UK’s NCA Was Tracking Epstein’s British Connections As Starmer Claimed To Be In The Dark

Documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act clearly show that Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) was running a classified intelligence operation on Jeffrey Epstein’s British connections from its US embassy…...while Downing Street claimed it was in the dark.

The operation started nearly five years before Keir Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States in December 2024, and continued throughout the period of his appointment.

In January 2020, the UK’s NCA produced a formal intelligence dissemination designated NCAWAS-20-001. The document was prepared by the agency’s International Liaison Officer stationed at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. It was transmitted to the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. Its subject was ‘Jeffrey Epstein’.

In June 2020 a second dissemination, NCAWAS-20-081, followed (EFTA00148680). Internal NCA correspondence references a prior meeting between NCA officers and FBI personnel, indicating that the January dissemination was itself the product of an established coordination process.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has claimed that the Government did not know. The documents however tell a very different story

Sayer Ji reports:

Any appointment to a post as sensitive as the Washington ambassadorship requires security vetting. Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein was already a matter of extensive public record. The question that the NCA documents raise is not whether the vetting process should have examined Mandelson’s Epstein connections—that much is obvious—but whether it accessed the United Kingdom’s own classified intelligence on those connections.

It is possible, and indeed standard practice, for operational intelligence to be compartmentalized—held within the agency conducting the investigation and not automatically shared with other parts of government, including those responsible for political appointments. The UK’s vetting system does not necessarily draw on every classified investigation across every agency. If that compartmentalization functioned as designed, it would mean that the NCA’s Epstein intelligence remained within the NCA and was not surfaced during Mandelson’s vetting. That possibility does not resolve the problem. It reframes it.

Compartmentalization is designed to protect active operations from political interference — not to shield an incoming prime minister from his own government’s intelligence during a sensitive ambassadorial appointment. And in Starmer’s case, the institutional distance is unusually short. He did not merely lead the Labour Party while the NCA ran its Epstein operation. He previously led the prosecution service that works hand-in-glove with the NCA as a matter of statutory design. The DPP and the NCA do not merely cooperate — they share investigatory powers under the same statute. Due diligence is not incidental to that role. It is the role.

If the vetting process accessed the NCA’s intelligence, then the British government appointed Mandelson with knowledge of what that intelligence contained. If the vetting process did not access the NCA’s intelligence—if the UK’s own classified investigation into Epstein’s British connections was excluded from the security vetting of his most prominent British associate—then the vetting system failed to surface exactly the kind of information it exists to find.

We no longer need to speculate about which scenario applies. On Feb 5, 2026, on the floor of the House of Commons, Starmer was asked directly whether Mandelson’s official security vetting mentioned his ongoing relationship with Epstein. Starmer’s answer: “Yes it did.” He confirmed that “various questions were put to him,” and that Mandelson “completely misrepresented the extent of his relationship with Epstein and lied throughout the process including in response to the due diligence.”

This is not the defense Starmer intends it to be. It is its collapse. “None of us knew” is no longer operative once the Prime Minister confirms the vetting flagged the relationship. The government knew enough to ask. It accepted the answer it was given. And it did not verify that answer against intelligence its own agencies held — including the NCA’s structured reporting from the British Embassy documented in these files, and the financial intelligence pipeline that was actively capturing Epstein-linked transactions through UKFIU-to-FinCEN channels at the time of Mandelson’s appointment.

The question is no longer whether the intelligence existed. It is why the systems designed to act on it deferred to the word of the man they were vetting.

Either answer is serious. Both contradict Starmer’s claim that “none of us knew.” The British government’s own agencies possessed the knowledge. The question is whether it reached the people who made the decision—and if not, why not.

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