"Plz Pass On to Bill Gates": How Confidential Polio Intelligence Intended for Gates Reached Jeffrey Epstein — and Kept Reaching Him for Five Years
Part VI of the Epstein Files Investigation Series
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Newly released Epstein files reveal that the president of a Gates Foundation-funded think tank systematically forwarded the Foundation’s confidential polio intelligence to Jeffrey Epstein for at least two years — while Epstein demanded editorial control over the organization’s grant communications with the Foundation and received material explicitly marked for Bill Gates.
The channel: Between March 2013 and March 2015, IPI president Terje Rød-Larsen forwarded at least ten sets of confidential field intelligence — including Taliban negotiation plans, military assessments, and a document marked “Strictly Confidential” — from the Gates Foundation’s polio program in Pakistan to Epstein’s personal Gmail. Simultaneously, a senior advisor at Gates’s private investment office directly solicited Epstein’s help on polio security questions.
The control: When Rød-Larsen forwarded IPI’s grant correspondence with the Gates Foundation, Epstein responded: “do not send anything else, anything! without letting me see it before it goes not after.” Epstein was not a passive recipient. He was functioning as an undisclosed gatekeeper over the IPI–Gates Foundation relationship.
The money: The Gates Foundation awarded IPI $2.5 million for polio-related work in October 2013. That same year, Epstein lent Rød-Larsen $130,000 personally. Epstein’s will later left $10 million to Rød-Larsen’s children. Norwegian police are now investigating Rød-Larsen for “aggravated corruption.”
The duration: As late as January 2018, Epstein was brokering access between Rød-Larsen and Gates’s inner circle at Davos, citing IPI’s polio work as the credential — extending the documented relationship to at least five years.
On March 9, 2013, Boris Nikolic sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein. Nikolic was a senior advisor at bgc3, Bill Gates’s private investment office in Kirkland, Washington — not an employee of the Gates Foundation itself, but a fixture in Gates’s inner circle and his former science advisor. His subject line read: “Polio — update — specific asks.” [EFTA01900866]
The email contained four operational questions about the Gates Foundation’s polio eradication campaign in Pakistan and Nigeria — the hardest, most dangerous mile of the most ambitious vaccination program in history. Nikolic wanted to know: Who can we deal with regarding violence in these regions? Who could mediate peace and advocate for vaccination? Who are the Middle East influencers? And how do we assess the willingness of the Taliban and Boko Haram to accept vaccination campaigns? [EFTA01900866]
These were not casual questions. They concerned active conflict zones, armed militant groups, and the security architecture surrounding a program into which the Gates Foundation had poured billions of dollars. Nikolic sent them to Epstein — a convicted sex offender who held no position in global health, no security clearance, and no formal role in the Foundation’s polio work.
Epstein’s reply was two words: “Im on it.” [EFTA01900866]
Five days later, the first of what would become a years-long flow of confidential polio intelligence documents landed in Epstein’s inbox. They would keep coming — growing more sensitive, more operational, and more explicitly confidential — for at least five years.
The story of Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein has been told in broad strokes: the meetings, the flights, the belated expressions of regret. But sixteen documents from the Epstein files, reviewed for this investigation, reveal something more specific and more consequential than social proximity. They show an operational channel — a sustained, bidirectional flow of confidential intelligence about one of the world’s most sensitive health programs — running through a man who had no business receiving it. And they show that man not merely receiving the information, but actively directing the flow.
The channel had three nodes. At one end sat the Gates Foundation and Gates’s private investment office. At the other sat Epstein. And in the middle — the figure who made the whole circuit function — sat Terje Rød-Larsen.
[Bill Gates (from left), Terje Rød-Larsen, Jeffrey Epstein, Boris Nikolic (advisor to Gates) and Thorbjørn Jagland]
The Diplomat
Rød-Larsen is one of the most consequential Scandinavian diplomats of the late twentieth century. Together with his wife, Mona Juul, he helped broker the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO — the handshake on the White House lawn that briefly made Middle East peace seem possible. He went on to serve as UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East and as an assistant secretary-general.
In 2005, he became president of the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank adjacent to the United Nations that specializes in conflict resolution and what practitioners call “track-two diplomacy” — the use of informal, back-channel negotiations to address problems that official channels cannot reach.
At some point in the early 2010s, Rød-Larsen also became, by his own description, Jeffrey Epstein’s “best friend.” He called Epstein “a thoroughly good human being.” The depth of their entanglement has become clearer with every document release. In 2013 — the same year the polio channel opened — Epstein lent Rød-Larsen $130,000.¹ Epstein’s will left $5 million to each of Rød-Larsen’s two children, totaling $10 million.² In 2015, Epstein ordered a $250,000 payment to Rød-Larsen for reasons that remain unexplained.³ In 2018, Epstein pressured a Norwegian shipowner into selling Rød-Larsen an Oslo apartment at half its market value, using what the seller described as “mafia methods.”⁴
Norwegian police have opened an investigation into Rød-Larsen and Juul for suspected “aggravated corruption.”⁵ Rød-Larsen resigned from IPI in October 2020 after his financial ties to Epstein were first revealed.⁶ His lawyer has said he is too ill from recent strokes to respond to media inquiries.⁷
Harald Stanghelle, a political commentator for the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, has described Rød-Larsen as “not merely a pawn in Epstein’s game but a spider at the centre of the web.”⁸ None of the prior reporting, however, has examined what Rød-Larsen was regularly sending Epstein — or the degree of control Epstein exercised over Rød-Larsen’s institutional relationships.
The Program
The Gates Foundation’s polio campaign in Pakistan was not merely a vaccination drive. By 2013, it had become one of the most complex private health-security operations on earth. Pakistan was one of only three countries where polio remained endemic, and the last cases were concentrated in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands controlled by competing Taliban factions, where CIA drone strikes were a near-daily occurrence and where, in 2011, the agency had used a fake vaccination campaign as cover for intelligence collection in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
That revelation had poisoned community trust in vaccinators. In June 2012, Taliban commanders in North Waziristan imposed a ban on polio drops. Health workers were being shot. And the Foundation — which IPI’s own documents describe as having provided the impetus for Pakistan’s National Emergency Action Plan for polio eradication, calling it “the brainchild of the Gates Foundation” [EFTA00962574] — needed something it could not buy on the open market: ground-level political intelligence from inside the tribal areas, back-channel negotiations with armed groups, and discreet mediation with actors that no American organization could approach directly.
It needed exactly the kind of work that Rød-Larsen’s International Peace Institute specialized in.
An undated IPI briefing document, marked “CONFIDENTIAL — DO NOT CIRCULATE,” was prepared for what it called a “BMGF Security and Access Strategy Session.” It laid out the situation in stark terms: Pakistan had been near eradication before the bin Laden raid and the “preceding fake vaccination campaign.” It recommended that the Gates Foundation “refrain from taking any kind of high-profile role in security-related issues.” [EFTA00591873]
This document appeared in the Epstein files. So did everything that followed.
Five Days
Five days after Nikolic’s email to Epstein, on March 14, 2013, IPI staff member Walter Kemp sent an urgent message to Rød-Larsen and colleagues — subject line: “Urgent — draft paper on polio,” with an attachment titled “polio eradication.docx.” Kemp asked whether they should add the IPI logo. [EFTA01901973]
Rød-Larsen forwarded the email and its attachment to Epstein’s personal Gmail: jeevacation@gmail.com. [EFTA01901973]
On March 9, Nikolic asks Epstein for help with polio. On March 14, the first IPI polio document arrives in Epstein’s inbox via Rød-Larsen. The channel was open.
What followed, over the next two years and beyond, was a systematic pattern: IPI’s field researcher, Nasra Hassan — a former senior UN official with deep contacts in Pakistan’s tribal areas — would produce intelligence reports and send them to Rød-Larsen, IPI Vienna Director Andrea Pfanzelter, and Kemp. Rød-Larsen would forward them to Epstein.
The Intelligence
The material Rød-Larsen sent to Epstein was not public health data. It was political and security intelligence of a kind that governments produce — and protect.
In early April 2013, IPI met with Bill Gates in person at Strasbourg. A draft follow-up letter quoted Gates observing that “the last millimetre seems to be the hardest.” IPI offered help with “very specific security, political and social conditions at local level.” [EFTA01985821] This letter appeared in the Epstein files.
On May 3, 2013, Hassan sent Rød-Larsen a field report from a five-day mission to Pakistan’s tribal areas (April 27 to May 1). It described meetings with tribal leaders, assessments of Taliban dynamics, and detailed accounts of corruption — phantom vaccination teams, fabricated numbers of children vaccinated. Hassan noted meeting a Gates Foundation employee, Dr. Waqar Ajmal, “by coincidence” while in Pakistan. Pfanzelter added a cautionary note: “If it is sent on, you should make it clear these are just first impressions.” [EFTA00657797]
Rød-Larsen sent it on — to Epstein. [EFTA00657797]
On May 30, 2013, the circuit completed itself. Epstein forwarded a polio update to Nikolic at Gates’s private office. A CIA drone had killed the Pakistani Taliban’s second-in-command, Wali ur Rahman, complicating polio negotiations. Hassan was described as “working behind the scenes to get the ‘new’ Govt to include polio issues in their negotiations with TTP.” [EFTA00961839] Nikolic had asked Epstein for help. Now Epstein was sending operational intelligence back.
On June 9, 2013, the most substantively rich package arrived. Hassan sent Rød-Larsen updated talking points for a Paris meeting the following day, accompanied by the complete IPI Mission Report. The document reported that a “discreet confidential enquiry” had yielded a Taliban response “not yet in the public domain.” IPI’s plans included working “very confidentially and discreetly via intermediaries” with Taliban groups, attempting to get Mullah Omar to support polio eradication, and recommending that Gates make direct contact with Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff. [EFTA00962574]
The document explicitly stated that IPI’s information was “based on direct talks with representatives from the major tribes and other groups in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas (some close to the Taliban)” and obtained “on a strictly confidential basis from other sources.” [EFTA00962574]
All of it — talking points, executive summary, full Mission Report — went to Epstein. [EFTA00962574]
The Gatekeeper
On October 1, 2013, IPI’s Director of Finance, David Witt, wrote to Amy Carter at the Gates Foundation (Amy.Carter@gatesfoundation.org) requesting general operating support of $1.0 to $2.5 million and project support of $2.5 to $4.0 million. The correspondence — routine grant negotiation between a think tank and its prospective funder — referenced a prior meeting in Seattle and was copied to Rød-Larsen. [EFTA00972411]
Rød-Larsen forwarded the entire email chain to Epstein. [EFTA00972411]
Epstein’s response, on October 9, 2013, redefines his role in the story: “do not send anything else, anything! without letting me see it before it goes not after. please. the idea that there is no accounting after months will present a problem.” [EFTA00972411]
This is not a man passively receiving forwarded intelligence. Epstein was demanding pre-approval of IPI’s communications with the Gates Foundation. He wanted to review documents before they were sent to the Foundation — not after. He was asserting editorial control over the grant relationship itself.
Two weeks later, on October 23, 2013, the Gates Foundation signed a grant agreement with IPI for $2.5 million in “General Operating Support,” covering October 2013 through October 2015. The agreement was addressed to Rød-Larsen. An attached document was titled “IPI Support for Polio Eradication.” [EFTA01113710]
The same year, Epstein lent Rød-Larsen $130,000 in a personal loan.¹
The Channel Deepens
The forwarding continued and the material grew more sensitive.
On November 7, 2013, Hassan sent Rød-Larsen a twelve-section operational update covering Taliban positioning, Pakistani Army covert involvement in the polio campaign, corruption, expired vaccines, the Syria-Pakistan polio transmission link, and plans to establish “additional, new parallel ‘channels.’” The report described IPI’s covert diplomacy as having achieved, “completely under the radar,” a “softening” in the Taliban position. Hassan acknowledged that the Taliban’s charge that “spies” enter tribal areas “under the guise of anti-polio health workers” had “some truth to this.” She reported that the Pakistani Army was secretly supporting the polio campaign “but keeping this strictly under wraps, with no info appearing in the press.” [EFTA00975983]
Rød-Larsen forwarded it to Epstein. [EFTA00975983]
On January 23, 2014, Kemp sent Rød-Larsen a document whose filename tells its own story: “polio_notes_for_TRL_BG_meeting.pdf” — briefing notes for a direct meeting between Terje Rød-Larsen and Bill Gates on polio. [EFTA01148951]
Rød-Larsen forwarded the meeting preparation materials to Epstein. [EFTA01148951]
On June 16, 2014, Hassan sent a military-intelligence-grade assessment: drone strikes conducted “upon request of Pak Govt,” cross-border militant movements, tribesmen fleeing into Afghanistan in numbers that threatened to “destabilize Afghanistan just days before & after 14 June runoff elections.” [EFTA01918556]
Rød-Larsen forwarded it to Epstein. [EFTA01918556]
On August 20, 2014, Rød-Larsen sent Epstein an email whose subject line requires no interpretation: “Fwd: Striclty Confidential: Polio update.” The attachment was titled “Update Polio Pakistan 19 August 2014_Stricly Confidential.pdf.” The document labeled itself as confidential. Rød-Larsen sent it to Epstein’s personal email regardless. [EFTA02717812]
“Plz Pass On to Bill Gates”
On February 18, 2015, Hassan sent Rød-Larsen a report on the first suicide bombing connected to polio — two bombers had detonated in Zhob, Balochistan, during a search-and-rescue operation for a kidnapped polio team. Four bodies were recovered. Hassan mapped the militant groups involved — TTP, Jundallah, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — assessed the geo-strategic significance of the Zhob corridor, and concluded that dialogue with militant groups was, following the Peshawar school massacre, “for the present, neither possible nor recommended.” [EFTA00864113]
Her subject line read: “Urgent, Confi, plz pass on to Bill Gates.” [EFTA00864113]
Hassan was asking Rød-Larsen to forward the report to Gates. On February 19, 2015, Rød-Larsen forwarded it — to Jeffrey Epstein. [EFTA00864113]
Whether it also reached Gates is unknown. What is documented is that material explicitly intended for Bill Gates’s eyes was routed to Epstein’s inbox. Hassan believed she was writing for one audience. The document reached a different one.
On March 21, 2015, Hassan sent another urgent backgrounder, this one on attacks against polio workers in Bajaur and Mansehra. The report opened with five words: “BMGF has requested info, herewith.” The Gates Foundation had asked IPI for information. IPI produced it — based on “two days of research, including via interlocutors with good sources.” [EFTA00670728]
Rød-Larsen forwarded it to Epstein. [EFTA00670728]
Five Years
The conventional understanding of the Gates-Epstein relationship is that it ended, or at least cooled, sometime around 2014. The polio documents tell a different story.
On January 25, 2018 — nearly five years after the channel opened — Epstein wrote to Larry Cohen at bgc3, Gates’s private investment office (Larry.Cohen@bgc3.com). The email read: “Terje Larsen asked if bill could dare a few minutes Tomorrow in Davos. Recall opinion worked on polio for him.” [EFTA02534783]
Epstein was brokering a meeting between Rød-Larsen and Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, using IPI’s polio work as the credential for the request. Cohen, busy at the conference, tried to find time but couldn’t. [EFTA02534783]
This email confirms that as late as January 2018, Epstein was still serving as the intermediary between Rød-Larsen and Gates’s inner circle — and that the polio work remained the currency of that relationship. The recipient, Larry Cohen at bgc3.com, was at the same institution as Boris Nikolic, who had started the chain in March 2013.
Health as Statecraft
The documents reviewed for this investigation describe something that has no comfortable name in the vocabulary of global health.
The Gates Foundation’s polio program in Pakistan was, by the evidence of IPI’s own reports, a de facto exercise in statecraft. IPI was not conducting epidemiological research. It was running back-channel negotiations with armed groups in a nuclear-armed state. It was gathering intelligence from sources “close to the Taliban.” [EFTA00962574] It was assessing Pakistani military operations [EFTA01918556] and recommending that Bill Gates personally contact the Chief of the Army Staff. [EFTA00962574] It was mapping militant factions [EFTA00864113], evaluating the credibility of Taliban cease-fire signals [EFTA00975983], and planning covert diplomatic outreach [EFTA00962574] — all funded by a private philanthropy [EFTA01113710] and conducted outside any governmental authority, legislative mandate, or public accountability structure.
None of this was inherently illegitimate. The polio eradication campaign in Pakistan faced genuine security challenges that required political engagement. The question is not whether the work was necessary, but who oversaw it — and the answer these documents provide is: effectively no one.
Readers of this series will recognize the architecture. Part II documented Project Molecule's explicit budget line: "$20M — Finance the surveillance network in Pakistan" — not aid to a ministry, but the financing of intelligence infrastructure outside sovereign consent. The polio channel is the operational reality behind that line item: a ground-level intelligence network in Pakistan's tribal areas, funded by the Gates Foundation, managed by IPI, and routed through Epstein's personal email. Part IV documented Rød-Larsen forwarding a "Nexus Centre for peace and health" concept paper to Epstein in September 2014, updated for Ebola — what appeared to be a single data point in the securitization of health. These documents reveal it was not a one-off. By September 2014, Rød-Larsen had been forwarding confidential material to Epstein for eighteen months. The Ebola concept paper was simply the most institutionally ambitious piece of an intelligence-sharing pattern that was already deeply established. And the same Larry Cohen at bgc3 who coordinated DAF strategy with Epstein and Gates Foundation staff in Part IV reappears here in January 2018, still receiving Epstein's requests to broker access — now using the polio work as currency.
The intelligence flowed from Hassan in the field, to Rød-Larsen at IPI, to Epstein’s personal Gmail, and in some cases onward to Gates’s private office. [EFTA00961839] The man at the center of the relay — Rød-Larsen — was simultaneously receiving personal financial benefits from Epstein and institutional funding from the Gates Foundation. [EFTA01113710] The man who demanded editorial control over IPI’s grant communications with the Foundation — Epstein [EFTA00972411] — held no formal position in any of the institutions involved. And the Foundation whose confidential materials circulated through this network had, so far as the documents reveal, no mechanism to detect that it was happening.
This is what private power in global health looks like when accountability structures fail: a vaccination program becomes an intelligence operation, an intelligence operation becomes a diplomatic channel, a diplomatic channel runs through a convicted sex offender’s inbox, and no one outside the circuit knows.
What We Don’t Know
There is no document in this set showing that Bill Gates personally knew Rød-Larsen was forwarding confidential polio intelligence to Epstein, or that he authorized it. There is no document showing that Gates Foundation leadership was aware of Epstein’s role as a gatekeeper in IPI’s grant communications. Nikolic’s and Cohen’s emails to Epstein were sent from bgc3 addresses — Gates’s private office — not from Gates Foundation emails, though the subject matter concerned Foundation programs. [EFTA01900866; EFTA02534783]
The documents do not reveal what Epstein did with the intelligence he received, or what motivated Rød-Larsen’s forwarding pattern. They do not explain whether Epstein’s role was as an informal advisor, a financial patron seeking influence, or something else entirely.
What the documents do establish is a governance failure whose scope is difficult to overstate. The Gates Foundation funded IPI to the tune of $2.5 million for polio-related work. [EFTA01113710] IPI produced confidential security briefings for the Foundation. [EFTA00591873] IPI’s president met personally with Bill Gates to discuss polio strategy. [EFTA01985821; EFTA01148951] And that same president systematically forwarded IPI’s most sensitive outputs to a convicted sex offender — who was simultaneously demanding pre-approval of communications with the Foundation [EFTA00972411], receiving material explicitly intended for Gates [EFTA00864113], brokering access between IPI and Gates’s inner circle [EFTA02534783], and providing Rød-Larsen with personal financial benefits.
The Question
The polio eradication program in Pakistan is one of the great undertakings of modern public health. The people who built it have worked for decades, at genuine personal risk, to eliminate a disease that paralyzes children. Vaccination workers have been murdered. The difficulty is real.
But the documents in this investigation reveal something beyond the Gates-Epstein social relationship that has already been reported. They reveal a sustained operational circuit through which confidential security intelligence — produced by a Gates-funded organization [EFTA01113710], sometimes at the Foundation’s direct request [EFTA00670728], sometimes explicitly intended for Gates himself [EFTA00864113] — was routed to a convicted sex offender who, according to the email record, exercised influence over institutional communications [EFTA00972411], and leveraging the polio work to maintain access to Gates’s inner circle for half a decade. [EFTA02534783]
The question is not whether Bill Gates “knew” Jeffrey Epstein. The question is: How did the world’s largest private health foundation lose control of its own intelligence — and who, if anyone, is asking?
Questions for the Gates Foundation
The Gates Foundation may wish to clarify:
Whether it was aware that IPI materials were being forwarded externally.
Whether any internal review was conducted.
Whether bgc3 and Foundation communications were formally separated in governance.
What safeguards now exist for sensitive geopolitical intelligence generated through grantees.
Read and share the X thread dedicated to this post.
Part VI of the Epstein Files Investigation Series
Notes
¹ Rød-Larsen’s $130,000 personal loan from Epstein in 2013 was first reported by Dagens Næringsliv and confirmed in Rød-Larsen’s October 21, 2020 letter to IPI’s board. (PassBlue, October 29, 2020)
² Epstein’s will bequeathing $5 million to each of Rød-Larsen’s two children was reported in the January 2026 Epstein files release. (News in English Norway, February 3, 2026)
³ Epstein’s $250,000 payment to Rød-Larsen in 2015 was reported by Dagens Næringsliv. (AFP/France24, February 11, 2026)
⁴ Morits Skaugen’s account of Epstein pressuring the apartment sale was reported by VG. (AFP/France24, February 11, 2026; Daily Sabah, February 11, 2026)
⁵ Norwegian police investigation into Rød-Larsen and Juul for “aggravated corruption” was announced in February 2026. (AFP/France24, February 11, 2026)
⁶ Rød-Larsen’s resignation from IPI on October 29, 2020. (PassBlue, October 29, 2020)
⁷ Rød-Larsen’s lawyer John Christian Elden stated his client was too ill to respond. (AFP/France24, February 11, 2026)
⁸ Harald Stanghelle’s characterization of Rød-Larsen. (AFP/France24, February 11, 2026)
This is Part 1 in a series.
Polio itself is questionable.
In effect this operation also feels like the strategic framework of 'create the problem to offer a solution'.
Clearly, you (Sayer) have spent a lot of time figuring out all the stages of this complicated expose'. But it was still too complicated for me to understand. One of the first problems I encountered is that you, one of my hero anti-vaccine advocates, one of the "Disinformation Dozen," seemed to be writing an article that accepts the notion that polio vaccines work. You describe " the most ambitious vaccination program in history," which suggests that you thought it could achieve its stated goals, though in the past you have critiqued polio vax programs. I hope I simply misunderstood your intent. If a sixth grader couldn't follow it, then your readers would also have a hard time seeing your point. Find a sixth grader.