“A Photo With Some African Warlords”
When Ghislaine Maxwell was interviewed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July, she was asked whether Epstein ever had any contact with intelligence agencies. Maxwell gave a vague response about Epstein’s business of “finding money” in Africa in the 1980s: “I think he may have suggested that there was some people who helped him,” Maxwell said. “He showed me a photograph that he had with some African warlords or something that he told me…That's the only actual active memory I have of something nefarious -- not nefarious... but covert, I suppose would be the word.”
In parallel to Iran–Contra, from 1984 to 1986, Southern Air Transport flew hundreds of trips inside Angola, with some runs connecting the capital city Luanda to Dobbins Air Force Base in Marietta, Georgia. Angola’s northeastern diamond-mining towns, cut off by unsafe roads and railways, were largely accessible only by air. SAT obtained a lucrative contract from Angola’s state-owned mining company to carry equipment to the mining towns, and carry diamonds out. While making trips to the mines, the SAT planes were suspected of air-dropping weapons to the rebel group UNITA with South Africa’s support.
South Africa profited handsomely from the Angolan civil war. Johannesburg became a booming re-export hub for illicit Angolan diamonds, as UNITA-controlled “blood diamonds” were under UN embargo and could not be exported legally from Angola. By the late 1990s, UNITA earned billions of dollars by smuggling diamonds to Johannesburg, where they re-exported with false certificates-of-origin and shipped onward to London and Belgium. A UN report estimated that over $1 million worth of diamonds were smuggled out of Angola per day in 2001.
Angola was the mirror image of Iran–Contra. As in Iran, Saudi money was the “bank” for Angola’s war. As in Nicaragua, trade in contraband (diamonds rather than drugs) was backed by an off-the-books arms trade. An associate of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd testified before Congress that Saudi aid to UNITA was part of an informal deal with Washington in exchange for access to mobile radar surveillance systems. He recounted being told that tens of millions of dollars had been funneled through Morocco to train UNITA fighters, and claimed Prince Bandar had planned to sell oil to South Africa. The Saudi government has denied these claims.
In Columbus, SAT’s collapse was written off as the result of “financial troubles.” But before declaring bankruptcy in 1998, half of its fleet of Lockheed Hercules planes were sold to Transafrik, an Angolan airline based in the United Arab Emirates. SAT resumed its missions supporting diamond mining operations, as Angola’s civil war raged on. Decades later, Epstein bragged to journalists about making his fortune out of “arms, drugs, and diamonds.”