A new book by a mysterious alleged former Israeli spy claims Jeffrey Epstein participated in an Israeli-run blackmailing scheme.

The deceased American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell were Israeli spies who used underage girls to blackmail politicians into giving information to Israel, according to their alleged Mossad handler.

The couple reportedly ran a “honey-trap” operation in which they provided young girls to prominent politicians from around the world for sex, and then used the incidents to blackmail them in order to attain information for Israeli intelligence.

The claims are being made by the alleged former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe in a soon-to-be-released book “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales” in which he said that he was the handler of Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell, who was also an Israeli espionage agent and was the one who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Mossad.

“See, f**king around is not a crime. It could be embarrassing, but it’s not a crime,” Menashe wrote in the book. “But f**king a fourteen-year-old girl is a crime. And he was taking photos of politicians f**king fourteen-year-old girls—if you want to get it straight…They [Epstein and Maxwell] would just blackmail people like that.”

The handler Ben-Menashe, himself an Iran-born Israeli businessman who says he worked for Mossad from 1977 to 1987, is a mysterious figure who was arrested in 1989 in the US on charges of arms dealing. He was acquitted in 1990, however, only after a jury accepted that he was acting on behalf of the Israeli state. Israel then denied that Menashe has any links with its intelligence services and attempted to distance itself from him, despite the fact that other news reports both in the US and Israel confirmed he was acting on the country’s behalf.

The new book, which also speculates that Maxwell may have worked for other governments as a double or triple agent, says that despite reports Epstein and Ghislaine met in the early 1990s in New York, they in fact met earlier through her father who introduced Epstein to Mossad before Ghislaine joined in the activities later.

Jeffrey Epstein, who was facing charges for sex trafficking minors, was found dead in his New York prison cell on 10 August. According to official reports he committed suicide, but there has been much speculation and evidence put forward that he was in fact killed, with many stating he may have been assassinated due to his knowledge of the figures he blackmailed and the acts they committed.

The statements made by Ben-Menashe are so far unsubstantiated, but if proven true they would provide significant evidence of Israel being involved in the blackmail of senior and prominent politicians and figures in the US.

This would only add to the state’s already-revealed track record of manipulating Western nations’ political systems, as was seen in the revelations of the Israeli lobby’s attempt to “take down” British and US politicians revealed in the past few years.