Ari Ben-Menashe is a former senior official of Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence (Aman), active primarily during the 1980s. He has made the most direct and sustained public claims connecting Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to Israeli intelligence operations. Ben-Menashe states he first met Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in the early 1980s through arms deal networks facilitated by Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, whom Ben-Menashe describes as a confirmed Mossad asset.
According to Ben-Menashe, Robert Maxwell introduced Epstein to Israeli intelligence, after which Epstein was trained and deployed to run a classic honeytrap operation: providing underage girls to powerful figures, recording encounters, and using the resulting material as leverage on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Ben-Menashe has given these accounts in multiple forums, including a February 2026 interview on Going Underground and to numerous journalists. He has also separately alleged, as of March 2026, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds unreleased Epstein-related material and has used it as leverage over senior American officials, including as a counterweight to U.S. diplomatic initiatives toward Iran.
Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein's former business partner in the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme, corroborated elements of Ben-Menashe's account before his death in 2022, telling reporters that Epstein had admitted Mossad ties and attributed his elite access and protection to those connections. The FBI's October 2020 Los Angeles field office memo, released in the January 2026 DOJ document dump, described a source's conclusion that Epstein "was a co-opted Mossad agent" who had been "trained as a spy." Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu have both publicly denied the claims. Netanyahu stated in early 2026 that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's personal ties to Epstein did not imply state espionage involvement.
Ben-Menashe's broader claims about Netanyahu leveraging Epstein files remain contested and unsubstantiated by independent documentary evidence. His credibility as a witness is a matter of ongoing dispute among intelligence analysts and journalists, with some noting a strong track record of accurate disclosures and others pointing to unverified claims in his past.