Exclusive: How private intelligence brought the U.S. treasury secretary into contact with Epstein's corporate web
Leaked emails from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak document how his 'Cogito/Ergo/Sum' trio of companies wove together a Manhattan PI firm, Soros Fund, Scott Bessent, and Jeffrey Epstein.
Updated September 30, 2025
“Mr. Prime Minister, There is perhaps only one firm I think is a sham, and your [Ivory Coast] hosts have found them,” wrote R.P. Eddy, the dapper chief executive of the Manhattan-based private intelligence firm Ergo and former chief of staff to the legendary U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, according to a leaked archive of emails with former Israeli prime minister and intelligence chief Ehud Barak. Originally published by the hacktivist group ‘Handala’, the emails have received widespread attention since their August 27 curation by the American transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets.
It was August 4, 2013 and Barak had just flown to Abidjan to meet with Ivory Coast president Alassane Ouattara as part of an ultimately unsuccessful pitch for a large contract to support the country’s intelligence apparatus – with a similar trip to Nigeria planned soon after – and had heard that the government was working with Ergo’s older, D.C.-based competitor, Jefferson Waterman International (JWI).
“Their [JWI’s] guy who claims to be a serious intel expert makes up his entire background, transforming himself from a mid-level analyst into James Bond + a delta force soldier,” continued Eddy’s apparent response to Barak’s inquiry about the company. While not named in the email, JWI’s paramilitary and clandestine operations expert at the time was Enrique Prado, an infamous Cuban former CIA paramilitary officer and chief of station in Khartoum who had left the agency for the controversial private military contractor Blackwater in 2004 in an attempt to privatize his idea for a post-9/11 assassination squad.
A previously unreported trio of Israeli companies, designed around the Latin phrase “Cogito, ergo sum,” formed the backbone of a corporate tax scheme whose central component, Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd., served as the face of many of Barak’s business relationships. According to Barak’s leaked email archive, current U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was a significant client of Barak’s, both indirectly through the Manhattan-based private intelligence firm Ergo, and then later through Barak’s Israeli Ergo. Bessent was at the time chief investment officer for the hedge fund of the prominent Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.
Barak simultaneously leveraged the legal entity used to engage with Bessent’s team to form Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, an Israel-based limited partnership between his Israeli Ergo and the now-deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s U.S. Virgin Islands-based Southern Trust Company, Inc. Despite any apparent direct relationship between Bessent and Epstein, the uncomfortably close business dealings could help explain the new treasury secretary’s refusal to provide the U.S. Senate Finance Committee with financial records relating to Epstein. Ranking member Ron Wyden (D-OR) recently characterized Bessent as “a willing participant in the Trump administration’s Epstein cover-up.”
Barak’s rise to head of state had been fueled by his retirement from the Israeli military in 1995 as the country’s most decorated soldier, having commanded both the country’s rough equivalent of Delta Force, Sayeret Matkal, and led the entire military intelligence directorate. Barak was thus an appropriate Israeli peer to former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove and former CIA operations chief David Cohen, who simultaneously advised the Manhattan Ergo. A former CNN journalist helping to lead the Manhattan private intelligence firm even equipped Barak with a custom intelligence briefing on the Ivory Coast’s security agencies shortly after he landed in the country, according to the leaked email archive. The trip had come roughly one month after Barak’s June 27, 2013 consulting agreement with the firm, where he apparently drew a modest $150,000 annual salary and a 5% profit share through his London-based company, TrueSec Ltd.
“We were created at the behest of the US government to provide an alternative form of on-the-ground intelligence in difficult geographies on a wide variety of issues,” read a purported internal frequently-asked-questions guide in the archive from the Manhattan Ergo, whose legal name is Global Precision Research LLC. According to the April 2014 document, which was included in an attachment to one of the leaked emails with Barak, Ergo’s government contracts “might” include investigations into “key leader and power broker dynamics; human terrain mapping; intelligence collection.”
A former chief strategy officer for the CIA, Todd Egeland, reportedly caused widespread scrutiny of Ergo in 2016 by tasking a subordinate to use deception in order to protect the ride-hailing company Uber from a price-fixing lawsuit. U.S. federal contracting disclosures show that the firm has received at least $2 million from the Department of Defense between 2017 and 2024, including a $625,000 contract with the Office of the Secretary of Defense for “Blue OSINT” — apparently referencing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Potential questions from clients were said in the FAQ document to include “Will Obama bomb Syria?” and an email in the archive attributed as from Eddy to Barak the same month as the Ivory Coast trip was titled “Ideas on syria bombing.” The email asked the former prime minister if he had an idea of “when strikes may start.”
The archive further purports to show that, in the lead-up to Barak’s August 2013 trip to the Ivory Coast in collaboration with Ergo, R.P. Eddy sent an email to Barak entitled “Are you close with George Soros?” “We do some work for his fund and are spending time with his son Jonathan,” noted the inquiry, in reference to the 95-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. “I know the Old Man,” read the apparent reply from Barak, before adding that “Met few times in the past but didn’t happen to work intimately.”
The U.S. Justice Department has recently instructed several of its offices to draft plans to investigate Open Society Foundations, the prominent international grantmaking face of Soros’s roughly $28 billion hedge fund, Soros Fund Management LLC. The pressure campaign is widely seen as resulting from partisan political interference on behalf of Trump, and The New York Times last week highlighted OSF’s support for the Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq as a potential target for the investigation.
A purported preparatory email from Eddy to Barak for a fundraising breakfast on the third floor of the posh Brook Club in Manhattan on December 4, 2013 stated that the head of investments for Soros – Kieran Cavanna – would be in attendance, and that “Soros is considering seeding Ergo’s hedge fund with $100-$450 million.” Cavanna in May 2024 published an interview through his podcast with his former boss at Soros Fund, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, recounting their time working together.
Bessent was chief investment officer of Soros Fund during his interactions with Ergo and Barak and had, at the age of 29, been a part of a small team at the fund which infamously helped cause the ‘1992 Sterling crisis’. By successfully pressuring the British government into decoupling their currency from Europe, his team landed Soros roughly £1 billion in profit.
In an email in the archive entitled “your views on Russia/Ukraine and Iraq” which was dated roughly six months after the breakfast, on June 23, 2014, Ergo managing partner and former CNN journalist Evan Pressman putatively stated to Barak that, “As you know, we are fortunate to have entered into a very exciting and potentially lucrative co-investment arrangement with one of the world’s largest family offices (code name: Sterling).”
One hint as to the identity of Sterling — beyond an apparent illusion to the 1992 Sterling crisis — came in mid-May 2014, with a purported email from Pressman to Barak in the archive stating, “Thanks very much for sharing your potential investment ideas for Sterling (client code)--both the ideas you offered over drinks and the Saudi currency idea you offered subsequently.” “Our analysts have begun to research these ideas and determine how we can craft them into a trade,” continued the message.
Ergo’s secrecy surrounding its oil-field negotiation support in Kazakhstan and Mozambique for a client code named ‘Vespa’ was less exacting than for ‘Sterling’, with a May 23, 2014 email attributed to Pressman indirectly disclosing ‘Vespa’ as the Italian energy company Eni.
The same email also named Bessent as an Ergo client.
But the relationship between Barak and Ergo degraded by the end of the year, according to the archive, with a November 14 email from Eddy regretfully noting that “Ergo will not be profitable this year” and requesting an end to Barak’s yearly salary in exchange for quintupled commissions. Barak moved quickly, sending a draft consulting agreement to Soros Fund director of research Sender Cohen one week later, instructing him to “Try to keep it simple and concise,” according to another email in the archive.
Subsequent emails in the archive contain a putative copy of Barak signing the finalized agreement with Soros Fund on Christmas day of 2014.
Somewhat inexplicably given his recent relationship with the American private intelligence firm Ergo, public records show that Barak formed his own Israeli legal entity named Ergo (E.B. 2014) Ltd. four days later, and the leaked Handala emails contain a flurry of apparent subsequent requests from Barak and his wife Nili to his myriad consulting clients to immediately switch over all payments from Hyperion (E.B.) 2013 Ltd. to his Ergo at the start of the new year. The request to Soros Fund came on January 3, 2015, according to the archive, and one recent U.S. regulatory disclosure describes Barak as owning a firm named Ergo which he formed in March 2013, the creation month of Hyperion.
Adding to the confusion, the leaked archive further documents in detail Barak’s formation of a trio of publicly-verifiable companies to make up the Latin phrase for “Cogito, ergo sum,” meaning “I think, therefore I am.” An email in the archive dated as August 25, 2015 apparently documents Barak in an unnecessary moment of panic, asking his lawyer, “Do we have a registration of ‘Sum’ or didn’t we establish it yet? meaning we have only ‘cogito-ergo (sum)’ ?”
Cogito (E.B.) 2015 Ltd was formed nearly three months after Ergo, on March 15, 2015, and nearly two months before the creation of Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP, which set up Barak’s Ergo as the general partner, with Cogito as the initial sole limited partner, owning 99.9% of Sum vs. Ergo’s 0.1%. By January 2016, Epstein’s U.S. Virgin Islands-based Southern Trust Company, Inc. had entered as an additional limited partner, grabbing a 50% stake out of Cogito’s share.
The Israel-based Sum was apparently designed through Epstein’s lawyer Darren K. Indyke to handle repayment of a $1 million loan to Barak as part of an investment into the Israeli public security company Reporty / Carbyne, whose ties to Epstein were the subject of the first significant investigation into the Barak email leaks. Further emails and attachments in the archive, corroborated by public records, purport to document the German investor Nicole Junkermann’s British Virgin Isles-based Montilla International Corporation investing $500,000 into Sum in February 2016, landing Montilla a 16.66% share of Sum taken out of Southern Trust’s previous 50%.
Drop Site News on Sunday similarly leveraged the leaks to report Epstein’s role in brokering a security arrangement between Israel and Mongolia.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) earlier this month issued a press release accusing U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of withholding financial information relating to Epstein, including regarding Southern Trust Company.
Bessent, whose former role as a senior manager with Soros Fund attracted scrutiny upon his appointment to the second Trump administration, is interwoven with Barak’s time at the Manhattan PI firm Ergo and his one-year engagement with Soros Fund and Sender Cohen, which was abruptly terminated by the hedge fund via an email on December 31, 2015.
In the months leading up to the August 4, 2015 public announcement of Bessent’s plan to end his four-year tenure managing Soros’s fortune to start his own hedge fund – leveraging a $2 billion investment from Soros – Barak had been repeatedly looped into conversations with Bessent’s staff, including personal assistant Chrissy Casali and Bessent staffer Shahin Vallee.
A February 6, 2015 purported email to Barak’s wife from Soros Fund’s Sender Cohen – who now chairs the prestigious Fulbright Israel Program and was previously a board member of the controversial Israel on Campus Coalition – noted that Ms. Casali would “check Scott’s calendar” regarding whether he could meet with the former prime minister during his visit to New York later that month. A subsequent May 31, 2015 email in the archive, titled “New User - Ergo” and attributed to Soros Fund staffer Laura Morrison, requested that Mr. Vallee be added to what appears to be an email distribution list for his personal consulting firm Ergo.
“Can you please add [Shahin] to the distribution list? He is working with Scott Bessent,” read the email.
Soros Fund did not provide comment despite requesting a phone call. Ehud Barak, R.P. Eddy, Sender Cohen, and Nicole Junkermann did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Jefferson Waterson International (JWI), regarding the criticism from Eddy.
September 30, 2025: Two of the initial formation document proposals for the Israel-based Sum (E.B.) 2015 LP were added, along with clarifying language.
 | A guest post by
|
Great reporting. Soros & Son are not Red nor Blue, but Green (as it greenbacks). For a bit more: https://www.foxnews.com/world/panama-papers-reveal-george-soros-deep-money-ties-to-secretive-weapons-intel-investment-firm
So, great, who's Trump protecting with the Epstein files quash? Maybe just maybe Israel's arms dealings throughout the world with maybe just maybe US backing and, of course, Epstein's financial acumen. WOW. Great article!