“PAY THE BAD GUYS”: The Six-Year Private Operation in Which a Convicted Sex Offender Directed Gates Foundation Strategy in Taliban Territory, Committed Its Funds, and Designed Its Anonymity
On the afternoon of June 9, 2013, Jeffrey Epstein's personal Gmail account was, for roughly two hours, the operational center of a covert foreign policy apparatus serving the Gates Foundation. At 1:09 PM, former UN Under-Secretary-General Terje Rød-Larsen forwarded Epstein a classified field intelligence package on Taliban backchannel communications, ghost workers, and ghost children in Pakistan's vaccination program. At 3:39 PM, Epstein forwarded the package to Bill Gates's chief science advisor, Boris Nikolic. One minute later, Epstein wrote back to Rød-Larsen with a five-word reply: "bg will send 5 million to start." He was committing Bill Gates's money to a UN diplomat, outside any formal grant process, having just relayed Taliban intelligence to a foundation executive, on a Sunday, from a Gmail account.
Part 6 of the full Epstein Files Series documented the intelligence channel through which Terje Rød-Larsen routed field reports from Pakistan and Nigeria through Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Gmail to Bill Gates’s chief science advisor, Boris Nikolic. That article established the mechanism: what information moved, how fast, and who received it.
This installment, Part 13, documents what was being debated inside that channel — in the weeks before it became fully operational. The question it forces is not merely one of legal exposure. It is a question about who was actually running Gates Foundation field strategy in conflict zones, and on whose moral compass that strategy was calibrated.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The FCPA question. On March 5, 2013, Jeffrey Epstein asked Boris Nikolic whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act applies to foundation work in Afghanistan. Not a lawyer. Not the Gates Foundation’s legal counsel. Epstein. That routing tells you where decision-making authority actually resided.
The Machiavelli position. The following day, Epstein asked: if paying tribal leaders is the only way to vaccinate children in Taliban territory — even knowing the money may buy weapons — is it justified? Nikolic said yes, invoking Machiavelli by name. His note on Gates: “Bill is much more reluctant/negative re this.” The covert apparatus had its own moral logic. Gates, by this account, was its most hesitant participant — not its architect.
Rød-Larsen in the room. The same day, Rød-Larsen had left Epstein’s office twenty minutes earlier. The ethics debate and the intelligence operation were not sequential. They were the same conversation.
"My guys." The day before Rød-Larsen submitted his formal brief, Epstein replied to Nikolic's forwarding of a polio document prepared for "bin Talal, a friend of Bill": "my guys would prefer specific asks." He asked where the money would go and who the "pivot point" was for the help requested. Epstein was not freelancing. He was representing principals with operational preferences, vetting intelligence before committing resources, and linking the field operations explicitly to a Nobel Prize initiative. Someone in this network was pursuing a Nobel Peace Prize. The field operations were part of that strategy.
The chain confirmed operational. One week later, Rød-Larsen’s brief to Epstein opened: “I will of course do anything you ask, and follow your lead.” A former UN Under-Secretary-General was reporting to Jeffrey Epstein. Nikolic forwarded it to Gates the same day.
June corroboration. Three months later, Taliban backchannel intelligence traveled from Rød-Larsen’s tribal contacts to Nikolic’s inbox in a single Sunday afternoon. That same week, Nikolic privately agreed that Gates’s own program staff were “a bunch of women with good intentions and no real capability” — and referenced the DAF architecture and the IPI channel in the same sentence. Because they were the same project.
bg will send 5 million to start.” One minute after forwarding the Paris intelligence package to Nikolic, Epstein sent a separate five-word reply to Rød-Larsen directly. Gates had spoken by phone to Afghan President Karzai the previous day about polio eradication. Epstein’s response was not to note the development. It was to commit the money. In the space of a single Sunday afternoon, Epstein had relayed Taliban field intelligence upward to Gates’s science advisor and committed $5 million of Gates’s funds downward to a UN diplomat — both directions, same inbox, same two-hour window. He was not an advisor to this operation. He was running it.
The Foundation's own internal response — monitored by Epstein. In April 2013, IPI's Strasbourg meeting with Gates produced something Epstein watched in real time: the Gates Foundation stood up an internal working group on "geopolitical security issues related to polio," specifically to interface with IPI. Rød-Larsen forwarded the Foundation's internal organizational response to Epstein within hours. He was not just receiving intelligence outputs. He was watching the institutional plumbing being installed to handle them — before it held its first meeting.
Geographic expansion. By October 2013, the channel had extended to Syria. A “vaccination ceasefire” in the Syrian civil war was being workshopped inside a registered sex offender’s Gmail inbox.
“No Gates name on it. At all.” On September 4, 2013, when Pfanzelter forwarded Epstein the Gates Foundation’s formal grant proposal template for the IPI relationship — funds Gates had already committed — Epstein replied with two instructions. He offered $1 million per area per year from his own resources in parallel. And he told Rød-Larsen and Pfanzelter directly: the peace center being constructed around this operation “should not have the Gates name on it. At all.” A registered sex offender with no formal role in any of these institutions was architecting the reputational cover under which they would operate. His primary concern was keeping the most famous name in global health off the structure he was building around it.
The Question Nobody Was Supposed to Ask
Consider what it means that in March 2013, Jeffrey Epstein was the person Boris Nikolic called when he needed to think through whether tribal payments in Afghanistan crossed a federal legal line.
Not a lawyer. Not the Gates Foundation’s general counsel. Not a compliance officer at any of the institutions nominally overseeing this work. Epstein.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits U.S. persons and entities from paying foreign officials or intermediaries to obtain or retain business. Its application to private foundations operating in conflict zones is not settled law. But the question itself is the story. By March 2013, the planning had advanced to the point where someone in Epstein’s network was running FCPA exposure calculations on payments to actors in Taliban-adjacent territory — and the person they trusted to think it through was a convicted sex offender operating out of a Manhattan townhouse. (EFTA01901953)
The architecture documented in Part II of this series — Project Molecule, the “$20 million to finance the surveillance network in Pakistan” — had been a design document. By March 2013, it had become something operational enough to generate federal legal questions. The money was moving, or was about to.
The Machiavelli Debate
The following day, March 6, Epstein posed the ethical problem in terms that leave little room for euphemism.
If the only path to vaccination in Taliban-controlled territory runs through payments to the people doing the blocking — knowing that some of that money purchases weapons, funds personal enrichment, sustains the very power structures making vaccination impossible in the first place — do you pay? (EFTA01901953)
Nikolic said yes. Results justify means. Invoke Machiavelli. Purchase the access.
Then: “Bill is much more reluctant/negative re this.”
This single line does significant work. It tells us that Gates was aware, at some level, of what was being contemplated — aware enough to have a position, and a more cautious one than his own science advisor. It tells us that the debate was not occurring in a vacuum, that Gates’s reluctance had been noted, and that the people around him were proceeding with a more permissive framework regardless. And it tells us something about the structure of authority in this operation: the moral restraint, such as it was, sat with the billionaire whose name was on the foundation. The operational logic sat with the network Epstein had assembled around him.
None of this means Gates authorized illegal payments. It means he was “reluctant.” What happened after his reluctance was noted is not documented. What is documented is that Nikolic — the relay point between Epstein and Gates — held the Machiavellian position, and that the channel continued operating for years afterward.
Epstein’s own framing is worth sitting with. He imagined a scenario in which Gates’s public association with polio eradication made him a target — hostile actors tightening their grip over vaccine access precisely because of the visibility, forcing a choice between paying armed groups or abandoning the children they were blockading. “The only way to win them over,” he wrote, “is to pay the bad guys to allow vaccines.” (EFTA01901953)
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