From this point forward, I’m going to be apportioning out written drafts of the material for the forthcoming first season on PPM in slightly more digestible, article sized chunks contrary to 50 page essays that require serious mastication and a bovine belly with multiple chambers to break down. I”m comfortable enough with this approach because I feel like I did enough heavy lifting in the first two parts to the point that readers are relatively up to speed and will be able to follow along and make the requisite mental connections to tether the revelations herein back to the larger thrust of this project. We’ve set enough of the varying scenes and furnished you with enough preliminary evidence to firmly establish that Epstein agitated against the Islamic Republic throughout his life and entered the worlds of international arms deals and espionage through his understudy role under Khashoggi and Leese as the American parastate egged on the Iran-Iraq War in hopes of seeing the proxy conflict destroy the two Middle Eastern upstart revolutionary governments.
You’ll hopefully recall the latter sections of the previous essay and our introduction to Bandar Bush and Epstein’s considerable links to the former Saudi Ambassador to the US, a relationship he appears to have cultivated over decades, as shown by the sampling of evidence I laid out stretching from:
Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s instrumental role as a Contra slush fund beginning in ‘84
his addressee appearance in the first Black Book
Epstein’s lawyer / handler Alan Dershowitz inadvertently divulging meetings with the recent head of Saudi intelligence when trying to build an alibi regarding Virginia Giuffre’s allegations
Bandar’s purchasing of a massive mountainside manse in Aspen (a property that was passed to another Epstein associate in John Paulson and which is located in the billionaire summer house hub that Wexner also called home)
the inclusion of multiple Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud progeny in Epstein’s email contacts
Having firmly established these ties, we will soon use the Epstein - Bandar friendship as a springboard to examine the possibility that Epstein was party to Al Yamamah, the priciest arms deal of all time, struck between the Saudis and the British in 1985. We’ll also mull whether Epstein even served as a go-between to Bandar and helped iron out the finer points of the arrangement whereby the Prince personally financed the Nicaraguan paramilitary at Reagan’s behest in early Iran-Contra.
But to construct such an argument and assess the persuasiveness of these theories, we must first tango with the doctored passport that was found in Epstein’s possession and the identity of the man for whom it was reportedly issued, conducting a forensically thorough sifting of its contents with a finetoothed comb to see what kinds of secrets get caught in its teeth. Along the way, we’ll juxtapose the various aspects of the passport identity’s past that lend themselves to the notion that he and Epstein were known quantities to each other and likely parastatal fellow travelers. This is what we will concern ourselves with today before unpacking the implications of the documented travel itinerary as filtered through the figure of Prince Bandar bin Sultan next time out.
In the latter part of 2025, pictures of Epstein’s Austrian passport under the real and/or double identity of Marius Fortelni finally entered the public domain. You can view the passport in its redacted entirety at the bottom of this article. From the present vantage, it’s likely impossible to say definitively what kind of arrangement was struck to permit the financier to step into the Austrian architect and restaurateur’s shoes on occasion (or whether there’s an even more fantastical tradecraft explanation wherein the Austrian died and Epstein stole his identity like some informal cover or else the Company phased in the use of real life individuals as cold bodies). There are sundry brainpicking interviews from the last couple of years regarding Fortelni’s oceanside, smart home condo development Forté Luxe in Jupiter Island and biography-bolstering ephemera dating back as far as 1989 in the American newspaper record that support the flesh and blood, corporeal existence of the sometimes Fort Lauderdale or Miami Beach based real estate developer. Still, one should be forgiven for being skeptical or wondering if all is not as it appears, as Epstein and Fortelni cut symmetrical paths across the planet and cropped up in similar places time and again, from Saudi Arabia to New York to West Africa to Florida.
I can conceive of a few different explanations for how the passport came to Epstein and was then doctored, Fortelni’s photo X-ACTO bladed off and swapped with a square dimensioned, black and white picture of a preppy Epstein in plaid. Cue: saucy To Live and Die in LA Willem Da-forgery montage. This is one of those contingency theory scenarios where I’ll ask you to hold these alternating possibilities in your mind at once. Each is beset with a hole or two and no size fits all.
I could see Epstein and Fortelni having been in cahoots in an organized criminal capacity and that Jeffrey secured the docs that way, with Marius a henchman or adopted consigliere of sorts. I could also see a scenario where they both were CIA assets with slightly different remits and the agency set Epstein up to inherit an old set of Fortelni’s papers (they were born only a year apart and while not doppelgängers, do have some slight facial similarities). It’s also not inconceivable that Epstein could have pilfered the passport, stolen it from Fortelni’s draftsman desk or something. And lastly, while this strikes me as most outlandish, it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that Fortelni could be a concocted cover identity or cold body that various assets or agents could slip into in the field.
From what I’ve gathered from others and his bio online, it sounds like Fortelni is the son of a successful German actor and real estate developer, so this last option seems highly doubtful, but the whole situation is such a profoundly cumbersome head scratcher that I struggle to dismiss the notion entirely. For example, if the fraudulent passport’s solitary purpose was to protect Epstein in case of a PFLP-era hijacking, as his legal team’s story goes, why on earth would you hold onto it for an additional 32 years past its expiration? Was Epstein simply a packrat hoarder who couldn’t let such evidence of passport forgery criminality go out of sentimentality? Such a notion runs counter to the portrayal of Epstein that is constructed by the Files of a meticulous scrubber of hard drives and digital evidence of his crimes. I reckon the passport must have had a continued usefulness for him to keep it as long as he did.
There are seemingly only 5 hits for Fortelni on Newspapers.com. The most recent results date to February 2015, both of them Notices of imminent sale of items held in lapsed, unpaid storage units in the Fort Lauderdale area. How strange for the big shot real estate developer to have failed to make payments on one of his storage units for so long that they were about to auction off his stored items as shown by this South Florida Sun Sentinel issue… Seems uncharacteristic. Do you know who did exhibit a characteristic pattern of dispatching private investigators to move hard drives, laptops, and dirty magazines from storage unit to storage unit so as to evade the feds, though? Do I even need to say it? Was Epstein using the old Fortelni passport as ID to keep a degree of separation between himself and a storage unit with a trove of particularly sensitive items? Or is this sheer coincidence?
In the Oct. 29th, 1989 edition of Newark, New Jersey’s The Star Ledger, the paper’s food critic William A. Raidy reports back from his visit to the recently ribbon-cut Via Via restaurant on the Upper East Side. Founded by “international restaurateurs” Marius Fortelni and David Teller, he waxes rhapsodical about the girls “three deep at the bar”; the “generous highballs”; the samplings of ravioli Genovese, calamari al inferno, and veal paillard on arugula beds. Then located at 1294 Third Ave. near 74th Street, Via Via would have been mere blocks from Epstein’s E. 66th St. flat in the Solo Building that was his much more modest New York residence and temporary office of the Intercontinental Asset Group in the late 1980s before he inherited the townhouse from Wexner. It’s not hard to imagine Epstein having helped Fortelni populate the bar with the girls that Raidy was all agog over. This earliest mention of Fortelni that I’ve uncovered in American newspapers bears a couple blink-you-could-miss breadcrumbs. The UES Via Via was apparently cousin to another on 37th Street that was opened a little less than 2 years prior, meaning that the flagship appears to have debuted in NYC in 1987, right around the time Epstein was undergoing that post Iran-Contra career change. Auspicious timing for this Austrian double of Epstein’s to suddenly pop up in the U.S. (note: this is the same year the Fortelni Passport in Epstein’s possession expired). There’s also mention that Fortelni comes from a Milanese family of restaurateurs that have been setting white linen tablecloths for “discriminating diners” in Northern Italy since the early 1800s.
My curiosity is piqued more so by the passing mention that Via Via owners Fortelni and Teller met at the “American (International) School in Vienna”, though, and for good reason, as we’ll see. As tradition dictates for such institutions, the American International School in Vienna’s student body demographics include a 30% chunk of American children, an approximate 30% or so of natural born Austrians, and a plurality consisting of 70 other nationalities making up the rest. Most of the American students are the spawn of diplomats and assorted Embassy and intergovernmental sector employees. By virtue of this reality, it’s well within the realm of the reasonable that Fortelni could have had classmates whose parents were CIA. The AISV has strong ties to the State Department as illustrated by its highlighted inclusion in the Overseas Schools Fact Sheet and the singular seat on the 10-person school board that is strictly appointed by the U.S. Ambassador alone. AISV’s most recognizable alumni name is likely Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan who enjoyed a starring turn as a young protege of Roy Cohn aka pre-hairpiece Trump in the recent film The Apprentice, to bring this aside full circle.
Anyways, could Fortelni have been recruited by Central Intelligence straight outta secondary school? Read on, dear reader.
Turning to the final “Marius Fortelni” search result in the digitized newspaper archives… In 1991, the Philadelphia Daily News gossiped about some “tent bash” he threw in the Hamptons to sample the “French and Russian delicacies he intends to serve when he opens his trendery this fall”. Lo and behold, the obligatory salacious anecdote that saw the party’s inclusion in the Philly paper’s gossip section: some paparazzi caught Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson peeing in the bushes in a revealing tube dress. Elle Macpherson was inseparable from Epstein madam-in-waiting Naomi Campbell in the 1990s, with whom she helped cohost Miss Universe in 2001 smack dab during Trump’s peeping tom ownership of the pageant, and Macpherson’s also been snapped arm in arm with Ghislaine Maxwell and Black Book addressees Fiona Feeley and Tim Jeffries at a fundraising party for the Serpentine Gallery in 1999.
Not only that, but the swimsuit powerhouse once dubbed “The Body” by TIME-LIFE-CIA Inc. in the 1980s was also listed as part of a criminal grooming milieu by an alleged Epstein victim who filed a somewhat absurd online tip with the FBI. There’s just enough believability to stop me short of dismissing it as delusion at first glance, so I’ll leave it to you to decide. The redacted tipster weaves a strange tale wherein she attended a Hollywood high school with a number of Israelis and Serbians who were on a first name basis with the “princess of Yugoslavia” (presumably Catherine Oxenberg?). The tipster claims she was on the verge of applying for art school and had compiled her portfolio at which point the actor Matthew Settle of Band of Brothers and Gossip Girl c-list fame dated her under false pretenses and groomed her to be approached by Ghislaine for “modeling jobs”—it’s unclear if she even maintains she was actually victimized by Epstein in a sexual fashion. What she does feel particularly aggrieved about is that she is convinced Epstein et al “stole her portfolio” including the painting of Bill Clinton in the blue dress that was later attributed to NY Academy of Art Petrina Ryan-Kleid (a fellow Epstein NYAA alumnus with Maria Farmer, of course) and that all of her paintings and artwork were given fraudulent provenance and sold at inflated prices and the like. It is within this context that she lists Elle Macpherson and her manager Stuart as co-conspirators in this grooming art heist of sorts or at the very least related members of this modeling-art world rhizome.
Do I find her tale compelling? Not necessarily, although I don’t find it unbelievable either based on the ties to Macpherson that we documented and the much more well-known art academy links, so I’m duty bound to disclose, at the very least. To sum this section, though, we’ve shown that the identity contained within Epstein’s doctored passport corresponds with the Austro-German-Italian descendant of restaurateurs who attended a Viennese K-12 school for spy kids. This Marius Fortelni individual opened an eatery blocks away from the Epstein townhouse and a more modest apartment on the UES in the late 1980s, right around the time Epstein was settling back in the States post financial bounty hunting and gun running across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. We also discovered that Fortelni has thrown rambunctious enough outdoor saturnalias to land in the gossip pages and that they were attended by Epstein-Trump model trafficking nexus figures like Elle Macpherson. Finally, we speculated a tad about a Fort Lauderdale storage unit under Fortelni’s name that appears to have been emptied out to the Storage War wolves by the miffed proprietors, evoking Epstein’s use of storage liminal spaces like freeports for squirreling away the evidence of his crimes.
The journalist Edward Szall previously speculated that the doctored Fortelni papers sporting Epstein’s photograph were issued by Ronald Lauder during his stint as Ambassador to Austria, which lasted all of April ‘86 - Oct. ‘87, claims that are also investigated in the 2nd volume of Whitney Webb’s blackmail omnibus. This would compute in the light of Epstein’s clientele relationship with the Estée Lauder heir, for whom he set up a fine art tax evasion LLC called Friends Ventures jointly owned with Leon Black that was used to purchase and share a Kurt Schwitters piece. Epstein and Lauder remained on friendly terms until at least 2017, with over 900 mentions of the Diddy-linked fragrance kingpin in the files and Epstein inviting him to Terje Rød-Larsen hosted soirées and the like. While it’s still a distinct possibility that the World Jewish Congress president Lauder helped set up Epstein with Fortelni’s documents, I think the evidence is increasingly pointing in a different direction.
As previously acknowledged by Epstein’s lawyers in 2019 and now seemingly confirmed by the images, the Austrian passport was issued on May 21st, 1982, a full four years prior to Lauder’s brief stint at the Embassy. With an expiration date 5 years on, it seems unlikely that Epstein would have continued to carry the lapsed passport once defunct unless his lawyers’ official explanation that it was a crude failsafe in case of a hostage-taking onboard one of his flights by PFLP militants is genuine. Seeing as they contradicted themselves and refused to answer questions about how it was obtained and whether the stamp evidence proved it had been used by Epstein in transit, questions that were raised by the prosecution during proceedings regarding flight risk, I think we can dismiss their version of events out of hand.
In which case, an expiry of 1987 is an intriguing detail, as 1987 would be right around the time that Iran-Contra had concluded, erm… Or put in other words, been outed by the Hasenfus Crash and the investigative derring-do of the Lebanese press and henceforth blown up in the public sphere, leading to Congressional and Presidential investigatory commissions. By 1987, Epstein was transitioning into life as a Ponzi schemer with Steven Hoffenberg and as the fresh faced financial advisor to one Les Wexner, pretty cozy landing spots coming out of the massive scandal (One Nation Under Blackmail, Webb). Also, mind you, his new jobs wouldn’t necessitate a doctored passport in quite the same way that being a transnational financial bounty hunter and Iran-Contra arms dealer might, at least on the face of it… Taking the timing into account, I’m inclined to believe that the Fortelni passport was used by Epstein as a cover identity during his globetrotting as the mentee of various Contragate players such as Douglas Leese, Adnan Khashoggi, Robert Maxwell, and Ehud Barak between 1982 - 1987.
Back in 2019, after the expired subterfuge passport (amongst five others) was discovered in a safe with $70,000 in cash, 48 loose diamonds, and a U.S. Treasury Customs agent lapel pin in a credentials wallet (highly suspicious in the context of a doctored passport) during the raid on the NY townhouse, prosecutors alleged in one of the Epstein case hearings that the passport had received ingress and egress stamps from countries such as the UK, France, Spain, and Saudi Arabia on multiple occasions in the 1980s. We now have images and FBI internal emails to back up these claims. Furthermore, the passport lists Dammam, Saudi Arabia as Marius aka Epstein’s place of residence. Dammam is the fifth largest Saudi city, situated on the Persian Gulf approximately 400 or so miles West of the Strait of Hormuz as the crow flies and directly adjacent to the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain by bridge.
From here, we ought to begin our close reading of the Fortelni Passport in earnest, starting with its point of origin and provenance.
May 21st, 1982 - The Fortelni passport was issued in Austria under the authority of the “Bundespolizeidirektion Wien” (Vienna) by an Oberkommisar named Dr. Mikuskovics. Based on what I’m seeing, the “Dr.” is an abbreviation signifying Doktor, likely denoting a recipient of a top-level doctoral degree in law based on the immigration and law enforcement context, although I wouldn’t be shocked if it stood for “director” (a German speaking listener might be able to set this matter straight). One of the emergent wonderments that the Fortelni Passport poses in my mind is: Why an Austrian passport for Epstein specifically? Circumstance and convenience? Or something more?
Setting aside a reading where Epstein encounters Fortelni in Saudi Arabia and purchases it off him or else where the passport passes hands through Lauder’s doing, I can think of one characteristic of the city in which it was authorized that might shed light on the “Why Austria?” question. Vienna is arguably the spy capital of Europe, after all, a noir reputation gained from dusky monochrome Cold War cinema such as The Third Man, the classic about a penicillin-diluting racketeer who has staged his death so as to escape the British military police on his tail and which captures post-war Wien in all its quadripartite occupation district intrigue. Vienna has enjoyed the reputation of a European city of strategic import and espionage due to its central location bridging east and west for millennia, with even Marcus Aurelius noting its geographic advantages long before the cafe culture and baroque architecture cropped up, long before MI6 man Graham Greene sent his cowboy fictioneer character Holly Martins scurrying down bombed out ruins after the Cheshire phantom Harry Lime aka Orson Welles, a cinematic adaptation that may have been inspired by the Philby-recruited Soviet spy Hans-Peter Smolka.
This perception has only been solidified in recent years, with some estimates placing as many as 7k agents of varying services active on its streets today. In the years of the Third Reich’s rise cresting into the Anschluss, you might have encountered Kim Philby, Freud, or Trotsky in its cafes. More recently, the hotbed of snooping played host to the largest spy swap between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War, with British double agent and Russian military intel officer Sergei Skripal (later poisoned in Salisbury) and scarlet-haired Russian seductress Anna Chapman exchanged on the tarmac in Vienna in 2010.
Part of this tacit acceptance of Vienna as second spy capital of Europe (only surpassed by Brussels) is due to its neutrality, its historical geographic convenience as an operational launchpad beyond the Iron Curtain into countries such as Poland and Yugoslavia, and the fact that it also plays host to a number of intergovernmental organizations today. These include one of four major United Nations headquarters, the UN Office of Vienna (UNOV) located in the Vienna International Center, a holdover from the idiosyncrasies of the four part occupation of the city by the U.S., British, French, and Soviets that I alluded to earlier. The UNOV is home to key agencies like the International Atomic Energy Agency (which would be of monumental interest to Epstein’s likely parent agency LEKEM, the Bureau of Scientific Relations), the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Control (UNODC), and UNIDO (international development office), among others.
We may make a more thorough study of Epstein’s time in and ties to Vienna at a later date, but the Austrian capital hosts another intergovernmental organization we’ve already spoken about in Pt. I of this series and that may be even more germane to this line of inquiry. You’ll recall that we began to tease the thread of Epstein’s recruitment of recently resigned Slovakian national security adviser Miroslav Lajčák, onetime chair of the OSCE aka the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, specifically highlighting messages between the two in 2019 in which they discussed digital false flags and Epstein exhorted Miroslav to get the OSCE to take cybersecurity more seriously. The OSCE is officed in Vienna, of course.
Fascinatingly, it appears the issuance of the Fortelni passport, whether to Marius himself or to Jeffrey Epstein masquerading as the Austrian, arrived at a time when the U.S. Embassy in Austria was in crisis and transition following the March 1982 death of Reagan-appointed Special Envoy Theodore Cummings, a Jewish Austrian emigré and Food Giant supermarket magnate who first met Ronald in the 1960s as a GOP booster and who was a part of the actor’s informal “kitchen cabinet”. Apparently a Charge D’Affaires took charge of the Embassy until the following year, when another Reagan loyalist in the personage of Helene von Damm was promoted to the office. I’m unsure if this is a common occurrence, but even the State Department’s Timeline of the Chiefs of the Austrian Mission has a conspicuous void where the year during which the Fortelni Passport was issued should be placed, which is notable considering it found its way into the hands of American citizen and likely CIA and LEKEM asset Epstein. I’ve yet to find any indication which Embassy officer rose to handle diplomatic duties between Cummings’ unexpected death and von Damm’s appointment, so that’s slightly curious. More uncanny than curious is her almost shocking resemblance of the Maxwell Sisters, a young Isabel in particular, as seen in this “candid” pic from Air Force One or another of the Ambassador in a sun hat and baring her décolletage.
If von Damm had anything to do with the passport making its way to Epstein, this could be further evidence of Jeff the Financier’s entrenchment in Iran-Contra, as von Damm was not only Ronald’s former secretary but also a Reagan insider and among 5 campaign aides including Edwin Meese and Deputy Chief of Staff Deaver who received questionable payouts from the 1980 Reagan / Bush transition foundation. It’s also worth adumbrating von Damm’s biography quickly. Raised in Amstetten where her father toiled as an engineer for the paper company Neuesiedler Papierfabrik (now Mondi), she married a US Army corporal named Charles McDonald during the Soviet occupation and emigrated to the US—one groom in a line of four ex-husbands that came to include a German-American Bank of America executive, whose surname she ultimately kept. Helene dug up her roots in Chicago and traveled to California when she became smitten with Reagan’s ardent anticommunism as a “refugee” of a “socialist country” herself. She ascended from a lowly gubernatorial campaign envelope-filler to Reagan’s personal secretary and then Finance Director for the Northeast in 1980, a position parlayed into Director of Presidential Personnel and then the brief Ambassadorship in Austria. She resigned after her tempestuous liaison with the recently divorced owner of the prestigious Viennese Hotel Sacher became a source of “public fascination”, divorcing Peter Gürtler a year after she stepped down, walking away with alimony, seats on the boards of a couple European companies, and a Doubleday book deal. Gürtler “committed suicide” in 1990—curious timing, that, considering all the parastatal criminal activities of the Reagan and Bush years, the fall of the Soviet Union, and his nearly annulled, lightning quick marriage to the U.S. Ambassador.
Sometimes a singular Google search leads to a eureka moment, sending you spilling out of the bathtub in a spray of foam and Epsom salt, racing naked for pen and paper to jot down a reminder of the revelatory piece of evidence that just fell into your lap. I was feeling like I was circling the drain a little bit, that I’d taken my Fortelni passport discoveries about as far as I could, when my mind stirred. “Klonny, you tried to find something linking Ambassador Helene von Damm to Iran-Contra… But did you ever search for an Austrian or Viennese Connection to the scandal more generally?”, so spoke my Shivers and Encyclopedia skills to me as I soaked like some wet dog Harry du Bois.
Wouldn’t you know it, dear reader… With even just a perfunctory internet conjuring, I quickly found a source that would support the Fortelni Passport having been allocated to Epstein as cover during his involvement in Iran-Contra related travels, showing that the use of aliases and false passports were a part of the Enterprise’s OpSec modus operandi. And it gets better yet. Not only will I establish that they relied upon fake passports and cover identities while jetting about on Contragate business, I’ll also show that the Iran-Contra architects used fraudulent passports to travel to Vienna, Austria to negotiate with an Iranian delegation for the release of hostages specifically.
But first, I ought to preface this by pointing out that even today, Western intelligence, national security think tanks like the Hudson Institute, and the Pahlavist anti-AOR lobby maintain that Vienna is the base of operations for Iranian intelligence networks in Europe due to its neutrality and lax regulations regarding covert activity. Per Die Presse, the Library of Congress released a report on Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence in 2012 that asserted Vienna is chock full of Iranian agents, with security experts estimating 100 or more individuals working for the ministry to surveil and pressure regime change advocates in exile there. The Library of Congress report alleges that Austria and Iran have enjoyed warm relations since the Islamic Revolution, meaning this dynamic was well-established prior to when the Fortelni Passport came into being in 1982.
Which brings us to a mini research climax of sorts. Pulling from the Aug. 1993 Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters during Lawrence E. Walsh’s tenure. Take your magnifying glass to “Part VIII Officers of the Department of Defense” specifically, now scroll down to Item #22. This is numbered evidence of various notes, diary entries, and testimonies that were withheld from the Tower Commission and the Select Committees which show that Secretary of Defense Weinberger and many of his closest aides were routinely informed of Contragate arms shipment developments and were personally conducting high-level meetings in the White House and the field regarding the black op. In Items #21 and #22, the OIC team subverts the testimony of a classified “senior military officer” who feigned ignorance when asked whether he’d been considered for a meeting with Iranians regarding the hostage crisis and claimed to be wholly unfamiliar with Col. Oliver North, who he characterized as a “staff officer on the periphery”.
To reiterate the underlined portions of the screenshot, Secretary Weinberger’s diary revealed that Oliver North and a Senior Military Officer whose identity was classified (national security reasons, ol’ chap) travelled to Vienna, Austria in September of 1985 to meet with Iranians about getting the hostages released. They did so at the express request of Robert McFarlane and with the permission of Weinberger and General Vessey. The Ambassador Robert B. Oakley helped to grease the wheels to get one of the false passports divvied out to the “Officer”, lending credence to the notion that the U.S. Embassy Charge D’Affaires or Amb. Von Damm could have put a finger on the scale related to the Epstein/Fortelni papers. The other two travel docs for North and Redacted were secured when Ollie invoked Admiral Moreau’s name.
Finally, we see that their plane tickets and HOTEL RESERVATIONS were booked under their aliases (one of which was Goode). Their Iran-Contra negotiations trip to Vienna landed a mere month or two after Ambassador von Damm cabled a resignation letter to the White House, signaling her intent to step down over the growing din of gossip about her scandalous relationship with the hotelier. She would make good on the press release the following year, leaving her post in 1986, meaning… that Ambassador Von Damm was still in office at the time that a major secret meeting between the U.S. and Iranian Contragate delegations was held in her jurisdiction. Now, considering she and the recently divorced Gürtler shacked up together, got married in Feb. 1985 only a month after she’d finalized her divorce from computer industry consultant Byron Leeds (how fitting that the 4th wedding fell in the shortest month), and divorced again in the span of like 2ish years tops, I would be remiss if I didn’t speculate ever so slightly about the torrid-but-brief affair.
At the very least, I think we can deduce that chances are the Hotel Sacher would have played host to various comings-and-goings of Reagan officials, whether Contragate-related or not. For example, from the same WaPo profile, we find tell of a meeting between von Damm and Secretary Shultz, Assistant Sec. for Euro Affairs Richard Burt, and National Security Adviser and major Contragate player Robert A. McFarlane in Vienna that very May, 1985 (emphasis added, see article’s final stretch). How much do you want to bet they rendezvoused at the Sacher or at the very least stayed there? And not just because it’s Vienna’s fanciest and most prestigious hotel. It would only be logical to hold certain deliberations in the private confines of a spare room or conference room within a hotel whose proprietor could be trusted to keep a secret (perhaps incentivized to stay mum by sexy time with the hot lady Ambassador?).
If you’re attempting to have an off-the-books summit without inviting suspicion or the press sniffing it out, there are few better options than a five-star luxury hotel that caters to an international clientele in a neutral country. It’s called “hotel diplomacy”, for godsakes, I’m not just talkin’ out my rump here. To back up what I’m putting down, always going that extra mile, I’ve pulled a Wall Street Journal piece exploring the security and zipped lipped peculiarities of courting such business during the UN’s General Assembly of Nations and the background checks and metal detectors that hoteliers are expected to have on hand as an example.
To conclude this section, I’ll leave you with two speculative, inquisitive ponderances. How would you rate the likelihood that von Damm honeypotted Gürtler for the express purpose of gaining influence over the Hotel through romantic means in advance of it serving as a neutral ground for top secret meetings? And secondly, with all of this splayed before you, what do you think the chances are that Fortelni’s Austrian passport fell into Epstein’s hands because it was to play a pivotal role in enabling him to get in and out of Austria and/or Saudi Arabia to meet with Iranian arms dealers and dignitaries with ease and without inviting suspicion? From the little I’ve dredged up so far, it seems that while entry/exit stamps for Austrian citizens were routine, they weren’t uniform or always strictly enforced (especially at land crossings), so even though there seemingly isn’t any inky proof of Fortelni/Epstein revisiting Vienna after the passport was issued, this doesn’t mean the holder never returned. There are more involved ways of explaining away such a discrepancy (if we’re thinking there’s a compelling case to make regarding Austrian activities specifically), as even the North and Redacted anecdote describes the use of secondary passports, which is not uncommon when you wish to enter a country without tipping Immigration and Customs off to your point of departure.
Speaking of stamps, let’s hurry along through the queue before that border control officer pulls us aside for cavity checks.
From here, I will attempt to arrange the majority of the itinerary of Mr. Fortelni’s entrances and exits in this particular passport’s pages sequentially, particularly focusing on especially noteworthy visits and only barring entries where the smudging or faded ink render them illegible. Beginning with his Saudi work visa:
May 25th, 1982 - An Entry Visa was rubber stamped at the Royal Saudi Arabian Consulate in Vienna, giving the holder permission to stay in the country for one month and listing an employer named something like “____ Corporation for Commerce and Importing”. Per Arabic fluent assistants online, the first word in the company title may be something like “Anji” or “Angi”, but the handwriting is difficult to make out. Needless to say, though, if you check Marius Fortelni’s bio, you’ll see that he claims to have worked as a “subcontractor for the Royal Saudi Commission while guiding a large real estate and construction firm” before moving to New York in the 1980s. There’s no way he could have been an employee of the massive construction contractors Saudi Binladin Group, is there? This seems like a potentially fruitful line of questioning to pose to Mr. Fortelni if one were ever to get him into a Tupamaros’ interrogation chair.
This broached an aspect of his bio that I hadn’t touched on yet. Fortelni apparently forewent a college education to “start his own cement and construction company in West Africa as a young man”. 1 Doesn’t Teen Fortelni’s African cement manufacturer sound like a front company for a young Central Intelligence agent? If not, what impetus could have caused a just graduated Fortelni to seek his fortune far from home in the developing world? And could he have somehow made a business contact at Saudi Binladin Group through construction and the cement trade? Doubtful he would have exported clinker to the Saudis, as they have one of the most robust and self-reliant cement industries in the world… Hard to say. But based on everything we know, I look at Fortelni’s time in Africa a little askance, like a Prelude to a Spy.
Either way, here’s the reasoning behind my wonderment as to whether he could have worked for SBG and Osama’s relatives. Firstly, he doesn’t name the “large real estate and construction firm” that he “guided” in Saudi Arabia, which could give the vibe of someone carefully eliding those specifics because he’s worried about the 9/11 shit sticking to him. Secondly, his bio states that he operated primarily in the cities of Jubail and Dammam while his company and the 130 workers in its employ built 150 houses for “prominent local figures”. From this, we can ascertain that the Saudi Royal Commission he is referring to is the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu, which was founded in 1975 and whose stated mission is to "Plan, promote, develop and manage Petrochemicals and Energy intensive industrial cities through successful customer focus and partnerships with investors, employees, communities and other stakeholders." This means that Marius Fortelni was a subcontractor working on one of the largest urban planning, engineering, and industrial city development projects in history.
And here’s how we bring his bio and passport full circle and likely shine a flashlight on the gossamer webs that have insisted on avoiding our beam in the darkness up until this point… Built “from the sand up” atop the ruinous suburbs of an ancient fishing and pearling village on the Arabian Peninsula’s eastern seaboard, when the Saudi Royals initiated the largest civil engineering project of all time, they turned to two outfits they knew would be able to get the job done: Bechtel and the Saudi Binladin Group. In June of 1976, Bechtel was awarded a 20 year contract to,
…manage the implementation of the master plan it had submitted to the Saudi Royal Commission on Jubail and Yenbo, the policymaking body for the project. Mr. Yates, who was interviewed during a recent visit to Bechtel's San Francisco headquarters, is Bechtel's field manager.
Bechtel's task, he said, was to map out the entire infrastructure for the industrial complex and the city, supervise the granting of contracts after evaluating bids, and oversee the actual construction.
“We make sure all the pieces fit together,” says Charles G. Wolfe, engineering manager in the Bechtel's San Francisco support office, where some 20 technicians spent all of last year preparing “requests for proposals’ to go out to hundreds of contractors this year. Already more than 100 contracts have been awarded and nearly $2 billion spent.
The NYT article goes on to describe the international effort to fast track the construction of the eyesore, like a growth on the pristine unbroken ‘dermis of the desert, with Hyundai rallying to dredge & construct the industrial port, NYC’s Sanderson & Porter tackling the world’s largest desalination plant, and West Germany’s Karf-Stahl Co. jointly planning an 800k ton steel mill with the Saudis. In ‘76, Jubail had “no major road connections, no labor force, no power supply, no housing, and no sweet water, save for a few wells”. The prize was that sicklysweet crude, of course—the Khufu Pyramid esque scheme of Ozymandian proportions originated with a meeting between Stephen Bechtel Sr. And Saudi King Faisal in the Bechtel-bricked Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva (speaking of hotel diplomacy) in which the King complained of $1 billion in excess oil that they burned off in the desert per annum because they simply couldn’t deliver it to market.
Caption: Manucher Ghorbanifar
Speaking of Geneva, there are swirling stories regarding sit downs between Adnan Khashoggi and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and American representatives in 1985 and in one version, Geneva is the site of three days worth of top secret talks, this time at the Hilton. Citing Manucher Ghorbanifar’s sworn statement regarding Iran-Contra from 1986 in the Reagan Library, we find that Ghorbanifar, Khashoggi, and National Security Council consultant and staunch opponent of the Islamic Revolutionary “regime” Michael Ledeen intersect in Geneva in late October 1985, where they were joined by the number two man in Iran, Ayatollah Kabouli, who had driven in from Hamburg, a supposed “big Mullah” based in Frankfurt believed to have been close to Khomenei’s son (this may be a codename, finding scant evidence of a Karbouli). Karbouli was seemingly the “moderate” influence that the Reagan-Bush defense establishment and parastatal cowboys were trying to recruit parallel to the arms transfers. We can’t get into such weeds now, but Ledeen’s involvement is hugely instructive as he was one of the longest serving hawks against Iran and was a major architect of the Global War on Terror as prelude to regime change against Khamenei, for which he lobbied fervently.
Caption: Michael Ledeen
During the multiday meeting, Karbouli dished on the radical faction, “who took the hostages”, and requested technical help for seizing power in the country when the time comes, including Iranian money to feed to madrasas & bazaars so as to increase his base of support. He grew bolder still. “He ask(ed) for certain drops to put in drinks to try and kill Khomenei”. While Ledeen reportedly demurred and declined to hook Karbouli up with the Sidney Gottleib pupils in the Company’s technical services / dirty tricks department, likely because he didn’t want such a plot to blow back on Reagan or the CIA, Ghorbanifar maintains that they ultimately got the “drops” from the Israeli branch of the Iran-Contra nexus, which could mean Epstein or LEKEM or AMAN were involved.
The account of this planning meeting weeks before the Nov. 24th Hawk shipment / Epstein Fam Vacay coheres, as we know that Iranian payments on the arms transfers were deposited in a Monte Carlo bank by Ghorbanifar and then routed to accounts in Geneva with Credit Suisse and Compagnie de Services Fiduciaires, which were used to relay moneys to the Contras in Nicaragua. CSF was also reportedly affiliated with Albert Hakim, Iranian business partner of Gen. Secord, and helped to broker the purchase of the plane that Robert McFarlane used to fly to Tehran (possibly alluding to the Southern Air vessel). More significantly, the Genevan Connection illustrates that Iran-Contra wasn’t simply about a circuitous means of arming the Contras, it was also the tentative first attempts at assassination plots and succession plans that have yet to hatch, reinforcing my argument that the Americans weren’t as much making overtures as much as they were trying to fan the flames of the Iran-Iraq War towards mutually assured destruction or else get the Iranians’ guard down so they could strike.
Back to Bechtel and Fortelni. Early on at the Jubail worksite, they apparently had to freight in construction materials via the choked road from Dammam, which explains Fortelni’s bio stating that he split his time between the two cities. The article goes on to describe how the “initial team of Bechtel managers—mostly Americans and Europeans—was forced into Al Khobar, a city 35 miles north… for lack of housing…”. Based on what I’m seeing and in light of the fact that Fortelni also boasts of having built homes for the rich and famous like Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Mariah Carey, etc, I’m starting to think that there’s a good chance that Fortelni was enlisted to build the on-site homes in Jubail for Bechtel managers and their wives and kids—by extension, I’m starting to think he may have run a Bechtel subsidiary or been a direct employee, although the other theories aren’t fully out of the picture.
I ought to explain the implications of these revelations, what it means that Fortelni was either hired by Bechtel or worked for a subsidiary company, a tall order so deep into an article and with the particulate avalanche in my hourglass dwindling. We may have to return to this, but Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger were both former Bechtel men poached to serve in Reagan’s Cabinet and both men had operational knowledge of the Iran/Contra para-traffic of weapons and authorized various meetings with Iranian delegations by the more hands-on underlings such as Col. Oliver North, NSA Robert McFarlane, etc, as we’ve illustrated. So if Bechtel commissioned Fortelni’s company (whichever it may be, whether Saudi Binladin Group or his West African outfit) to work on building housing for Bechtel employees once ground was broken on Jubail Industrial City, that would likely mean by extension that someone like Shultz or Weinberger would have set the passport exchange in motion somehow, whether by introducing him to the Khashoggi - Leese - Maxwell - Epstein set or else by calling on Fortelni for a favor in a pinch…
Doubling back to the Saudi visa. To my untrained eye, a ‘Blank Corp. of Commerce and Importing” doesn’t sound like the parent company with which Fortelni would be contracted for architectural design and construction work in Jubail, unless that’s a charade and he was actually in the import/export business with Epstein. If his bio is factual, the employer’s name lends me to believe that this passport may have been taken out for the express purpose of allowing Epstein to travel into Saudi Arabia under a secondary identity, especially seeing as the very first ingress and egress stamps coincided with a trip to the Gulf.
Setting aside the Vienna Connection, 2 the immediate impetus for the passport appears to have been the trip to Saudi Arabia, which is undoubtedly its most eye-catching component. The أجنبي (ajnabi meaning foreigner) actually arrived at an equally auspicious and mournful time for the Saudi Royal Family, as King Khalid passed of a heart attack during the alien’s stay on June 13th and King Fahd was promptly coronated as the new figurehead of the royal family and statesman of the country. Believe me, I am dutifully doing my best not to read into this too much. Jesus, take the wheel. Side eye. Let’s proceed.
More itinerary dates:
May 27th, 1982 - Charles de Gaulle (This likely indicates a layover in France and that Fortelni / Epstein was en route from Austria)
May 28th, 1982 - Presumably departed Heathrow for Saudi
May 29th, 1982 - Entered Saudi Arabia at Dhahran International Airport
June 16th, 1982 - Exited Saudi Arabia at Dhahran
June 18th, 1982 - Reentered France
Let me furnish you with one rationale for why the passport may have been used by Epstein from the very first or early in its lifecycle. Based on everything we know about the timeline of the Jubail city development project, it seems highly unlikely that a month long visa would have been sufficient for Fortelni to get into the country, journey to the off-the-beaten-path construction site, design, and construct some 150 homes for Bechtel employees or otherwise. Even with 130 workers to boss about, there’s no way in hell that you could manage such a feat. In which case, the passport should have another Work Visa or else Fortelni never left and simply handed the passport off to Epstein somewhere in Riyadh or the desert. Furthermore, the complete and utter lack of evidence of repeat trips to Saudi Arabia after exiting on June 16th, 1982 would seem to support this. It computes for Epstein to be kicking around France, Spain, and the UK in 1982/83. For Marius Fortelni, based on what we know about him and the magnitude of the project he was seemingly elbows deep in, not so much. Much to think about.
Time for some more stamp action. Don’t get a stiffy from all this passport porn, now…
Aug. 20th, 1982 - Nice, Cote Azur
Sept. 16th, 1982 - Presumably Entered, Charles de Gaulle
Sept. 28th, 1982 - Left Charles de Gaulle again?
Oct. 19th, 1982 - Entered Malaga, Spain
Note that 3 years after this, LEKEM nuclear krytron trigger smuggler and Arnon Milchan recruit Richard Kelly Smyth and his wife Emilie, would begin new lives under the assumed names of Dr. Jon and Emilie Schiller in Malaga, a seaside community known for lax customs and immigration laws, apparently enough so that it has the reputation of being a bastion of spies and Isntreali intel has clearly hollowed out a colony there between the handsome safe house apartment they lived in for 16 years and Epstein’s presumed passage through the city. You might think of Malaga as a miniature Vienna on the coast.
Oct. 24th, 1982 - (Presumably) Entered Heathrow
Oct. 26th, 1982 - Entered Charles de Gaulle
Nov. 4th, 1982 - Charles de Gaulle
Nov. 9th, 1982 - Charles de Gaulle again.
Clearly Fortelni / Epstein was back and forth betwixt France and some other destination between a couple of these stays, possibly returning to Austria or another country, perhaps Saudi, Israel, or the United States where he could have had an arrangement with customs not to stamp his passport if he was trying to enter covertly.
There are a couple more ingress/egress stamps, all of them for Heathrow and CDG in 1983. Two points. It’s not inconceivable that these could be the memorabilia of Fortelni’s travels and that the passport’s usage by Epstein was only after 1983, perhaps that year being a demarcation of when his gunrunning seriously picked up. And if he was using the passport when primarily flying on CIA proprietary airlines or chartered flights, he may have avoided customs entirely, in which case it was more so backup, a cover identity in case of capture. So the timeframe of Epstein’s movements with said papers may have been from 1983-1987, primarily the period completely devoid of stamps, albeit it’s like drawing blood from a stone to use a negative to prove a secondary claim. If these stamps were from Epstein’s journeys and the passport wasn’t doctored post-‘83, we can draw some conclusions, though. For one, the repeated visits or stops at Heathrow may be evidence of his growing relationship with the Leese and Maxwell families around this time.
Similarly, quoting from the 2016 article in The Guardian titled “Declassified papers reveal real reason for Thatcher's dash to Riyadh” that pertains to the back and forth British v. French competition for Saudi biz, we may find that Epstein’s travels in 1983 coincided with a new campaign in the French charm offensive to land the Al-Yamamah deal, which was the side of the vying countries that Khashoggi was assisting:
It nearly unravelled after the French began courting the Saudis in 1983 with a rival bid for Mirage aircraft. After frantic government lobbying, Prince Bandar – an anglophile and the influential Saudi ambassador to Washington – invited Mrs Thatcher to drop in to Riyadh.
Further Fortelni / Epstein ingresses and egresses (sound like they should be long necked waterbirds):
Feb. 5th, 1983 - Charles de Gaulle Airport, France
April 30th, 1983 - Charles de Gaulle
Oct. 24th, 1983 - Nice, Cote Azur
Oct. 26th, 1983 - Charles de Gaulle
Oct. 27th, 1983 - Charles de Gaulle again
To my understanding, Douglas Leese and Adnan Khashoggi were friendly and occasional colleagues and Epstein was introduced to Khashoggi through Leese (per Hoffenberg). Could all of this jetting back and forth between the UK and France in 1982/83 be evidence of Epstein serving as a go-between, assisting both sides to game the situation in hopes of extracting the maximum rubber stamping bribes for the Saudis and commissions for themselves? In the 1980s, Adnan Khashoggi kept residences all across the planet, including both Paris and Cannes in France, as well as Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, so it’s well within the realm of possibility that French and Saudi sojourns could have been Epstein meeting with the mysterious moneybags. Quoting from Brown University’s “Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs” online study guide, we find additional vague evidence that may support that these Epstein ingresses & egresses in France were related to pre-Contragate talks:
…Adnan Khashoggi met with National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane beginning in 1983 to discuss U.S.-Iran relations. Meanwhile, former CIA Associate Director of Operations Theodore Shackley was introduced to General Manucher Hashemi, a former head of the Shah's secret police, SAVAK. Hashemi then introduced Shackley to other Iranians, including Manucher Ghorbanifar and Hassan Karoubi, who became infamous during the ensuing investigation as the “first Iranian.” …
In 1985, Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi came into contact in Hamburg, Germany, and began devising the skeletons of the plan that would eventually become the Iran side of the Iran/Contra Affairs. Three Israelis were drawn into the discussion in the summer of 1985. A number of stories exist regarding the exact time, place, and specifics of these meetings. However, from these meetings came the idea to sell U.S. arms to Iran via Israel and the suggestion that, to gain the U.S.'s approval for the scheme, American hostages in Lebanon could be released. At the same time this was happening, the NSC was searching for new ways to deal with Iran.
Was a young AmerIsraeli intelligence understudy named Jeffrey Epstein a party to these parleys in Hamburg? Or better yet, what if I could prove that Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar didn’t just confab in Hamburg, they’d also linked up in Vienna, of all places, to discuss the particulars of the Iran-Contra scheme as it began to take shape…? Wouldn’t that really be something? It would compute, after all, as we know Ollie North rendezvoused with unnamed Iranians in the ancien city. Was Hamburg a cover story? You’d almost have to assume that Epstein would have been party to these negotiations as a likely LEKEM asset and seemingly a Bill Casey Company Contragate player, especially seeing as there’s evidence that he was traveling with an Austrian passport at the time, one that wouldn’t expire until two years later. It could theoretically explain the von Damm - Gürtler tryst too and poor Peter the Hotel Failson’s eyebrow-crinkling “suicide” in 1990, two years prior to Bush pardoning a slew of the co-conspirators at Epstein associate William Barr’s behest and at a time when the OIC investigation was still in swing. Perhaps he overheard something he wasn’t supposed to or worse yet tried to extort his ex-Ambassador ex-wife over the concierge bit role he played in tending to such high profile low profile guests…
Too bad I’m not sure I can quite manage it. For a moment, I thought I was going to be able to stick the landing, as I could have sworn in the wee hours of composing parts of this last night I’d found a source that explicitly referenced Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar in Vienna, but sadly I may have been hallucinating what I wanted to see. I guess I could have dyslexically read “Geneva” as “Vienna”, the tears pooling in my bloodshot eyes and sending letters swimming. I’ve scoured my tabs to try and relocate the source I distinctly recall to no avail, it’s harsh blue light seared in my mind haunting me like the imprint of some banshee. It would compute, of course, as Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi are likely suspects for the gentlemen with whom Ollie North and Redacted rendezvoused, but short of hard evidence, I ought to keep my skis firmly on the powder. If someone can find a source that places Khashoggi or Ghorbanifar in Vienna sometime between May - November of 1985, I will throw a free subscription to the Patreon your way. The best I could summon after misplacing my goldmine source was mention of a 21st birthday party that Khashoggi threw for his son in Vienna in early 1985, which Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous host Robin Leach dubbed the “most extravagant event in European history”. No cigar, but close enough to speculate, at least! Was Daddy Khashoggi squeezing in business on the sly? If not for this slight disappointment, we might have ended this article with some proper Ronaldhino-esque showboating, albeit of the independent research variety…
I’ll be damned if I haven’t gotten close to some Rainbow Flicks, though. Even if I can’t definitively place Khashoggi (and likely Epstein) in Vienna during the May meeting between von Damm, McFarlane, and Shultz or the latter Ollie North and Redacted trip, I have found a handful of additional evidence of the Vienna Connection that show that the neutral spook interzone served as one of the “no questions asked” hubs for Iran-Contra planning, and that’s what I’ll leave you with today.
Some Viennese Connection quick hits to bolster our case, beginning with possible evidence that Shultz and McFarlane had even set up a temporary Situation Room to monitor the November 1985 arms shipment in Vienna or else had touched down there not long prior to the smuggling run to ensure everything was squared away with the Iranian side. Quoting from A.D. Sofaer’s essay Iran-Contra: Ethical Conduct and Public Policy published by the Houston Law Review:
…the administration, if not the President personally, had approved the 1985 sales.
That morning, Shultz decided to give me and Armacost access to some of the notes that Charlie Hill had kept of meetings and calls from the time Shultz became Secretary of State. He asked Hill to review the notebooks and read us the key events related to the 1985 arms sales. Armacost and I sat in Hill’s office and listened to a number of excerpts. Among these was a note of a meeting with McFarlane while he and Shultz were in Vienna during November of 1985. The notes recounted that McFarlane, then still the NSC Adviser, told Shultz that a shipment of HAWKs was being made to Iran that month by Israel with U.S. approval for the purpose of securing the release of hostages. This single note established beyond any doubt that the White House knew of and had approved that shipment.
Along similar lines, Shultz met with a Soviet delegation in Vienna in May 1985, doubtlessly overlapping with the same trip during which he, Richard Burt, and Robert McFarlane confabbed with Ambassador von Damm.
Shultz traveled to Vienna to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Austrian neutrality and sat down across from Foreign Minister Gromyko during that time to discuss space arms control and the like. The same European trip involved meetings regarding the Middle East and Palestine…
A potential sit down between Reagan and Gorbachev was floated, with Shultz touting Austria as a model for Soviet-American Accord, but minimal progress was made during the talks, reportedly.
Robert McFarlane diplomatically dialogued with South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha in Vienna in early August of 1985, mere days before the first TOW anti-tank missile shipment was carried by plane into Iran. While the public facing occasion for the talks were further “racial reforms” that the Reagan team had requested from the P.W. Botha government, Apartheid South Africa and its longstanding Foreign Minister Botha were among the PedoFash International coalition of players who helped to arm the Contras (in exchange for King Fahd and the Saudis plying the narsty Afrikaaners with oil at Reagan’s request), so it seems highly likely that such Contragate negotiations were partly what was going down in Vienna.
Ah, and now the Austrian passport makes even more sense… Per The Brattleboro Informer, it turns out that Austria was basically the designated way station for the Iranian Jewry movement, with thousands of Jewish Iranians congregating in Vienna as they awaited clearance to emigrate to the U.S. in 1985 and 1986. Between the Islamic Revolution and Iran-Contra, the Jewish populace had allegedly dwindled from 80k to approximately 30k as they fled enlistment and death in the Iran-Iraq War and Mossadist suspicions. This helps elucidate Iranian intelligence’s intense interest in the city, as it’s becoming increasingly apparent that not only was Vienna a neutral zone in which one could commingle with the enemy if you’re trying to get a message across, but it was also an Iranian opposition and Pahlavist enclave where one could go fishing for regime change agents.
I’ve been toiling assiduously to try and substantiate my theory that Ambassador Helene von Damm and Peter Gürtler played host to American dignitaries at the Hotel Sacher (ideally with a tangential Contragate sinew) and I think I hit the jackpot. In my dogged newspaper archive spelunking, I found two examples of the Hotel Sacher catering to the whims and appetites of internationally-minded governors and members of the diplomatic corps and Beltway high society.
We’ll start with the less interesting and disconcerting of the two. Democratic-Farmer-Labor Gov. Rudy Perpich, Minnesota’s 34th and 36th, faced allegations of financial impropriety over a late Oct. 1985 business trip to Vienna that appears to have been as much an excuse for a pleasant getaway for he and the First Lady as it was a trip to explore purchasing a castle to serve as an “educational center” tied to the University of Minnesota’s study abroad program and double Fulbright honoree Prof. William Wright of the Center of Austrian Studies. They spent 6 days holed up in the $189 a night Hotel Sacher (later claiming state expenses), bookings paid for with a “business development fund”. They eventually acknowledged the trip was partly a vacation in a press release two months later.
Intriguingly, they made three such voyages to Austria in the calendar year of 1985 (I’d kill to know when the other two fell) and the business development impetuses included meeting with Austrian officials regarding “medical high tech”, shopping the opening of a Hotel Sacher in Minnesota with the Ambassador and her new husband, and connecting with the Viennese operations of several businesses owned by Minnesotan corpo-raider Irwin L. Jacobs. Also known as Irv the Liquidator, the onetime minor stakeholder in companies such as Disney, Pabst, and the Minnesota Vikings founded a catalog mail order called COMB in 1973 that led to him opening the Cable Value Network so they could monotonously, sunnily hawk their wares on TV. After many years of buying distressed assets and stripping them for parts landed him on the Forbes 500 list between the years of 1986 - 1988 (funny timing), Jacobs served as CEO of pleasure boat builder Genmar Holdings in his twilight years. That was until he murder-suicided himself and his wife with dementia in the Year of Our Eventful Lord 2019, coincidentally. Of all the years in which to show up dead, it had to be this one… Their bodies were discovered in bed by a home care nurse at their Lake Minnetonka manse that April (she’d later sue for damages and emotional distress and was diagnosed with PTSD from the grisly scene). Now, if we build a compelling case that Vienna served as a neutral field for Iran-Contra negotiations, I have to point out that the September Gov. Perpich trip to the Hotel Sacher was only a week after the Sept. 14th smuggling of 408 TOW missiles to Iran (matter of fact, they allegedly departed on the 17th for a “trade mission” in France first).
That he was pursuing potential business with von Damm, this stalwart aide of Reagan’s and someone on the other side of the aisle, does make me a little suspicious about the possibility he ties into all this somehow. Which is weird, because Perpich was actually one of the more outspoken Contragate critics and even sued the Department of Defense over the deployment of National Guardsmen to Honduras where the Contras were based and trained without his blessing—it should be noted the lawsuit didn’t play out in his favor and resulted in the Supreme Court ruling against the governors who’d objected and confirming the constitutionality of Congress authorizing the deployment of the National Guard without gubernatorial permission or the President in a state of emergency. Just another case of the Faux-Duopoly establishment working in tandem? I’ll tag on to this that Perpich was a U.S. Army man from 1946-48 and following his nonconsecutive two terms, Rudy settled into a brief spate as a consultant with the post-communist government in Zagreb, Croatia after the Fall in 1991 and then with a French business the following year before colorectal cancer necessitated a return to the U.S. What to make of the bespectacled accountant looking retiree doing mini George Soros shit in Eastern Europe and what that might say about his Vienna stops? Enough on that.
To wrap this article off, I have to regale you with some stray high society pages reporting in the Palm Beach Daily News that inadvertently takes us to an unexpectedly salacious, bleak place, tying up Vienna, Prince Bandar, Khashoggi, and a renowned astronomer with a penchant for making some of the most depraved, raspy voiced, Star67 harassment calls you’ve ever heard. Penned by woman on the town Garnett Stackelberg, the February 2nd, 1986 piece is primarily about the social circle surrounding American University President Richard Berendzen, who was then enjoying a triumphal turn, having just published a memoir detailing his experience as the president of a major university and also having succeeded in extracting $5 million in donations earmarked for the construction of a sports complex at the University from the world’s mysteriously “wealthiest” man, one Adnan Khashoggi, Epstein’s mentor and Iran-Contra architect.
Stackelberg relays that the highly successful astronomer and administrator had just been feted by the Khashoggis in their marble-encased Olympic Towers penthouse in NYC. She then proceeds to describe how Beltway hostess with the mostest Esther Coopersmith convinced President Berendzen to hire the widow of former Egypt leader Anwar Sadat for a speaking engagement at the University. From there, she chugs along into another luncheon held in honor of the Berendzens, this time by Jack and Esther Coopersmith (more on her in a moment), which drew respected members of the diplomatic corps such as former Ambassador to Egypt Lucius Battle, journalists like Austin Kiplinger, and former Endowment for the Arts director Livingston Biddle.
Stackelberg then pivots into prattling on about how Ambassador von Damm helped Coopersmith to coordinate a fundraiser for the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, a pond-hopping event abroad that drew much of this circle of Berendzen’s out to Hotel Sacher, including the Biddles, the wife of the former Ambassador to Austria John Hume, “writer-socialite Ina Ginsburg”, and the wife of Democratic Senator from Louisiana J. Bennet Johnston. The coterie, led by Coopersmith, were greeted by von Damm and moonlighting bellhops with bouquets of red roses as they disembarked their Pan Am flight. While in Austria, the Ambassador pulled out all the luxurious stops and somehow got Leonard Bernstein to give a pro bono concert, which the Austrian chancellor also attended.
You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this at present, perhaps feeling like I’m clutching at straws. Let’s land this ship. The year following the Vienna Freud fete and the celebrations of the Khashoggi endowment Berendzen had scored, this Coopersmith woman hosted a dinner party in the District of Columbia for Epstein associate Prince Bandar bin Sultan as thanks for his pecuniary support of the Children’s Museum, which she’d founded. Bandar cracked jokes during the toast about wishing his gifts towards children’s educational recreation received as much notoriety as his Iran-Contra investments to scattered laughs. He remarked that, “Watching the Reagan admin’s tribal wars made him a born-again monarchist”. This wife of real estate developer Jack Coopersmith, by the way, was a big BBQ booster of Lyndon Johnson’s, she pledged her support to Biden’s senatorial campaign early on in the 1970s, she hosted every president at her home from Harry S. Truman to today barring Trump (tradition dictates), and she played a small role in the Camp David Accords by throwing a party for the news media, a favor Carter repaid by appointing her as a representative to the U.N. She was the second ever woman to win the United Nations’ Peace Medal in 1984. A few years following this anecdote, she’d accompany suspected CIA asset Bill Clinton to Moscow to help him cut his teeth in a foreign policy sense, conveniently taking the trip the same year the Soviet Union fell. Point being that this major mover and shaker who was friendly with Iran-Contra players like Prince Bandar and Adnan Khashoggi was on a party-planning first name basis with Ambassador von Damm and called upon the Hotel Sacher for such needs, lending further credence to the picture that’s surfacing like chemical bath flowing off the face of a photograph.
As far as Epstein material is concerned, this article has been relatively trigger and sex trafficking free, one of the perks of digging so deeply into the Iran-Contra era activities is that you don’t have to deal with quite as many sordid details, partly because of the lack of primary and secondary sources pertaining to Epstein in that timeframe but also due to the fact that he was mostly being initiated as a ruling class pimp in the 1980s and the meat of the sex criminality was being committed by people like his mentor Khashoggi, those who taught him the ropes. So considering we’ve only had the one Ambassadorial tryst so far, I don’t feel too bad about taking us into a very dingy dungeon corner to close. Trigger warnings.
Now that we’ve established how the Berendzen and Esther Coopersmith social circle ties back to Epstein, Khashoggi, Bandar, von Damm, and Vienna, we have to submerge ourselves in the phone sex assault scandal that saw the American University astronomer removed from his position and institutionalized , even. Once again, consider this in the context of what had come in the few years prior, Berendzen securing monies from known philanderer and Epstein mentor Adnan Khashoggi as he strutted about the top of the academia and publishing house world, not to mention tangential linkages to Austria circa Iran-Contra.
In March of 1990, a cavalcade of day care employees and babysitters approached the Fairfax County police with complaints regarding anonymous calls they’d received that would make your blood run cold in your veins, “filthy beyond your most horrible nightmares”. How he found her, I can’t say, whether he just pulled out the Yellow Pages brick or what… But Berendzen was ultimately caught in his spree of indecent phone calls (that interrupted the lives of 10-15 traumatized people) when he called a daycare owner named Susan Allen who just so happened to be married to a Fairfax Co. law enforcement officer. She proceeded to goad Berendzen into a series of increasingly disturbing calls while his phone was traced and recorded.
Berendzen allegedly asked the recipients disgustingly probing questions like whether they’d ever raped children, he’d taunt them with claims that he had a 4 year old sex slave chained in his basement, he spoke of purchasing victims at child auctions, and made repeated allusions to child pornography. On April 7th, 1990, once the law had positively identified him, the board of trustees of American University demanded his resignation and he was checked into Johns Hopkins. In a tale of poetic justice and the cycle of abuse, Berendzen allegedly attributed his perverse behavior to “exhaustion” and claimed that he had unprocessed trauma stemming from childhood abuse that he’d suffered at the hands of his schizophrenic mother (I’ll spare us the details, click the second hyperlink in this paragraph if you want to know more about this case); as fate would have it, Susan Allen was also the victim of CSA and this doubtlessly played no small part in the doggedness with which she pursued the Phantom Pervert to ensure that he was caught and children were rescued, if they existed. Remarkably, Berendzen somehow managed to convince the trustees he was rehabilitated post Johns Hopkins stint and they ended up permitting him to return to his astronomy professorship, which seems pretty negligent if not more troubling than that… As Allen remonstrated, “I had tremendous childhood trauma, but I am a very normal, healthy adult who doesn’t make obscene phone calls.”
While I haven’t found a direct line from Jeffrey Epstein to Richard Berendzen, the Int’l Pedo of Mystery did subsidize someone named JP’s tuition at American University, seemingly the son of former US Virgin Islands First Lady Cecile de Jongh. Either way, one can’t help but wonder what this pedophilia scandal involving an astronomy professor slash president at the Washington-based, CIA feeder school American University who secured Iran-Contra monies from Epstein associate Adnan Khashoggi for a sports complex might say about the PedoFash International… Perhaps the call is coming from inside the house?
Next time out, we will further consider whether Epstein / Fortelni’s Saudi visa is evidence supporting theories regarding his involvement in Iran-Contra smuggling and the possibility that at least a portion of his mysterious fortune originated in the largest and most corrupt arms deal of all time, namely Al-Yamamah (The Dove), a purchasing agreement struck between the Saudi government and the London-based aerospace giant BAE Systems. The Al-Yamamah Arms Deal was brokered by at least 3-4 different direct associates of Epstein’s, as we will soon uncover. I’m almost remiss to rattle them off at this point, as it feels premature and anticlimactic, but for foreshadowing’s sake… I will attempt to map the interlocks between Jeffrey Epstein and various Al-Yamamah players such as Prince Bandar, Douglas Leese, Adnan Khashoggi, and Wafic Said.
I alluded to it before, but Epstein had a Rolodex populated with West African connects such as Karim Wade, the son of the former Senegalese president, whose defense he helped fund during a corruption investigation, and Nina Keita, niece of the Côte d’Ivoire president. He also helped Sultan bin Sulayem secure a port deal in Nigeria and pitched Israeli biometric surveillance systems with Ehud Barak in Ivory Coast.
There’s a Year of the Spy connection to be found via Vienna and which may shed a different hue of light on the Epstein / Fortelni passport. NSA employee Ronald Pelton, one of the labour of Soviet and Israeli moles that included LEKEM’s Jonathan Pollard, was revealed to have courted disaster by staying in the home of the Soviet ambassador in Vienna during at least two trips in 1980 and 1983 to link up with his KGB handlers before he was ultimately ratted out by Vitaly Yurchenko in ‘85. This means he was spying for the Soviets during some of Ambassador von Damm’s tenure and aside from various SIGINT and SATINT capabilities, the secrets passed along allegedly included the floor plans of the U.S. Embassy in Austria.
Lastly, the promised Fortelni / Epstein passport in toto:
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