by Craig Unger
But in the end, of course, he had really bought his way into their world. Scientists liked sex and money as much as anyone. Joichi Ito, the former head of MIT’s prestigious Media Lab, and Harvard biologist George Church, of the Human Genome Project, were among those who had support from or regular contact with Epstein. In September 2019, Ito resigned after acknowledging he had received $1.7 million from Epstein, including $1.2 million for his own outside investment funds.
And ultimately, Epstein was Epstein, and when the conversation drifted outside his interest and he got bored, he was known to interrupt by referring to a topic that occupied his thoughts a great deal of the time.
“What does that got to do with pussy?” he’d ask.15
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Epstein wasn’t the only one who was obsessed with artificial intelligence. Vladimir Putin was, too. “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind,” he said in a speech that was broadcast on RT, the propagandistic Russian TV network, in 2017.16 “It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
To that end, according to Intelligence Online, in October 2019, Putin signed Russia’s new National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence by 2030, calling for the “establishment of a security system during the design, development, the installation and use of artificial intelligence.”17
Already, Russia has implemented enormously disruptive campaigns against the United States using unconventional weapons, including disinformation attacks and cyberwarfare—campaigns that were vital to installing Donald Trump as president in 2016.
But a report from the Brookings Institute concluded that in the future, Russia’s use of AI as a weapon can make that look like small potatoes. “AI has the potential to hyperpower Russia’s use of disinformation—the intentional spread of false and misleading information for the purpose of influencing politics and societies,” the report says.18 “And unlike in the conventional military space, the United States and Europe are ill-equipped to respond to AI-driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) in the information space.”
In fact, according to Yuri Shvets, you can’t fully understand the scope of Russian intelligence until you understand that Putin sees artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and control of advanced computer technology as Russia’s most vital national security issue. “This is, for Putin, as essential to the survival of his regime as it was for Stalin to get the A-bomb,” Shvets told me. “There are seventeen thousand Russian IT guys working in the United States, and a great number of them are connected with Russian intelligence—bright people who’ve been working inside Apple, Microsoft, and other companies for years.
“For Russian intelligence, it would have been like a Klondike to penetrate Epstein’s network of tech people who work on artificial intelligence and supercomputers. It would have been the equivalent of penetrating the Manhattan Project in World War II.”
Enter, into Jeffrey Epstein’s world, Svetlana Pozhidaeva, better known as Lana, a striking young Russian multi-hyphenate—scholar, model, women’s empowerment activist, and tech entrepreneur—who had ties to both Epstein and procurer Jean-Luc Brunel, and has her own suitably curious background in Moscow.
Raised in a Moscow apartment complex built for staffers of the NKVD, the Stalinist precursor of the KGB, Pozhidaeva was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the prestigious academy run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is a training ground for Russian diplomats and intelligence officials.19 Reputed to be the most elite university in the country, MGIMO has been dubbed the “Harvard of Russia” by Henry Kissinger because it has trained so many figures in Russia’s political, intellectual, and financial elite.
According to the Italian edition of Maxim, Lana gave up a promising tennis career at the age of sixteen to become the youngest freshman at MGIMO, where she graduated with the equivalent of summa cum laude, having mastered, along the way, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as if she were on course to join the Foreign Ministry.20
Her stellar academic credentials notwithstanding, Pozhidaeva somehow ended up in the orbit of alleged Epstein pimp Brunel by being represented by his modeling agency MC2. As a model, she was featured prominently in Maxim Italia and Ukraine Vogue, moved to the United States, and began her association with Jeffrey Epstein.
Unlike the very young local Florida girls Ghislaine and her team had recruited from broken homes and trailer parks, Lana was older—at this writing, thirty-five—and very well educated, self-possessed, and refined enough to play hostess to distinguished academics and Silicon Valley titans.
Once Pozhidaeva got to New York, she became president of a New York–based charity called Education Advance, which received most of its $56,000 in funding from Epstein in 2017 to support education science and technology. Pozhidaeva later told the Daily Beast that Epstein’s donation “helped develop an impactful program at MIT.”21
With Epstein’s help, Pozhidaeva also founded a New York–based monthly event series for female entrepreneurs and professionals called WE Talks. (“WE” stands for Women’s Empowerment, Encouragement, and Entrepreneurship.)
She took on a partner in Moscow named Victoria Drokova, who had also been educated at MGIMO, and whose CV raised exactly the same questions Lana’s did. But Drokova had another feature in her biography that Pozhidaeva did not: Her sister Masha Drokova was a celebrated pro-Putin activist in Russia.22
Best known as “the Girl Who Kissed Putin,” Masha, whose story is related in the 2012 documentary Putin’s Kiss, had been an activist in Moscow and a leader of the Nashi, the pro-Putin youth movement that critics have compared to Hitler Youth and have dubbed “Putinjugend.” She became famous when she spontaneously planted a kiss on Putin’s cheek during a Nashi rally after joining the group in 2005.
As a teen, she had her own online pro-Putin TV show in which she asserted that serving Russian intelligence is an honorable pursuit.23 “I really liked Putin, especially after I learned he liked me,” she later told Mashable.24 “When you’re a teenager . . . and the president of the country pays you attention and remembers you, it proves to you that you’re important.”
She has said that her personal mentors have included Putin himself and Vladislav Surkov, the brilliant puppet master who merged theatrical techniques with PR to alter the way reality is perceived in Putin’s Russia.25
But she says that she later fell out of love with Putin and took a more critical view of rising Russian nationalism.26 Whether that “disillusionment” was real is open to question, however. By 2015, she had moved to New York and gone into public relations, serving various tech firms and clients—doing well enough to set up shop in 2017 as Day One Ventures, a venture capital and public relations firm where she was an angel investor in early-stage tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. Day One Ventures has invested more than $30 million in tech start-ups since 2016.27 In addition, she served as vice president of communications for Acronis, a data-protection firm founded by Russian venture capitalist Serguei Beloussov that claims to protect the data of more than five million consumers and half a million businesses. Masha also did public relations for a number of clients—including Jeffrey Epstein.
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Drokova’s ties to Epstein are of special interest because Vladimir Putin was obsessed with artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and other forms of cutting-edge technology, and Jeffrey Epstein’s operation just happened to provide a perfect entry point. After all, technology was high on Epstein’s agenda, and his salon of Nobel laureates, Silicon Valley heavyweights, and celebrated academics constituted a fabulous assemblage of great minds—especially for a college dropout who had studied for two years at Cooper Union.
One of Pozhidaeva’s first WE Talks salons, in May 2018, feature
d Masha Drokova as a panelist addressing the challenge that only 2 percent of the venture capital raised goes to female founders.28
As an intelligence officer, Shvets had to constantly analyze case files as part of his job, and, according to him, Pozhidaeva’s story, much like Natalia Dubinina’s, does not quite compute. “She was in one of the best, most prestigious academic institutions in Russia,” said Shvets. “She could make a breathtaking career in the Foreign Office or in any foreign company working in the Moscow office. She would make a great career. But instead she goes into the so-called modeling business?”
“Each intelligence officer operates under a so-called legend or a cover story,” he said. “This is like their official work history, which they show to the world. The purpose of this legend is to cover up years you spent training at the KGB or FSB.”
What was most striking about Pozhidaeva was that she had a terrific academic career in Russia and then threw it away on something completely unrelated. She attended, as she says, a top college in Russia, like Stanford in the United States, said Shvets. “And she was a straight-A student. This is important to understand. She sacrificed four years and then two more years for a master’s degree. It’s an achievement.”
But suddenly after this, Shvets noted, “She says, ‘Fuck it all. Fuck my previous six years. Fuck everything I was doing.’ I mean, it’s amazing—it just does not happen in real life.”
According to Shvets, it all started with Peter Listerman. “It was Listerman who introduced her to Brunel, and Brunel introduced her to Epstein,” Shvets told me. “Of course, we know what Epstein was doing with the ladies. But in this particular case, Epstein takes her and introduces her to renowned American and international scientists.”
How could someone as intelligent and well educated as Pozhidaeva become an activist for women while possibly seeking patronage from Jean-Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein, who directed and participated in human trafficking and the rape of underage girls for more than two decades?
According to Shvets, the only answer is that it all must have been part of a deliberate effort to introduce Lana to a network of scientists and to help her set up a charity that made lots of donations to companies associated with artificial intelligence. And that leads Shvets to believe that she worked as a penetration agent with the assistance of Jeffrey Epstein. “She penetrated the network in the United States related to supercomputer and artificial intelligence,” he told me. Pozhidaeva did not return phone calls or emails from me.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TWO NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK
Even before Epstein was convicted in 2008, it was widely known within Epstein’s entourage, law enforcement circles, and various intelligence services that Jeffrey, Ghislaine, and company had been making videos of grave sexual crimes taking place under Epstein’s aegis and were keeping them safely guarded—just in case. According to the New York Times, Virginia Giuffre had written an unpublished memoir in which she noted she had found a room in Epstein’s New York mansion where monitors displayed surveillance footage. Similarly, Maria Farmer, who accused Epstein of assaulting her sexually in the nineties, said that Epstein had pointed out tiny cameras in room after room and told her, “We keep [recordings]. We keep everything.”1
Why were they doing this? The people who knew weren’t talking, of course. There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service. But no one outside Epstein’s circle seemed to know the specifics: who was involved, what sexual acts may have been recorded, how Epstein or Ghislaine may have used the recordings, whether the subjects who were in them were aware of them.
But it was leverage—and powerful leverage at that. “I’m sure many people wanted him dead,” Epstein accuser Chauntae Davies says in Netflix’s Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. “He had a lot of information on a lot of people. A lot of blackmail—videos and pictures.”
With countless bold-faced names in his black book—Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew, and so many more—this was kompromat paradise, and the FSB couldn’t possibly pass it up.
Potentially, the FSB had access to Epstein and his kompromat through the likes of Peter Listerman and the Russian girls who had come through Listerman and Brunel—Lana Pozhidaeva, Masha Drokova, and others. But when the Epstein case entered the court system in 2005 and his computers and videos became evidence, more people suddenly had access. A new avenue that the FSB began to explore was through a former deputy sheriff named John Mark Dougan, who had served in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to late 2008.
With his shaved head and the sturdy build of a former US Marine, Dougan has taken a turbulent journey over the last decade, from Donald Trump’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach playground to Moscow. There, he now claims to be in command of no fewer than 478 videos taken from Epstein’s Palm Beach residence—perhaps the most valuable assemblage of kompromat on the planet.
As a military man and an ex-cop, Dougan is the sort of macho antihero of questionable reliability one often encounters in the comic Florida crime fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. Like them, Dougan has a rather patchy job history that has taken him laterally from police work to horse transportation to database design to piloting.2 The word “disgruntled” follows Dougan wherever he goes. A hapless and quixotic underdog, he has reinvented himself as an avenging angel/whistleblower who has been taking on the powers that be, in Palm Beach County at least, since he resigned in 2009.
Dougan is of interest in the Epstein saga because from 2005 to 2009 he served as deputy sheriff in the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office District 3, an area that includes Jeffrey Epstein’s house at 358 El Brillo Way, as well as Mar-a-Lago and the Trump International Golf Club.
But Dougan had never been a happy camper in the PBSO. He did not endear himself to the top brass. At his best, Dougan has taken on racist and corrupt cops on his home turf in Palm Beach, where he occasionally won praise from his superiors for his “surveillance skills” and “thinking outside the BOX.”
“Deputy Dougan’s interpersonal skills need improvement,” one lieutenant wrote in an evaluation, “as he does not know how to pull back from a brewing issue.”
According to Neil Barnett, who runs Istok Associates, a London-based intelligence and investigation consultancy, Dougan was also clearly “an aggrieved individual with a fragile ego and a sense of his own grandeur. In other words, Dougan was openly present on the Internet as a former PBSO officer who exhibited a number of the classic traits of a suitable target for recruitment by a hostile intelligence service.”
That meant the Russians.
In Palm Beach, Dougan was already getting in trouble—for good reasons and bad. Among the various controversies he got involved in, one was, as noted, taking on a gang of racist cops that he said were assaulting people they arrested, especially those who were nonwhite. “They were just beating the minorities bloody,” Dougan told the Daily Beast.3 “It was just awful.”
Fed up with his colleagues’ racist behavior, he resigned and sent off pseudonymous emails to his department superiors about what was going on.4 But little was done in the way of punishing the malefactors. In the end, Dougan was so dismayed they got away with it that he was on his way to becoming a whistleblower.
Before long, he launched PBSOtalk.org, a secure whistleblower forum that allowed cops and other law enforcement officers to talk anonymously and circulate exposés of alleged abuses and corruption within the byzantine, internecine politics of the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. At this writing, his site has more than fifty thousand posts.
On a phone call from his one-bedroom apartment in west Moscow, Dougan told me the site was necessary because the cops would make life “a living hell” for anyon
e who crossed “that blue line” to report corruption in the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office.5 Over time, Dougan did more than merely expose malfeasance among law enforcement officials; he began to use his technical expertise to attack his foes with doxing and an array of social media attacks.
Whether one saw him as a whistleblower or as an aggrieved former employee, Dougan clearly had access to secrets, and he wanted to talk. More than that, using the Internet persona BadVolf, Dougan, the renegade American ex-cop, had taken on the guise of a Russian hacker. Using a voice changer, he pretended he was a woman and carried on an intimate ten-day telephone relationship with a law enforcement official. According to the Daily Beast, he doxed no fewer than fourteen thousand federal agents, judges, cops, and intelligence agents, posting their home addresses on the web.
And you could learn all about BadVolf’s exploits on his site, BadVolf.com, which features a short promotional video by RT, the propagandistic Russian TV network, heroically portraying him as a David taking on Goliath in the form of the awesome power of the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. (The video shown was a short promo film for Breaking Bad Wolf, a full-length documentary that can be seen on YouTube.)6 Between BadVolf and PBSOtalk.org, Dougan says he was so effective that his work led to the arrest and firings of countless police officers. But his work also led to serious ruptures with the powers that be, with the PBSO and FBI trying to put him in jail, he says, to “have me tortured and killed.”7
Some time around 2010, about a year after Dougan left the force, having established a reputation as someone who provided a secure outlet for like-minded cops to speak out, Dougan got a call from Joseph Recarey.
