave and control the rest of us. There’s a way out, however, and it’s easier than you might think. Webb explains:

“Like I mentioned earlier, these people see us as subhuman and complete idiots. So, they think that we'll just be dependent on this technology forever, that we've become complete slaves to our own convenience and we'll never take our power back. And it's actually very easy to take your power back. 

You don't have to be a slave to your smartphone or technology, and they rely on the ability to analyze these masses of data on artificial intelligence algorithms that — because of the corruption in corporate America — are oversold. They're not actually as good as they say they are. 

They're relying on you taking your smartphone everywhere you go and using it for everything and basically giving them what they want. The way to take power back is to reduce that stuff in your life. Get local and build parallel systems. That's something that we can all take steps towards.

They've become so dependent on these electronic forms of control ... the digital ID agenda, vaccine passports and central bank digital currencies. They fully expect us to go very willingly into these digital corrals that are much more controlling and much less free for the people that enter them — but they need us to voluntarily enter. 

Now we have these dueling fuel and energy crises and the obvious intent is [that] people who are cold and hungry are more likely to be voluntarily led into these systems. But again, we have to agree to it. And that means we have agency, and they know it. They can't technically force us. We have to surrender our power completely to them, and we have all the tools to take it back, we just have to take responsibility and start doing it. 

This is why I would really caution people against what I see as psychological conditioning, this idea that we have to wait for a political savior, vote for the right person, and as soon as we get the ‘right person’ in the White House, everything will be fine. The extent of the corruption is vast and there is no way one person at the White House can undo it all. 

What we need are regular people to take responsibility. So many of us are looking for the good guy versus the bad guy on the level of nation state leadership. No. The good guys are just the regular people like you and me, and the bad guys are the people most often at the top that have stomped on heads and clawed their way to the heights of power, regardless of what nation state you're talking about. 

It's among regular people where you will find the ‘good guys’ you're looking for and it's time for those people to come together and say ‘Enough!’ And we really can do it. It just is about taking personal responsibility ... We have to take our power back and that starts on an individual level.”

More Information

To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of, “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein.” If you would like to view more of the interviews that Whitney did for this book please to this page on her site as it has links to all the many podcasts she has done about this book.

If you want to pick up both volumes at the same time at a reduced price, the best place to do that is from the publisher’s website, trineday.com. Eventually, an eBook and audio book will also be made available. For more of Webb’s work, see UnlimitedHangout.com.