The British Embassy in Washington Had a Jeffrey Epstein File. Then London Sent His Best Friend to Run It.
What the documentary record shows British government agencies were doing on Jeffrey Epstein's network — for five years before Peter Mandelson was appointed ambassador to the United States
A note from the author: I have been reporting on American and British institutional entanglements with Jeffrey Epstein’s network since the U.S. Department of Justice released roughly three million pages of files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act earlier this year. I am also a named plaintiff in Finn et al. v. Global Engagement Center et al., a federal civil rights case in the Middle District of Florida, against several of the institutional actors adjacent to the British political networks described below — including the Center for Countering Digital Hate. I disclose this so that the reader can weigh the evidence accordingly. The documents cited here are primary sources, verifiable against the DOJ release, and speak for themselves.
Most Americans have not been following the scandal that is currently consuming the British government. It is worth a paragraph of background before the real story begins.
In December 2024, Britain’s newly elected Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, announced that Peter Mandelson — a Labour Party elder, former European Union trade chief, and longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein — would be the United Kingdom’s next ambassador to the United States. Mandelson had written to Epstein in 2009 calling him “my best pal.” He had stayed at Epstein’s New York residence while Epstein was serving his Florida sentence for soliciting a minor. In September 2025, after further correspondence surfaced, Starmer fired him. In February 2026, British police arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office while in government.
Last week, The Guardian revealed that Britain’s own security service had recommended against granting Mandelson the clearance required for the ambassadorship — and that the Foreign Office had overruled the recommendation. The permanent head of the Foreign Office was forced to resign. On Monday, Starmer told the House of Commons he had not been told about the failed vetting, called it “frankly staggering,” and survived the day only narrowly. Sir Olly Robbins, the former Foreign Office chief, testifies before Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee tomorrow morning. Members will ask him who overruled the security service, and when the Prime Minister knew.
American readers may recognize one adjacent name from this political orbit. In December 2025, the U.S. State Department placed a visa ban on Imran Ahmed, the British-born founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, as part of a foreign-policy sanctions package that also named the former European Union commissioner Thierry Breton and the CEO of the Global Disinformation Index, Clare Melford. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the group of having “led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” A federal judge in the Southern District of New York temporarily blocked Ahmed’s deportation. The litigation is ongoing. What most Americans following that case may not know is that the Center for Countering Digital Hate was created, according to the investigative reporting of Paul Holden in The Fraud and of Matt Taibbi in Racket News, inside the British Labour Party’s internal factional apparatus, by operatives who were direct protégés of Peter Mandelson. The same British political network that produced Britain’s ambassador to the United States also produced the institution whose U.S.-based CEO is now facing deportation for attempting to influence American speech from abroad.
Those are narrow scandals, each confined to its own paperwork. The broader question is available on the public record. It belongs in Tuesday’s hearing, in the Ahmed litigation, and in the American press. And it is, properly understood, an American story — about what a foreign government was doing inside its own embassy on American soil, for five years, before it sent Jeffrey Epstein’s closest British correspondent to run the building.
A phone call in November 2019
Jeffrey Epstein died in a federal jail cell in August 2019. He had been arrested a month earlier by the FBI on federal sex-trafficking charges. The United States had spent the better part of a decade failing to bring him to trial, and in the weeks after his death, pressure built across jurisdictions to reconstruct what had been missed.
In November of that year, the Financial Conduct Authority — the British equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — picked up the phone to another British agency, the National Crime Agency. The FCA had reason to believe, they said, that Jeffrey Epstein had been in a close personal relationship with Jes Staley, then Chief Executive of Barclays, one of the largest banks in the world. The FCA had already been in contact with the U.S. Department of Justice about it. Staley was later banned from senior financial roles for having misled the regulator about that relationship.
That phone call was the start of what would become a continuous, multi-agency, classified British intelligence operation on Jeffrey Epstein’s British network. It was run, by design, from the British Embassy in Washington.
What an embassy is for
An embassy is not just a building where diplomats hand out visas. It is the physical and legal interface between two governments on foreign soil. Inside the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, along with the ambassador and his political staff, are officers seconded from British law enforcement agencies — including the National Crime Agency, Britain’s closest equivalent to the FBI. Their job is to handle cases that cross the Atlantic, working directly with their American counterparts.
On January 6, 2020, the National Crime Agency’s International Liaison Officer at the embassy transmitted a formal classified intelligence document to the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. The document is catalogued in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Epstein files release as EFTA01721768. Its subject line is plain: “Intelligence for FBI — Payments linked to Jeffrey EPSTEIN.”
It was not a tip, and it was not a courtesy. It was a finished intelligence product. It traced Epstein-connected payments across at least fourteen named international banks, in six currencies, running from 2010 through 2019. It identified four corporate vehicles under Epstein’s beneficial ownership. It named specific accounts, specific dates, specific amounts. And it stated its own purpose, in the document’s own words: “to assist in potential child sexual exploitation and human trafficking investigations.”
This is a detail the American reader may want to sit with. The government of the United Kingdom had produced a classified dossier on Jeffrey Epstein’s financial architecture, with the explicit purpose of assisting American investigations into the sexual exploitation of children, and had hand-delivered it to the FBI from a building on Massachusetts Avenue — five and a half months after Epstein’s death, four and a half months into the first wave of American public reckoning with what his network had been.
The Iveagh notification
Five months later, on June 30, 2020, the National Crime Agency transmitted a second formal document from the same embassy to the same FBI unit. This one, catalogued as EFTA00037470, named a specific British subject: Clare, Countess of Iveagh, at that time the President of the West Sussex branch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children — Britain’s oldest and largest child-protection charity.
The NCA document flagged publicly reported allegations that Lady Iveagh had been a close contact of Jeffrey Epstein, and that she had traveled and stayed with him on multiple occasions. It asked the FBI whether a parallel British child-safeguarding review would interfere with American investigations. It requested that the matter be handled with sensitivity and not made public.
Whatever the reader’s prior views on British aristocratic philanthropy, this moment in the documentary record is worth registering. The British state, acting through a classified channel into American law enforcement, was actively managing the implications of its own citizens’ proximity to Jeffrey Epstein — including people serving in senior positions of trust involving children.
The marker system
By late August 2020, the operation had begun to generate a peculiar institutional problem. British banks, operating under British legal obligations to file reports on suspicious financial activity, were capturing Epstein-related transactions that American institutions apparently had not. The NCA officer in Washington began routing this material to the FBI through Britain’s financial intelligence unit — the UK equivalent of America’s FinCEN — and on September 11, 2020 (EFTA00148721), he wrote something remarkable to his American counterpart.
He said, essentially: we’d been assuming the FBI already had this, because the underlying U.S. financial institutions should have flagged it. But it looks like the reporting is only surfacing on our side, because of British legal obligations you don’t have. So let us put a standing marker on anything coming in, and route it to you systematically, to make sure nothing slips through the gaps.
The officer whose region this fell under was identified in the thread, unredacted: Paul Jenkins, head of the National Crime Agency’s Western Hemisphere region.
What the NCA was proposing was not a one-time intelligence handoff. It was the construction of a permanent pipeline. British-captured financial intelligence on Epstein’s network would be routed, continuously, into the FBI.
2023: the pipeline was still producing
Three years later, the pipeline was still generating friction inside the U.S. system. Between March 27 and April 19, 2023 (EFTA00162401, EFTA00162415, EFTA00144231), the FBI’s FinCEN Liaison Officer and the FBI’s New York Field Office worked through a deconfliction request involving 45 Epstein-related subjects, tied to an active FBI investigation file catalogued as NY-3027571. The subjects had been surfaced in FinCEN disclosure requests arising out of the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank civil litigation over those banks’ handling of Epstein’s accounts.
Many of the underlying reports concerned transactions that had occurred more than a decade earlier, with the reports themselves filed “roughly a decade later.” Retrospective suspicious-activity reports, in other words, filed on Epstein-network transactions that were only now being reconstructed. The FBI’s New York office formally objected to their release.
The British intelligence pipeline that had been set up inside the Washington embassy in 2020 had, by 2023, become part of the connective tissue of the continuing American investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s financial infrastructure.
The appointment
On December 19, 2024, Britain’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, announced that Peter Mandelson would be the United Kingdom’s next ambassador to the United States.
Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is not a matter of speculation. It is documented in the same January 2026 Department of Justice release that contains the NCA intelligence pipeline. Mandelson wrote to Epstein in 2009, while Epstein was serving his Florida sentence, calling him “my best pal.” He stayed at Epstein’s New York residence that same year.
In 2009 and 2010, during and after the global financial crisis, Mandelson — then a senior British Cabinet minister — forwarded sensitive British government readouts to Epstein, material that the American tax lawyer Dan Neidle and British broadcaster Channel 4 News have separately established was of potential market-moving significance. In September 2025, after further emails surfaced, Starmer fired him. In February 2026, British police arrested him.
Eight days before the December 2024 appointment was announced, Starmer was given a due diligence report warning of Mandelson’s continuing relationship with Epstein — including the specific fact that Mandelson had stayed at Epstein’s New York house while Epstein was serving his sentence. That fact is already on the public record, through the Mandelson Files released by the British government in March 2026.
The timeline, in one paragraph
The Financial Conduct Authority first contacted the National Crime Agency regarding Jeffrey Epstein in November 2019. Peter Mandelson was appointed British ambassador to the United States on December 19, 2024. Between those two dates, for sixty-one months, British state agencies maintained an active classified intelligence channel into American law enforcement on Epstein’s financial and child-safeguarding architecture, running out of the same embassy Mandelson would shortly occupy.
What this is, and what it is not
This is not a vetting story. A vetting review can determine who overruled Britain’s security service in January 2025. It cannot determine why a British government, whose own agencies had been generating classified intelligence on Jeffrey Epstein’s British network continuously since 2019, appointed Epstein’s most prominent British correspondent to run the embassy from which that intelligence was being routed.
That is not a procedural question. It is a question about what the United Kingdom knew about the American investigation it was quietly supporting, and what it chose to do with that knowledge when it came time to fill the role at the top of it.
On Monday, Prime Minister Starmer announced that the Cabinet Office would examine “any security concerns raised during Peter Mandelson’s tenure.” The documentary record is already in the public domain. It was released by the U.S. Department of Justice. It can be read by any American who wants to read it.
The embassy already knew.
Your work here is impressive, Sayer Ji, truly investigative gold, I would say.
I am just not convinced, due to the plethora of evidence against it, that Epstein IS dead.
Incredible that this is not front page news! Sayer you are a star! Excellent clear reporting that needs to be circulated far and wide.
Starmer is a liar and is destroying Britain and all its values!