Former Israeli Spy: "Netanyahu Is Holding The Epstein Files, And Will Release Them To Blow Up Iran Peace Deal."

The claim is almost impossible to verify. The timing is almost impossible to ignore.

June 16, 2016

There is a particular kind of story that lives in the gap between unproven and unthinkable. You cannot confirm it. You cannot quite dismiss it either. And the more you learn about the people and pressures surrounding it, the wider that gap seems to stretch.

This is one of those stories.

On June 16, 2026, as the world digested news of a historic US–Iran peace framework — reportedly set to be signed in Switzerland, with the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on the table — a familiar voice surfaced with an unfamiliar warning. Speaking on Afshin Rattansi’s program Going Underground, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that Israel would move to sabotage any genuine US–Iran rapprochement (important to note, Rattansi is a British journalist with a real mainstream pedigree (Guardian, BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera) as well as Press TV, that Going Underground began on RT — Russian state-funded — in 2013 before moving to independent distribution from Dubai, and that the show brands itself on "the questions mainstream media avoid" with an anti-Western/anti-establishment editorial lean). Doesn’t change Ben-Menashe assessment: that Benjamin Netanyahu would, in his words, release Epstein material targeting U.S. government officials, including Trump — “new and unseen” material “never before seen in the public.”

It is the kind of sentence that detonates on social media before anyone asks the only question that matters: Is it true?

Let’s take it apart honestly — what we know, what we don’t, and why the answer is harder to reach than either the believers or the debunkers will admit.

What was actually said, and by whom

The claim is real in the narrow, literal sense: Ben-Menashe did say it, on Rattansi’s show, and it was reported by The News International and amplified across social platforms.

It’s also not new. Ben-Menashe has been making versions of this argument on the same program for nearly a year. In an August 2025 appearance he asserted that the American government was “trapped by the Israelis,” with Epstein as one of the tools used to do the trapping. A February 2026 episode was built entirely around the thesis that Netanyahu uses Epstein-derived leverage to steer Trump’s foreign policy. The June 2026 “sabotage the peace deal” version is the same recurring claim, freshly bolted onto the news cycle.

So the honest framing is this: a single source, making a dramatic allegation he has made repeatedly, now attached to a live geopolitical moment.

The interesting part isn’t the claim. It’s everything surrounding it.

The problem of the messenger

Ari Ben-Menashe is not a nobody, and that is precisely what makes him difficult.

He genuinely worked for Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman), by most accounts from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, before becoming an arms dealer and, later, an international consultant and author of Profits of War. That much is documented. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh found portions of his testimony credible, and Ben-Menashe was among the early leakers of the secret U.S. arms sales to Iran in 1986.

But the same résumé carries heavy warnings. A 1993 U.S. House investigative task force examined his “October Surprise” allegations and concluded they didn’t hold up — travel and passport records, the investigators said, placed him somewhere other than where he claimed to have witnessed key events. Congressional inquiries have described him as untrustworthy, citing contradictory statements and an absence of corroboration. Contemporary fact-checkers characterize him as someone who blends verified facts with unverified or exaggerated claims — a pattern that demands independent confirmation for any single dramatic assertion. He has also worked, as recently as 2021, as a paid foreign lobbyist, including a multimillion-dollar contract advising Myanmar’s military junta.

In other words: a real insider, with real knowledge, and a documented history of telling stories that cannot be substantiated. The journalist’s nightmare. You cannot take him at his word — and you cannot quite rule him out either, because some of what he has said over the decades turned out to be closer to true than his critics assumed.

His long, tangled association with intelligence work cuts both ways. It is the reason to listen. It is also the reason to be careful.

The Epstein-as-asset question, and why it refuses to die

Here is where the story stops being about one man’s credibility and starts touching the documentary record.

The specific idea Ben-Menashe pushes — that Epstein operated as an intelligence asset, recruited in the 1980s, running a kompromat operation against Western elites — is not his invention, and it is no longer confined to the fringe.

The newly released Epstein files, and reporting around them, have surfaced genuinely strange material on multiple foreign-intelligence fronts:

• Israel / Mossad. Released documents and FBI material reference suspicions that Epstein was a “co-opted Mossad agent,” and note his close ties to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak — who reportedly visited Epstein’s New York townhouse more than thirty times between 2013 and 2017, and who earlier in his career served in Israeli military intelligence. These remain suspicions in the record, not confirmed findings.

• Russia / FSB. The files show Epstein corresponding in 2015 with Sergei Belyakov, a former Russian deputy minister and graduate of the FSB Academy, seeking help on a purported blackmail matter. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk went so far as to say Epstein was “probably” a Russian asset and announced an investigation — though he offered no hard evidence, and the Kremlin dismissed the suggestion outright.

• United States. The same trove implicates a large number of American and European figures, which is part of why competing governments each have an incentive to steer the narrative toward someone else’s intelligence service.

The crucial caveat, stated plainly by Reuters and others: no major news organization has published definitive proof that Epstein worked for any intelligence service. Mossad, FSB, CIA — every version has circumstantial threads and partisans, and none has a confirmed conclusion. The most sober reading of the record is that Epstein cultivated relationships across several intelligence-adjacent worlds, and that multiple states now possess, or believe others possess, compromising material.

That ambiguity is the soil in which a claim like Ben-Menashe’s grows. He is not asserting something the documents flatly contradict. He is asserting a specific, unverifiable interpretation of a landscape that is genuinely murky — and pointing it at a specific political outcome.

The timing nobody can wave away

If the messenger is doubtful and the underlying intelligence picture is unresolved, why give the claim any oxygen at all?

Because of what is happening between Washington and Jerusalem right now.

The relationship between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu has, by the account of mainstream outlets, reached its most strained point in years. Over the spring and into June 2026:

• Trump reportedly warned Netanyahu, during a tense phone call, “Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon” — and, according to multiple reports, told him he would be “in jail if not for me,” after Netanyahu reportedly called off a major strike on Iran with jets already on the runway under U.S. pressure.

• Al Jazeera and CBC, among others, framed the rupture as driven by genuinely divergent interests: the Iran war is deeply unpopular in the United States, so Trump needs a deal to end it — while Netanyahu’s political survival has, by these accounts, been bound up with the war continuing.

• At the G7 summit this week, Trump publicly criticized Israel’s conduct in Lebanon, saying it had to be “more responsible” and that a recent strike “was too much.”

• And in the background, Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial has reportedly hit a key milestone, with prosecutors wrapping their final cross-examination.

Layer those facts over Ben-Menashe’s claim and the structure becomes uncomfortable. Two leaders whose interests have visibly collided over war and peace. One of them facing the prospect of prison if his political position collapses. A peace deal that would hand the unpopular war a definitive ending — and remove the very pressure that has, by some readings, kept that leader politically afloat. And a trove of unreleased compromising material whose ownership and contents no one outside a tiny circle can actually verify.

None of that proves a word of what Ben-Menashe says. Motive is not evidence. A man with reasons to want something is not the same as a man doing it, and a discredited source describing a plausible-sounding plot has produced exactly that — plausible-sounding stories — many times before.

But it does explain why the claim refuses to simply evaporate the way most fringe assertions do. The political physics around it are real, even if the claim itself is not confirmed.

What we can say honestly

Strip away the amplification and here is the residue:

What’s documented: Ben-Menashe made the statement. He has a real intelligence background. The Epstein files contain genuine, unresolved intelligence threads pointing in several national directions. The Trump–Netanyahu relationship is under unusual public strain. A US–Iran deal is reportedly imminent. Netanyahu’s legal jeopardy is real.

What’s unverified: That “real” or “never-before-seen” Epstein files exist in Netanyahu’s possession. That he intends to release anything. That the material implicates a “majority” of U.S. officials. That any of this is connected to the peace negotiations. These rest on the word of a single source whom multiple investigations have judged unreliable, carried initially by partisan and state-aligned outlets.

So no, this is not a confirmed story. It would be irresponsible to present it as one.

And yet.

The defining feature of the Epstein affair has always been that the unthinkable kept turning out to be merely undisclosed. Intelligence ties dismissed as conspiracy theory kept reappearing in official documents. The list of the powerful kept getting longer, not shorter. The instinct to wave a claim away because it sounds too dark has, in this particular saga, aged badly more than once.

That doesn’t make Ben-Menashe right. It makes him unfalsifiable from where we sit — and it leaves the rest of us holding a question rather than an answer.

If the peace deal is signed in Switzerland and nothing happens, the claim dies quietly, as most of his claims have. If something does surface in the days that follow — well, that is the version of events no one will be able to call impossible.

For now, the honest posture is the uncomfortable one: we don’t know. We can’t know. And the people who do know aren’t the ones doing interviews.

The question simply hangs there, in the air, waiting for the only thing that ever resolves a story like this.

Time.

This piece is based on reporting from Reuters, Al Jazeera, CNN, CBC, the Times of Israel, CNBC, and the original Going Underground interview, alongside the public record on Ari Ben-Menashe’s history. It presents claims as claims and facts as facts; readers are encouraged to follow the primary sources and draw their own conclusions.