In February 2026, the Paris financial prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into a company registered in the British Virgin Islands that Jeffrey Epstein shared with the daughter of a former French culture minister. Amid the scandal, almost no one recalled that the financier who died in a Manhattan cell in 2019 had not come from nowhere. Before he came to manage the money of scientists and former presidents, Epstein learned his trade on the margins of a far older apparatus, set up in 1976 when the United States Congress cut the hands off its own intelligence agency. That apparatus had a discreet name, the Safari Club, and a centre of gravity that the French press almost never mentions, the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. This investigation reconstructs that genealogy using the official Church Committee report, verified biographies of Khashoggi and Epstein, and the case files still opening in Paris and Washington in 2026.
The Church Committee and the CIA’s legal tutelage
In 1975, Senator Frank Church chaired a committee that did what no American body had done before, look squarely at what the CIA had been doing behind closed doors for two decades.
The final report, published in April 1976 across six volumes under the committee’s full name, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, documented the MKUltra programme, mind-control experiments carried out on citizens without their consent, and exposed what became known as Operation Mockingbird, the systematic infiltration of the American press by undercover agents who wrote or inspired articles favourable to the agency. It also uncovered COINTELPRO, directed against domestic political movements, and the Family Jewels project, the secret inventory the CIA itself compiled of its own abuses before Congress forced it to. The immediate effect was a form of legislative oversight the United States had never known before, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, made permanent that same year, and its House counterpart established the following year, together with an amendment, the Clark Amendment, which in 1976 expressly banned covert funding of any armed faction in the Angolan civil war. For an agency accustomed to operating without answering to anyone, that shorter leash meant something very concrete, it could no longer bankroll other people’s wars with the same freedom of manoeuvre as before.
Church himself warned that same year, in a televised interview, that the surveillance capability those agencies had developed could become, if ever used without limits, the instrument of a total tyranny against which there would be no way to defend oneself. It was, in his own words, a warning aimed squarely at the country that had elected him, not at some distant foreign adversary.
The Church Committee’s final report, published in April 1976, formally documented the existence of the MKUltra programme and of the infiltration of American media known as Operation Mockingbird.
The Safari Club, the alliance Washington could not sign
What the CIA could no longer do directly, others did on its behalf. In 1976, the head of French foreign intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches, brought together the intelligence chiefs of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Iran in an informal alliance christened the Safari Club.
The founding meeting took place, with an irony history reserves for few episodes, at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, a luxury hotel owned by Adnan Khashoggi. The Saudi was no decorative guest. His cousin Kamal Adham then ran Riyadh’s secret services and was one of the direct architects of the arrangement, while Khashoggi supplied the money, the contacts and, in the terms of the day, the neutral ground where agencies punished by their own parliaments could keep operating without explaining themselves to anyone. The Safari Club financed anti-communist interventions in Africa, including the deployment of troops to Zaire in 1977, and sustained arms networks in the Middle East throughout the decade following the 1973 oil embargo, when crude prices had flooded Saudi coffers with liquidity. France supplied diplomatic cover and much of the banking scaffolding, Saudi Arabia put up the capital, and the whole arrangement operated precisely in the grey zone that the American Congress had just denied its own CIA.
That fortune was not eternal. From a peak of around four billion dollars in the early nineteen-eighties, Khashoggi’s wealth collapsed to barely eight million by 1990, dragged down by debts, litigation and the end of the Cold War that had sustained his business model. But by then he had already fulfilled his historic role, financing, with no Western parliament overseeing it, fifteen years of covert operations across two continents. The Safari Club itself did not dissolve with the eighties, it transformed. Part of the same parallel financing circuit resurfaced in the Iran-Contra affair, when Washington sold arms to Tehran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras without congressional authorisation, and Khashoggi, once again, lent his name and his accounts to channel funds through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the bank that regulators in more than a dozen countries shut down simultaneously in 1991, in what remains one of the largest bank collapses of the twentieth century, amid accusations of money laundering on a planetary scale.
Epstein, accountant of a system he did not invent
Jeffrey Epstein founded none of this. He arrived later, and he learned fast.
In 1974 he was teaching mathematics at the Dalton School in New York, a school for the children of the New York elite, until he was dismissed in 1976 for poor performance. That same year he joined Bear Stearns on the recommendation of Alan Greenberg, one of the most powerful bankers on Wall Street, and rose with unusual speed to become a limited partner in 1980. He resigned the following year, after a suspension tied to a fifteen-thousand-dollar personal loan the firm deemed irregular. In August 1981 he founded his own financial advisory firm, Intercontinental Assets Group, and among his first clients, according to journalist Vicky Ward’s foundational investigation published in Vanity Fair in 2003, was Adnan Khashoggi himself, introduced to Epstein by the British arms dealer Douglas Leese. No document proves that Epstein took a direct part in the Safari Club’s operations. What is established is that his very first major client was precisely the man who had supplied the hotel, the money and much of the network of contacts that had made that alliance possible.
That first contract opened a door that never closed again. By the end of the decade he already presented himself as an exclusive adviser to great fortunes, and he found in the textile magnate Leslie Wexner, owner of Victoria’s Secret, the client who would grant him power of attorney over much of his estate, the leap that let him buy, among other properties, the island of Little Saint James.
According to Vanity Fair (2003) and later biographies, Adnan Khashoggi earned up to 106 million dollars in commissions on Lockheed arms sales between 1970 and 1975, at the peak of a personal fortune estimated at around four billion dollars.
What is still moving in 2026
That structure did not close with Epstein’s death in August 2019. On 30 January 2026, the United States Department of Justice released tens of thousands of pages from the case file, and in France the effect was immediate.
The documents revealed that Jack Lang, culture minister between 1992 and 1993, had known Epstein for around fifteen years, having met him through Woody Allen. His daughter Caroline, a film producer, founded Prytanee LLC with Epstein in 2016, a British Virgin Islands company presented as a fund supporting artists through the purchase and resale of artworks, holding barely 1.4 million dollars in its accounts despite a promised twenty-million-dollar investment from Epstein. In the will Epstein signed two days before his death, in August 2019, he left Caroline Lang a bequest of five million dollars. On 6 February 2026, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary investigation against father and daughter for laundering aggravated tax fraud, and ten days later ordered a search of the Institut du Monde Arabe, an institution founded in 1980 by France and eighteen Arab League states to promote Arab culture on French soil, and which Jack Lang chaired. Both resigned the same day the investigation became public, he from the institute’s presidency, she from running the Syndicat de la production indépendante. Their lawyer, Laurent Merlet, maintains that Lang merely gave his opinion on artworks and was never involved in the company. Lang himself summed it up with an almost theatrical line, I am guilty of nothing, I am as white as snow.
Four months later, on 10 June 2026, Bill Gates appeared before the House Oversight Committee and acknowledged that two emails Epstein had sent himself in 2013, mentioning extramarital affairs of his own and a request concerning antibiotics to be administered without consent to the woman who was then his wife, raised what he called a serious probability that Epstein had contemplated blackmailing him. Gates said he had never received those emails directly, either from Epstein or from his then scientific adviser, Boris Nikolic, the man who had introduced them years earlier and whom Epstein named alternate executor of his own will. The blackmail, in short, was contemplated, documented by Gates himself before Congress, and never carried out.
France is no new backdrop to this story. Jean-Luc Brunel, the model scout Ghislaine Maxwell introduced to Epstein in the mid-1980s, appears twenty-five times in the financier’s flight logs between 1998 and 2005, the year Epstein wired him up to a million dollars to set up the MC2 Model Management agency in New York. Brunel visited Epstein in prison at least seventy times during his 2008 sentence, and spent the years after his patron’s death evading an international arrest warrant, until French police detained him at Roissy airport in December 2020. He died hanged in his cell at the Santé prison in Paris in February 2022, officially by suicide. The investigative book by Anthony Mansuy and Emmanuelle Andreani, published in June 2026, further documents the eight-hundred-and-eighty-square-metre flat Epstein kept on the Avenue Foch in Paris.
In France, the only media commentator to name this mechanism in public was Fabrice Epelboin, in an op-ed published in Atlantico and, the following day, on a BFM TV set, in February 2026. Epelboin spoke of the Safari Club, of a CIA weakened by Congress, and of the French services, without in those appearances ever pronouncing the name Khashoggi. The genealogy this text reconstructs, resting on sources other than his, confirms that the Saudi was precisely the piece still left to be named.
None of these episodes, taken separately, proves an organisational continuity between the 1976 Safari Club and the case files that in 2026 involve a former French minister and the founder of Microsoft. What they prove is something simpler, and perhaps more uncomfortable, that the financial and political architecture that made Epstein possible at the outset was never dismantled, that it merely changes name and intermediaries each time one of its links breaks, and that the West still prefers to call it an isolated scandal rather than acknowledge that…
G.S.
Sources
- Church Committee final report (United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities), April 1976 (official archival document)
- Frank Church, interview on Meet the Press, NBC, 1975
- Clark Amendment
- Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein”, Vanity Fair, March 2003
- Ronald Kessler, “The Richest Man in the World, The Story of Adnan Khashoggi”, Warner Books, 1986 (print book)
- Entre influence et espionnage, le Safari Club, ce réseau sans lequel Jeffrey ne serait jamais devenu Epstein, Fabrice Epelboin, Atlantico, 12 February 2026
- Vous avez zappé des cours d’histoire ? Fabrice Epelboin rappelle à BFM que l’affaire Epstein n’est pas un fait divers, lemediaen442.fr, 14 February 2026
- France to investigate former culture minister Lang over Epstein links, Al Jazeera, 7 February 2026
- Affaire Epstein : pourquoi le Parquet national financier a-t-il ouvert une enquête visant Jack Lang et sa fille Caroline ?, Public Sénat, 9 February 2026
- French prosecutors widen Epstein probe with raid on Jack Lang’s former institute, Euronews, 16 February 2026
- Former French Culture Minister Jack Lang and His Daughter Caroline Lang Appear in the Epstein Files, ARTnews, 3 February 2026
- Key takeaways from Bill Gates’ interview with House committee about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, PBS News, 10 June 2026
- Anthony Mansuy and Emmanuelle Andreani, “Epstein, ce que vous n’avez jamais lu”, 2026 (book)
