“None of Us Knew”: The Classified Epstein Intelligence Trail That Runs Straight Through Starmer’s Defense

How Britain's National Crime Agency, its Washington embassy, and its financial intelligence unit tracked Epstein's British connections — while Downing Street claims it was in the dark.

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Documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act show that Britain's National Crime Agency was running a classified intelligence operation on Jeffrey Epstein's British connections from its Washington embassy — beginning nearly five years before Keir Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador and continuing through the period of his appointment.

Starmer says no one knew. The documents say the British government did. The distance between those two statements is the story.

On December 19, 2024, Starmer appointed Mandelson as British Ambassador to the United States. On September 3, 2025, he fired him. By then, newly surfaced emails had made Mandelson’s position untenable. On January 30, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice released approximately three million pages of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation into Mandelson. Morgan McSweeney resigned as Starmer’s Chief of Staff on February 8. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called publicly for Starmer to step down.

Starmer’s defense has been consistent: “I was lied to.” And: “None of us knew the depth and the darkness.”

Before entering politics, Starmer spent five years as Director of Public Prosecutions — head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the body that prosecutes cases investigated by the National Crime Agency.

The documents tell a different story. They show that the British government — through its National Crime Agency, its embassy in Washington, its financial intelligence unit, and its formal law enforcement channels — possessed classified knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to British institutions and individuals. That intelligence operation was running before Starmer became Labour leader. It was still generating new information when Mandelson was appointed ambassador. The question is not whether the British government knew. The question is what happened to that knowledge.

The Intelligence Pipeline

On January 30, 2020, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency produced a formal intelligence dissemination designated NCAWAS-20-001. The document was prepared by the NCA’s International Liaison Officer stationed at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. It was transmitted to the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. Its subject was Jeffrey Epstein.

This was not a courtesy communication or a diplomatic formality. It was classified intelligence, produced through formal channels, transmitted embassy-to-bureau. A second dissemination, NCAWAS-20-081, followed in June 2020 (EFTA00148680). Internal NCA correspondence references a prior meeting between NCA officers and FBI personnel, indicating that the January dissemination was itself the product of an established coordination process.

The NCA emails released under the EFTA reveal what this pipeline was carrying. The intelligence concerned Epstein’s British connections—his financial infrastructure, his social network within British institutions, and the transactions that connected them. The correspondence shows NCA officers coordinating with the FBI’s New York Field Office, specifically its Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Unit, and routing financial intelligence through the UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU) to the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

One exchange is particularly revealing. On September 11, 2020, an NCA officer wrote regarding the routing of UK-captured financial intelligence to the FBI (EFTA00149055):

“The assumption at our end previously has been that FBI will know it already given the US financial institutions/entities. However, it may be that the reporting is only being filed in the jurisdiction of the UK due to their legal obligations. If that’s the case I’ll get the UKFIU to put a marker on anything coming in to make sure nothing slips through the gaps.”

The NCA was discovering, in real time, that British financial systems were capturing Epstein-related transactions that the FBI may not have had. The United Kingdom’s own financial surveillance infrastructure—the system that monitors suspicious transactions filed by banks operating under UK jurisdiction—was generating intelligence about Epstein’s network that American authorities potentially lacked.

The NCA officer’s proposed solution was to flag all incoming Epstein-related financial intelligence for immediate forwarding. This was not a one-off tip. It was the establishment of a standing mechanism for routing British-captured financial intelligence about Epstein’s operations to the FBI.

What the Pipeline Was Carrying

The NCA emails reveal the scope of what British intelligence had captured.

Among the subjects discussed in the NCA-FBI correspondence was the case designated 'IVEAGH'—a reference to Clare Guinness (née Hazell), styled Countess of Iveagh following her 2001 marriage to Arthur Edward Rory Guinness, 4th Earl of Iveagh, of the Guinness brewing family. The NCA's formal June 30, 2020 dissemination (EFTA00037470) documents the posture precisely: the NCA was not itself investigating Lady Iveagh, but was transmitting open-source allegations against her to the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division at the request of the NSPCC — the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children — because the NSPCC was conducting an internal review of her fitness to continue as President of its West Sussex branch. The NCA's August 2020 correspondence (EFTA00148721) shows officers seeking the FBI's view on whether the NSPCC's parallel review would adversely affect US operations. The transmission itself indicates that the NCA's engagement with the FBI on Epstein's British network included child safeguarding dimensions, not merely financial irregularities — and that a UK child protection charity was holding its internal review of a named subject pending guidance from Washington.

The same email chain contains a partially unredacted reference to financial intelligence captured on “Epstein’s former pilot.” UK financial systems were capturing transaction data on individuals within Epstein’s immediate operational circle—people who facilitated the logistics of his activities—and this intelligence was being routed to the FBI through the NCA. British banks, operating under UK reporting obligations, were filing suspicious activity reports on Epstein-adjacent transactions that American institutions may not have flagged.

The reference number DP214135, which appears across multiple documents in the chain, indicates this was a catalogued, tracked intelligence matter—not informal cooperation but a formally managed case with its own institutional paper trail within the NCA.

The Timeline

The NCA’s intelligence pipeline was operational from at least January 2020. The documents show active coordination through September 2020 and, as subsequent records demonstrate, the financial intelligence it generated was still being managed by the FBI as late as April 2023.

Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour Party on April 4, 2020—three months after the NCA’s first formal Epstein dissemination from the British Embassy.

But the timeline extends further back. From 2008 to 2013, Starmer served as Director of Public Prosecutions — head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the organization that prosecutes all cases investigated by the NCA and its predecessor, the Serious Organised Crime Agency. The DPP's relationship with the NCA is not advisory. Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the DPP holds formal investigatory powers that are physically executed by NCA officers: the DPP issues disclosure notices; NCA staff conduct the interviews. The DPP authorizes search warrants; NCA officers carry them out. The CPS's specialist Serious Economic, Organised Crime and International Directorate exists specifically to handle NCA-investigated cases. Starmer himself acknowledged in 2013 that SOCA was one of the agencies feeding cases directly into his office. The man who says "none of us knew" spent five years running the institution structurally designed to know.

This is not the first time Starmer has claimed that institutional knowledge held by the CPS never reached him. In January 2024, following ITV's dramatization of the Post Office Horizon scandal, Starmer faced questions about why the CPS prosecuted sub-postmasters based on data from a system already known to be faulty — while he was DPP. The CPS brought at least eleven Horizon-related prosecutions during Starmer's tenure, including the case of Seema Misra, a sub-postmistress convicted and jailed in 2010 while pregnant — a conviction quashed in 2021 after it emerged the Post Office had concealed evidence of Horizon's defects. Starmer said he "wasn't aware" of the cases. The CPS said it had destroyed the relevant records. Under Section 6(2) of the Prosecution of Offences Act, the DPP holds the statutory power to take over any private prosecution and discontinue it — a power Starmer did not exercise despite public reporting on Horizon's failures as early as 2009. The pattern is consistent: institutional knowledge existed within the system Starmer led, Starmer says it never reached him, and the records that might confirm or deny that claim have been destroyed.

Peter Mandelson was appointed Ambassador to the United States in December 2024—nearly five years after the NCA began its classified intelligence operation on Epstein’s British connections.

Any appointment to a post as sensitive as the Washington ambassadorship requires security vetting. Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein was already a matter of extensive public record. The question that the NCA documents raise is not whether the vetting process should have examined Mandelson’s Epstein connections—that much is obvious—but whether it accessed the United Kingdom’s own classified intelligence on those connections.

It is possible, and indeed standard practice, for operational intelligence to be compartmentalized—held within the agency conducting the investigation and not automatically shared with other parts of government, including those responsible for political appointments. The UK’s vetting system does not necessarily draw on every classified investigation across every agency. If that compartmentalization functioned as designed, it would mean that the NCA’s Epstein intelligence remained within the NCA and was not surfaced during Mandelson’s vetting. That possibility does not resolve the problem. It reframes it.

Compartmentalization is designed to protect active operations from political interference — not to shield an incoming prime minister from his own government’s intelligence during a sensitive ambassadorial appointment. And in Starmer’s case, the institutional distance is unusually short. He did not merely lead the Labour Party while the NCA ran its Epstein operation. He previously led the prosecution service that works hand-in-glove with the NCA as a matter of statutory design. The DPP and the NCA do not merely cooperate — they share investigatory powers under the same statute. Due diligence is not incidental to that role. It is the role.

If the vetting process accessed the NCA’s intelligence, then the British government appointed Mandelson with knowledge of what that intelligence contained. If the vetting process did not access the NCA’s intelligence—if the UK’s own classified investigation into Epstein’s British connections was excluded from the security vetting of his most prominent British associate—then the vetting system failed to surface exactly the kind of information it exists to find.

We no longer need to speculate about which scenario applies. On Feb 5, 2026, on the floor of the House of Commons, Starmer was asked directly whether Mandelson’s official security vetting mentioned his ongoing relationship with Epstein. Starmer’s answer: “Yes it did.” He confirmed that “various questions were put to him,” and that Mandelson “completely misrepresented the extent of his relationship with Epstein and lied throughout the process including in response to the due diligence.”

This is not the defense Starmer intends it to be. It is its collapse. “None of us knew” is no longer operative once the Prime Minister confirms the vetting flagged the relationship. The government knew enough to ask. It accepted the answer it was given. And it did not verify that answer against intelligence its own agencies held — including the NCA’s structured reporting from the British Embassy documented in these files, and the financial intelligence pipeline that was actively capturing Epstein-linked transactions through UKFIU-to-FinCEN channels at the time of Mandelson’s appointment.

The question is no longer whether the intelligence existed. It is why the systems designed to act on it deferred to the word of the man they were vetting.

Either answer is serious. Both contradict Starmer’s claim that “none of us knew.” The British government’s own agencies possessed the knowledge. The question is whether it reached the people who made the decision—and if not, why not.

The Financial Trail, 2023

The intelligence pipeline did not end with the NCA’s 2020 operations. Documents released under the EFTA show the financial surveillance apparatus generating and managing Epstein-related intelligence through at least April 2023.

On Friday, March 24, 2023, the Chief Counsel of FinCEN personally contacted the FBI’s FinCEN Liaison Officer about an urgent matter. The subject was the disclosure of Suspicious Activity Reports related to Jeffrey Epstein in civil litigation pending in the Southern District of New York: Doe v. JP Morgan Chase, Doe v. Deutsche Bank, and USVI v. JP Morgan (EFTA00162401).

The scale was extraordinary. FinCEN was asking the FBI to deconflict the release of SARs against an active investigation designated NY-3027571—the Epstein investigation file. The names requiring deconfliction arrived in multiple tranches: an initial batch delivered March 27, supplemental names on March 28 and 29 from Deutsche Bank filings, and ten additional names on April 4 (EFTA00162415). The FBI’s FinCEN unit—staffed, as the emails reveal, by just two employees handling all FinCEN liaison matters—was overwhelmed. “This is a long list, it will take time,” the liaison officer wrote. “It will not be ready by COB today.”

The entities named in the unredacted portions of the deconfliction list included Nautilus Inc, Sotheby’s, and Robert Trivers, along with forty-two other names that remain redacted. A supplemental request on April 18 added Haywood Securities Inc, George Schidlovsky, Sol Global Investments, AVL Canada, and IGY-AYH St. Thomas Holdings, LLC (EFTA00162401).

One detail in the FinCEN correspondence is critical for the timeline. The Chief Counsel’s office explained that “many of the involved SARs referred to transactions that took place over a decade ago, though some of the reports themselves were not filed until roughly a decade later, after Epstein’s arrest” (EFTA00144231). Financial institutions were filing retrospective suspicious activity reports on Epstein-related transactions well into the 2020s. The financial surveillance system was not merely reviewing old records—it was generating new reports about historical Epstein network transactions years after his death.

The FBI’s response, after consultation with the New York field office and SDNY, was to object to the release of all forty-five names—not just those connected to the Ghislaine Maxwell appeal, but every name on the list (EFTA00162415). When the FinCEN liaison asked whether the objection covered “just Maxwell or all the 45 names,” the answer was unequivocal: “The objection will be for all the names.”

This financial intelligence apparatus—the same system that the NCA had been feeding British-captured transaction data into since 2020—was actively processing Epstein-related information eighteen months before Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador.

In summary, the Epstein case did not end in 2019. His financial network remained under active review and legal protection as recently as 2023.