[2026-05-13] ParaPower Mapping
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From this point forward, I’m going to be apportioning out written drafts of the material for the forthcoming first season on PPM in slightly more digestible, article sized chunks contrary to 50 page essays that require serious mastication and a bovine belly with multiple chambers to break down. I”m comfortable enough with this approach because I feel like I did enough heavy lifting in the first two parts to the point that readers are relatively up to speed and will be able to follow along and make the requisite mental connections to tether the revelations herein back to the larger thrust of this project. We’ve set enough of the varying scenes and furnished you with enough preliminary evidence to firmly establish that Epstein agitated against the Islamic Republic throughout his life and entered the worlds of international arms deals and espionage through his understudy role under Khashoggi and Leese as the American parastate egged on the Iran-Iraq War in hopes of seeing the proxy conflict destroy the two Middle Eastern upstart revolutionary governments.
You’ll hopefully recall the latter sections of the previous essay and our introduction to Bandar Bush and Epstein’s considerable links to the former Saudi Ambassador to the US, a relationship he appears to have cultivated over decades, as shown by the sampling of evidence I laid out stretching from:
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Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s instrumental role as a Contra slush fund beginning in ‘84
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his addressee appearance in the first Black Book
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Epstein’s lawyer / handler Alan Dershowitz inadvertently divulging meetings with the recent head of Saudi intelligence when trying to build an alibi regarding Virginia Giuffre’s allegations
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Bandar’s purchasing of a massive mountainside manse in Aspen (a property that was passed to another Epstein associate in John Paulson and which is located in the billionaire summer house hub that Wexner also called home)
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the inclusion of multiple Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud progeny in Epstein’s email contacts
Having firmly established these ties, we will soon use the Epstein - Bandar friendship as a springboard to examine the possibility that Epstein was party to Al Yamamah, the priciest arms deal of all time, struck between the Saudis and the British in 1985. We’ll also mull whether Epstein even served as a go-between to Bandar and helped iron out the finer points of the arrangement whereby the Prince personally financed the Nicaraguan paramilitary at Reagan’s behest in early Iran-Contra.
But to construct such an argument and assess the persuasiveness of these theories, we must first tango with the doctored passport that was found in Epstein’s possession and the identity of the man for whom it was reportedly issued, conducting a forensically thorough sifting of its contents with a finetoothed comb to see what kinds of secrets get caught in its teeth. Along the way, we’ll juxtapose the various aspects of the passport identity’s past that lend themselves to the notion that he and Epstein were known quantities to each other and likely parastatal fellow travelers. This is what we will concern ourselves with today before unpacking the implications of the documented travel itinerary as filtered through the figure of Prince Bandar bin Sultan next time out.
In the latter part of 2025, pictures of Epstein’s Austrian passport under the real and/or double identity of Marius Fortelni finally entered the public domain. You can view the passport in its redacted entirety at the bottom of this article. From the present vantage, it’s likely impossible to say definitively what kind of arrangement was struck to permit the financier to step into the Austrian architect and restaurateur’s shoes on occasion (or whether there’s an even more fantastical tradecraft explanation wherein the Austrian died and Epstein stole his identity like some informal cover or else the Company phased in the use of real life individuals as cold bodies). There are sundry brainpicking interviews from the last couple of years regarding Fortelni’s oceanside, smart home condo development Forté Luxe in Jupiter Island and biography-bolstering ephemera dating back as far as 1989 in the American newspaper record that support the flesh and blood, corporeal existence of the sometimes Fort Lauderdale or Miami Beach based real estate developer. Still, one should be forgiven for being skeptical or wondering if all is not as it appears, as Epstein and Fortelni cut symmetrical paths across the planet and cropped up in similar places time and again, from Saudi Arabia to New York to West Africa to Florida.
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I can conceive of a few different explanations for how the passport came to Epstein and was then doctored, Fortelni’s photo X-ACTO bladed off and swapped with a square dimensioned, black and white picture of a preppy Epstein in plaid. Cue: saucy To Live and Die in LA Willem Da-forgery montage. This is one of those contingency theory scenarios where I’ll ask you to hold these alternating possibilities in your mind at once. Each is beset with a hole or two and no size fits all.
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I could see Epstein and Fortelni having been in cahoots in an organized criminal capacity and that Jeffrey secured the docs that way, with Marius a henchman or adopted consigliere of sorts. I could also see a scenario where they both were CIA assets with slightly different remits and the agency set Epstein up to inherit an old set of Fortelni’s papers (they were born only a year apart and while not doppelgängers, do have some slight facial similarities). It’s also not inconceivable that Epstein could have pilfered the passport, stolen it from Fortelni’s draftsman desk or something. And lastly, while this strikes me as most outlandish, it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that Fortelni could be a concocted cover identity or cold body that various assets or agents could slip into in the field.
From what I’ve gathered from others and his bio online, it sounds like Fortelni is the son of a successful German actor and real estate developer, so this last option seems highly doubtful, but the whole situation is such a profoundly cumbersome head scratcher that I struggle to dismiss the notion entirely. For example, if the fraudulent passport’s solitary purpose was to protect Epstein in case of a PFLP-era hijacking, as his legal team’s story goes, why on earth would you hold onto it for an additional 32 years past its expiration? Was Epstein simply a packrat hoarder who couldn’t let such evidence of passport forgery criminality go out of sentimentality? Such a notion runs counter to the portrayal of Epstein that is constructed by the Files of a meticulous scrubber of hard drives and digital evidence of his crimes. I reckon the passport must have had a continued usefulness for him to keep it as long as he did.
There are seemingly only 5 hits for Fortelni on Newspapers.com. The most recent results date to February 2015, both of them Notices of imminent sale of items held in lapsed, unpaid storage units in the Fort Lauderdale area. How strange for the big shot real estate developer to have failed to make payments on one of his storage units for so long that they were about to auction off his stored items as shown by this South Florida Sun Sentinel issue… Seems uncharacteristic. Do you know who did exhibit a characteristic pattern of dispatching private investigators to move hard drives, laptops, and dirty magazines from storage unit to storage unit so as to evade the feds, though? Do I even need to say it? Was Epstein using the old Fortelni passport as ID to keep a degree of separation between himself and a storage unit with a trove of particularly sensitive items? Or is this sheer coincidence?
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In the Oct. 29th, 1989 edition of Newark, New Jersey’s The Star Ledger, the paper’s food critic William A. Raidy reports back from his visit to the recently ribbon-cut Via Via restaurant on the Upper East Side. Founded by “international restaurateurs” Marius Fortelni and David Teller, he waxes rhapsodical about the girls “three deep at the bar”; the “generous highballs”; the samplings of ravioli Genovese, calamari al inferno, and veal paillard on arugula beds. Then located at 1294 Third Ave. near 74th Street, Via Via would have been mere blocks from Epstein’s E. 66th St. flat in the Solo Building that was his much more modest New York residence and temporary office of the Intercontinental Asset Group in the late 1980s before he inherited the townhouse from Wexner. It’s not hard to imagine Epstein having helped Fortelni populate the bar with the girls that Raidy was all agog over. This earliest mention of Fortelni that I’ve uncovered in American newspapers bears a couple blink-you-could-miss breadcrumbs. The UES Via Via was apparently cousin to another on 37th Street that was opened a little less than 2 years prior, meaning that the flagship appears to have debuted in NYC in 1987, right around the time Epstein was undergoing that post Iran-Contra career change. Auspicious timing for this Austrian double of Epstein’s to suddenly pop up in the U.S. (note: this is the same year the Fortelni Passport in Epstein’s possession expired). There’s also mention that Fortelni comes from a Milanese family of restaurateurs that have been setting white linen tablecloths for “discriminating diners” in Northern Italy since the early 1800s.
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My curiosity is piqued more so by the passing mention that Via Via owners Fortelni and Teller met at the “American (International) School in Vienna”, though, and for good reason, as we’ll see. As tradition dictates for such institutions, the American International School in Vienna’s student body demographics include a 30% chunk of American children, an approximate 30% or so of natural born Austrians, and a plurality consisting of 70 other nationalities making up the rest. Most of the American students are the spawn of diplomats and assorted Embassy and intergovernmental sector employees. By virtue of this reality, it’s well within the realm of the reasonable that Fortelni could have had classmates whose parents were CIA. The AISV has strong ties to the State Department as illustrated by its highlighted inclusion in the Overseas Schools Fact Sheet and the singular seat on the 10-person school board that is strictly appointed by the U.S. Ambassador alone. AISV’s most recognizable alumni name is likely Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan who enjoyed a starring turn as a young protege of Roy Cohn aka pre-hairpiece Trump in the recent film The Apprentice, to bring this aside full circle.
Anyways, could Fortelni have been recruited by Central Intelligence straight outta secondary school? Read on, dear reader.
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Turning to the final “Marius Fortelni” search result in the digitized newspaper archives… In 1991, the Philadelphia Daily News gossiped about some “tent bash” he threw in the Hamptons to sample the “French and Russian delicacies he intends to serve when he opens his trendery this fall”. Lo and behold, the obligatory salacious anecdote that saw the party’s inclusion in the Philly paper’s gossip section: some paparazzi caught Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson peeing in the bushes in a revealing tube dress. Elle Macpherson was inseparable from Epstein madam-in-waiting Naomi Campbell in the 1990s, with whom she helped cohost Miss Universe in 2001 smack dab during Trump’s peeping tom ownership of the pageant, and Macpherson’s also been snapped arm in arm with Ghislaine Maxwell and Black Book addressees Fiona Feeley and Tim Jeffries at a fundraising party for the Serpentine Gallery in 1999.
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Not only that, but the swimsuit powerhouse once dubbed “The Body” by TIME-LIFE-CIA Inc. in the 1980s was also listed as part of a criminal grooming milieu by an alleged Epstein victim who filed a somewhat absurd online tip with the FBI. There’s just enough believability to stop me short of dismissing it as delusion at first glance, so I’ll leave it to you to decide. The redacted tipster weaves a strange tale wherein she attended a Hollywood high school with a number of Israelis and Serbians who were on a first name basis with the “princess of Yugoslavia” (presumably Catherine Oxenberg?). The tipster claims she was on the verge of applying for art school and had compiled her portfolio at which point the actor Matthew Settle of Band of Brothers and Gossip Girl c-list fame dated her under false pretenses and groomed her to be approached by Ghislaine for “modeling jobs”—it’s unclear if she even maintains she was actually victimized by Epstein in a sexual fashion. What she does feel particularly aggrieved about is that she is convinced Epstein et al “stole her portfolio” including the painting of Bill Clinton in the blue dress that was later attributed to NY Academy of Art Petrina Ryan-Kleid (a fellow Epstein NYAA alumnus with Maria Farmer, of course) and that all of her paintings and artwork were given fraudulent provenance and sold at inflated prices and the like. It is within this context that she lists Elle Macpherson and her manager Stuart as co-conspirators in this grooming art heist of sorts or at the very least related members of this modeling-art world rhizome.
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Do I find her tale compelling? Not necessarily, although I don’t find it unbelievable either based on the ties to Macpherson that we documented and the much more well-known art academy links, so I’m duty bound to disclose, at the very least. To sum this section, though, we’ve shown that the identity contained within Epstein’s doctored passport corresponds with the Austro-German-Italian descendant of restaurateurs who attended a Viennese K-12 school for spy kids. This Marius Fortelni individual opened an eatery blocks away from the Epstein townhouse and a more modest apartment on the UES in the late 1980s, right around the time Epstein was settling back in the States post financial bounty hunting and gun running across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. We also discovered that Fortelni has thrown rambunctious enough outdoor saturnalias to land in the gossip pages and that they were attended by Epstein-Trump model trafficking nexus figures like Elle Macpherson. Finally, we speculated a tad about a Fort Lauderdale storage unit under Fortelni’s name that appears to have been emptied out to the Storage War wolves by the miffed proprietors, evoking Epstein’s use of storage liminal spaces like freeports for squirreling away the evidence of his crimes.
The journalist Edward Szall previously speculated that the doctored Fortelni papers sporting Epstein’s photograph were issued by Ronald Lauder during his stint as Ambassador to Austria, which lasted all of April ‘86 - Oct. ‘87, claims that are also investigated in the 2nd volume of Whitney Webb’s blackmail omnibus. This would compute in the light of Epstein’s clientele relationship with the Estée Lauder heir, for whom he set up a fine art tax evasion LLC called Friends Ventures jointly owned with Leon Black that was used to purchase and share a Kurt Schwitters piece. Epstein and Lauder remained on friendly terms until at least 2017, with over 900 mentions of the Diddy-linked fragrance kingpin in the files and Epstein inviting him to Terje Rød-Larsen hosted soirées and the like. While it’s still a distinct possibility that the World Jewish Congress president Lauder helped set up Epstein with Fortelni’s documents, I think the evidence is increasingly pointing in a different direction.
As previously acknowledged by Epstein’s lawyers in 2019 and now seemingly confirmed by the images, the Austrian passport was issued on May 21st, 1982, a full four years prior to Lauder’s brief stint at the Embassy. With an expiration date 5 years on, it seems unlikely that Epstein would have continued to carry the lapsed passport once defunct unless his lawyers’ official explanation that it was a crude failsafe in case of a hostage-taking onboard one of his flights by PFLP militants is genuine. Seeing as they contradicted themselves and refused to answer questions about how it was obtained and whether the stamp evidence proved it had been used by Epstein in transit, questions that were raised by the prosecution during proceedings regarding flight risk, I think we can dismiss their version of events out of hand.
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In which case, an expiry of 1987 is an intriguing detail, as 1987 would be right around the time that Iran-Contra had concluded, erm… Or put in other words, been outed by the Hasenfus Crash and the investigative derring-do of the Lebanese press and henceforth blown up in the public sphere, leading to Congressional and Presidential investigatory commissions. By 1987, Epstein was transitioning into life as a Ponzi schemer with Steven Hoffenberg and as the fresh faced financial advisor to one Les Wexner, pretty cozy landing spots coming out of the massive scandal (One Nation Under Blackmail, Webb). Also, mind you, his new jobs wouldn’t necessitate a doctored passport in quite the same way that being a transnational financial bounty hunter and Iran-Contra arms dealer might, at least on the face of it… Taking the timing into account, I’m inclined to believe that the Fortelni passport was used by Epstein as a cover identity during his globetrotting as the mentee of various Contragate players such as Douglas Leese, Adnan Khashoggi, Robert Maxwell, and Ehud Barak between 1982 - 1987.
Back in 2019, after the expired subterfuge passport (amongst five others) was discovered in a safe with $70,000 in cash, 48 loose diamonds, and a U.S. Treasury Customs agent lapel pin in a credentials wallet (highly suspicious in the context of a doctored passport) during the raid on the NY townhouse, prosecutors alleged in one of the Epstein case hearings that the passport had received ingress and egress stamps from countries such as the UK, France, Spain, and Saudi Arabia on multiple occasions in the 1980s. We now have images and FBI internal emails to back up these claims. Furthermore, the passport lists Dammam, Saudi Arabia as Marius aka Epstein’s place of residence. Dammam is the fifth largest Saudi city, situated on the Persian Gulf approximately 400 or so miles West of the Strait of Hormuz as the crow flies and directly adjacent to the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain by bridge.
From here, we ought to begin our close reading of the Fortelni Passport in earnest, starting with its point of origin and provenance.
May 21st, 1982 - The Fortelni passport was issued in Austria under the authority of the “Bundespolizeidirektion Wien” (Vienna) by an Oberkommisar named Dr. Mikuskovics. Based on what I’m seeing, the “Dr.” is an abbreviation signifying Doktor, likely denoting a recipient of a top-level doctoral degree in law based on the immigration and law enforcement context, although I wouldn’t be shocked if it stood for “director” (a German speaking listener might be able to set this matter straight). One of the emergent wonderments that the Fortelni Passport poses in my mind is: Why an Austrian passport for Epstein specifically? Circumstance and convenience? Or something more?
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Setting aside a reading where Epstein encounters Fortelni in Saudi Arabia and purchases it off him or else where the passport passes hands through Lauder’s doing, I can think of one characteristic of the city in which it was authorized that might shed light on the “Why Austria?” question. Vienna is arguably the spy capital of Europe, after all, a noir reputation gained from dusky monochrome Cold War cinema such as The Third Man, the classic about a penicillin-diluting racketeer who has staged his death so as to escape the British military police on his tail and which captures post-war Wien in all its quadripartite occupation district intrigue. Vienna has enjoyed the reputation of a European city of strategic import and espionage due to its central location bridging east and west for millennia, with even Marcus Aurelius noting its geographic advantages long before the cafe culture and baroque architecture cropped up, long before MI6 man Graham Greene sent his cowboy fictioneer character Holly Martins scurrying down bombed out ruins after the Cheshire phantom Harry Lime aka Orson Welles, a cinematic adaptation that may have been inspired by the Philby-recruited Soviet spy Hans-Peter Smolka.
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This perception has only been solidified in recent years, with some estimates placing as many as 7k agents of varying services active on its streets today. In the years of the Third Reich’s rise cresting into the Anschluss, you might have encountered Kim Philby, Freud, or Trotsky in its cafes. More recently, the hotbed of snooping played host to the largest spy swap between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War, with British double agent and Russian military intel officer Sergei Skripal (later poisoned in Salisbury) and scarlet-haired Russian seductress Anna Chapman exchanged on the tarmac in Vienna in 2010.
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Part of this tacit acceptance of Vienna as second spy capital of Europe (only surpassed by Brussels) is due to its neutrality, its historical geographic convenience as an operational launchpad beyond the Iron Curtain into countries such as Poland and Yugoslavia, and the fact that it also plays host to a number of intergovernmental organizations today. These include one of four major United Nations headquarters, the UN Office of Vienna (UNOV) located in the Vienna International Center, a holdover from the idiosyncrasies of the four part occupation of the city by the U.S., British, French, and Soviets that I alluded to earlier. The UNOV is home to key agencies like the International Atomic Energy Agency (which would be of monumental interest to Epstein’s likely parent agency LEKEM, the Bureau of Scientific Relations), the UN Office on Drugs and Crime Control (UNODC), and UNIDO (international development office), among others.
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We may make a more thorough study of Epstein’s time in and ties to Vienna at a later date, but the Austrian capital hosts another intergovernmental organization we’ve already spoken about in Pt. I of this series and that may be even more germane to this line of inquiry. You’ll recall that we began to tease the thread of Epstein’s recruitment of recently resigned Slovakian national security adviser Miroslav Lajčák, onetime chair of the OSCE aka the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, specifically highlighting messages between the two in 2019 in which they discussed digital false flags and Epstein exhorted Miroslav to get the OSCE to take cybersecurity more seriously. The OSCE is officed in Vienna, of course.
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Fascinatingly, it appears the issuance of the Fortelni passport, whether to Marius himself or to Jeffrey Epstein masquerading as the Austrian, arrived at a time when the U.S. Embassy in Austria was in crisis and transition following the March 1982 death of Reagan-appointed Special Envoy Theodore Cummings, a Jewish Austrian emigré and Food Giant supermarket magnate who first met Ronald in the 1960s as a GOP booster and who was a part of the actor’s informal “kitchen cabinet”. Apparently a Charge D’Affaires took charge of the Embassy until the following year, when another Reagan loyalist in the personage of Helene von Damm was promoted to the office. I’m unsure if this is a common occurrence, but even the State Department’s Timeline of the Chiefs of the Austrian Mission has a conspicuous void where the year during which the Fortelni Passport was issued should be placed, which is notable considering it found its way into the hands of American citizen and likely CIA and LEKEM asset Epstein. I’ve yet to find any indication which Embassy officer rose to handle diplomatic duties between Cummings’ unexpected death and von Damm’s appointment, so that’s slightly curious. More uncanny than curious is her almost shocking resemblance of the Maxwell Sisters, a young Isabel in particular, as seen in this “candid” pic from Air Force One or another of the Ambassador in a sun hat and baring her décolletage.
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If von Damm had anything to do with the passport making its way to Epstein, this could be further evidence of Jeff the Financier’s entrenchment in Iran-Contra, as von Damm was not only Ronald’s former secretary but also a Reagan insider and among 5 campaign aides including Edwin Meese and Deputy Chief of Staff Deaver who received questionable payouts from the 1980 Reagan / Bush transition foundation. It’s also worth adumbrating von Damm’s biography quickly. Raised in Amstetten where her father toiled as an engineer for the paper company Neuesiedler Papierfabrik (now Mondi), she married a US Army corporal named Charles McDonald during the Soviet occupation and emigrated to the US—one groom in a line of four ex-husbands that came to include a German-American Bank of America executive, whose surname she ultimately kept. Helene dug up her roots in Chicago and traveled to California when she became smitten with Reagan’s ardent anticommunism as a “refugee” of a “socialist country” herself. She ascended from a lowly gubernatorial campaign envelope-filler to Reagan’s personal secretary and then Finance Director for the Northeast in 1980, a position parlayed into Director of Presidential Personnel and then the brief Ambassadorship in Austria. She resigned after her tempestuous liaison with the recently divorced owner of the prestigious Viennese Hotel Sacher became a source of “public fascination”, divorcing Peter Gürtler a year after she stepped down, walking away with alimony, seats on the boards of a couple European companies, and a Doubleday book deal. Gürtler “committed suicide” in 1990—curious timing, that, considering all the parastatal criminal activities of the Reagan and Bush years, the fall of the Soviet Union, and his nearly annulled, lightning quick marriage to the U.S. Ambassador.
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Sometimes a singular Google search leads to a eureka moment, sending you spilling out of the bathtub in a spray of foam and Epsom salt, racing naked for pen and paper to jot down a reminder of the revelatory piece of evidence that just fell into your lap. I was feeling like I was circling the drain a little bit, that I’d taken my Fortelni passport discoveries about as far as I could, when my mind stirred. “Klonny, you tried to find something linking Ambassador Helene von Damm to Iran-Contra… But did you ever search for an Austrian or Viennese Connection to the scandal more generally?”, so spoke my Shivers and Encyclopedia skills to me as I soaked like some wet dog Harry du Bois.
Wouldn’t you know it, dear reader… With even just a perfunctory internet conjuring, I quickly found a source that would support the Fortelni Passport having been allocated to Epstein as cover during his involvement in Iran-Contra related travels, showing that the use of aliases and false passports were a part of the Enterprise’s OpSec modus operandi. And it gets better yet. Not only will I establish that they relied upon fake passports and cover identities while jetting about on Contragate business, I’ll also show that the Iran-Contra architects used fraudulent passports to travel to Vienna, Austria to negotiate with an Iranian delegation for the release of hostages specifically.
But first, I ought to preface this by pointing out that even today, Western intelligence, national security think tanks like the Hudson Institute, and the Pahlavist anti-AOR lobby maintain that Vienna is the base of operations for Iranian intelligence networks in Europe due to its neutrality and lax regulations regarding covert activity. Per Die Presse, the Library of Congress released a report on Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence in 2012 that asserted Vienna is chock full of Iranian agents, with security experts estimating 100 or more individuals working for the ministry to surveil and pressure regime change advocates in exile there. The Library of Congress report alleges that Austria and Iran have enjoyed warm relations since the Islamic Revolution, meaning this dynamic was well-established prior to when the Fortelni Passport came into being in 1982.
Which brings us to a mini research climax of sorts. Pulling from the Aug. 1993 Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters during Lawrence E. Walsh’s tenure. Take your magnifying glass to “Part VIII Officers of the Department of Defense” specifically, now scroll down to Item #22. This is numbered evidence of various notes, diary entries, and testimonies that were withheld from the Tower Commission and the Select Committees which show that Secretary of Defense Weinberger and many of his closest aides were routinely informed of Contragate arms shipment developments and were personally conducting high-level meetings in the White House and the field regarding the black op. In Items #21 and #22, the OIC team subverts the testimony of a classified “senior military officer” who feigned ignorance when asked whether he’d been considered for a meeting with Iranians regarding the hostage crisis and claimed to be wholly unfamiliar with Col. Oliver North, who he characterized as a “staff officer on the periphery”.
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To reiterate the underlined portions of the screenshot, Secretary Weinberger’s diary revealed that Oliver North and a Senior Military Officer whose identity was classified (national security reasons, ol’ chap) travelled to Vienna, Austria in September of 1985 to meet with Iranians about getting the hostages released. They did so at the express request of Robert McFarlane and with the permission of Weinberger and General Vessey. The Ambassador Robert B. Oakley helped to grease the wheels to get one of the false passports divvied out to the “Officer”, lending credence to the notion that the U.S. Embassy Charge D’Affaires or Amb. Von Damm could have put a finger on the scale related to the Epstein/Fortelni papers. The other two travel docs for North and Redacted were secured when Ollie invoked Admiral Moreau’s name.
Finally, we see that their plane tickets and HOTEL RESERVATIONS were booked under their aliases (one of which was Goode). Their Iran-Contra negotiations trip to Vienna landed a mere month or two after Ambassador von Damm cabled a resignation letter to the White House, signaling her intent to step down over the growing din of gossip about her scandalous relationship with the hotelier. She would make good on the press release the following year, leaving her post in 1986, meaning… that Ambassador Von Damm was still in office at the time that a major secret meeting between the U.S. and Iranian Contragate delegations was held in her jurisdiction. Now, considering she and the recently divorced Gürtler shacked up together, got married in Feb. 1985 only a month after she’d finalized her divorce from computer industry consultant Byron Leeds (how fitting that the 4th wedding fell in the shortest month), and divorced again in the span of like 2ish years tops, I would be remiss if I didn’t speculate ever so slightly about the torrid-but-brief affair.
At the very least, I think we can deduce that chances are the Hotel Sacher would have played host to various comings-and-goings of Reagan officials, whether Contragate-related or not. For example, from the same WaPo profile, we find tell of a meeting between von Damm and Secretary Shultz, Assistant Sec. for Euro Affairs Richard Burt, and National Security Adviser and major Contragate player Robert A. McFarlane in Vienna that very May, 1985 (emphasis added, see article’s final stretch). How much do you want to bet they rendezvoused at the Sacher or at the very least stayed there? And not just because it’s Vienna’s fanciest and most prestigious hotel. It would only be logical to hold certain deliberations in the private confines of a spare room or conference room within a hotel whose proprietor could be trusted to keep a secret (perhaps incentivized to stay mum by sexy time with the hot lady Ambassador?).
If you’re attempting to have an off-the-books summit without inviting suspicion or the press sniffing it out, there are few better options than a five-star luxury hotel that caters to an international clientele in a neutral country. It’s called “hotel diplomacy”, for godsakes, I’m not just talkin’ out my rump here. To back up what I’m putting down, always going that extra mile, I’ve pulled a Wall Street Journal piece exploring the security and zipped lipped peculiarities of courting such business during the UN’s General Assembly of Nations and the background checks and metal detectors that hoteliers are expected to have on hand as an example.
To conclude this section, I’ll leave you with two speculative, inquisitive ponderances. How would you rate the likelihood that von Damm honeypotted Gürtler for the express purpose of gaining influence over the Hotel through romantic means in advance of it serving as a neutral ground for top secret meetings? And secondly, with all of this splayed before you, what do you think the chances are that Fortelni’s Austrian passport fell into Epstein’s hands because it was to play a pivotal role in enabling him to get in and out of Austria and/or Saudi Arabia to meet with Iranian arms dealers and dignitaries with ease and without inviting suspicion? From the little I’ve dredged up so far, it seems that while entry/exit stamps for Austrian citizens were routine, they weren’t uniform or always strictly enforced (especially at land crossings), so even though there seemingly isn’t any inky proof of Fortelni/Epstein revisiting Vienna after the passport was issued, this doesn’t mean the holder never returned. There are more involved ways of explaining away such a discrepancy (if we’re thinking there’s a compelling case to make regarding Austrian activities specifically), as even the North and Redacted anecdote describes the use of secondary passports, which is not uncommon when you wish to enter a country without tipping Immigration and Customs off to your point of departure.
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