OCEAN OUTLAW: A PORTRAIT OF GHISLAINE MAXWELL

She was the founder and president of a project to build an extraterritorial state in the world’s oceans, having been an aspiring marine biologist in her youth. A deep-sea diver, submarine captain, helicopter pilot, and robot operator, who studied French Literature and Business as a graduate of Oxford University. She was fluent in four languages, including those of the three countries of which she was a citizen: France, where she was born, Britain, where she grew up, and the United States of America – where she chose to settle and live most of her fascinating and tumultuous life. Her time in America was mostly spent at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where she was invited to speak at the United Nations no less than nine times.

I’m talking about Ghislaine Maxwell. In this portrait, there will barely be a mention of any activities on account of which the “Madam sex trafficker” cardboard cutout has been crafted by the mainstream media and their intelligence community handlers. This even though I was friends with one of the young women who knew Ghislaine Maxwell and was “involved” with Jeffrey Epstein. This was at the Dalton School, where both of my mentors had been hired by Headmaster Donald Barr – the sci-fi author and CIA operative who also hired Epstein to teach there. One of these two mentors worked very hard at trying to recruit me into the CIA when I was between the ages of 13 and 14 – even suggesting that the Agency would pay my college tuition (to be clear I refused, for same reason that I refused an Israeli offer decades later, because I insist on remaining entirely independent).

In any case, having been the subject of defamation in the “fake news” mainstream media myself, and at that as part of an intelligence operation, I can say that I have never seen a worse case of defamation by omission than that of Ghislaine Maxwell. As per Friedrich Nietzsche, what I am saying here lies beyond the scope of any moral judgments about “good” and “evil.” It is not my concern to argue that Ghislaine Maxwell is a “good” person – not at all. Only that she is an interesting and impressive person. Her fascinating aims, ambitions, and concerns in life have been hidden because they involve truths that would unravel our world. Let’s pull on those red threads.

Successor of a Super-Spy

The facts of Robert Maxwell’s career as a businessman, media mogul, and politician are widely available, so I see no reason to rehash them here. What is of more interest in understanding what it would have been like to have this man as one’s father – especially if one is the youngest of nine siblings, and is “daddy’s favorite girl,” after whom he eventually names his yacht – is the extensive intelligence involvements of the man who would become ‘Robert Maxwell.’ He was born in 1923 as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, in what was then Slatinské Doly, Czechoslovakia and has since become Solotvyno, Ukraine. He was an Ashkenazi Jew from a Yiddish-speaking family who had long lived in the Carpathian Mountains (made famous by Dracula). His father – Ghislaine’s grandfather – was a poor livestock trader and part-time Torah teacher. By the time he married Elisabeth (Betty) Jeanne Meynard, a French Christian woman who had studied at the Sorbonne and later earned a PhD from Oxford, Hoch had adopted the alias “Ivan du Maurier.” Betty Maxwell’s biography A Mind of My Own: My Life With Robert Maxwell is an excellent source for piecing together the titan’s life and career, especially when augmented by the research of Whitney Webb in One Nation Under Blackmail. First, having escaped the Nazis in his native Eastern Europe, he joined the French Resistance as a fighter. During this time, he was recruited by British Intelligence. By the time he entered the British military, settled in the United Kingdom, and changed his name again to the entirely fabricated “Robert Maxwell,” Binyamin Hoch was already a high-level operative of MI6.

What MI6 did not know was that, somewhere along the way, Hoch was also recruited by the KGB and was conducting espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. This connection to the KGB has been reported on by no less than the BBC in its documentary, House of Maxwell. Robert Maxwell’s work as a double agent for both MI6 and the KGB at the height of the Cold War made him very useful when, sometime in the late 1970s, he was also recruited by the Mossad.

The reason why Maxwell’s media empire was found to be bankrupt after his death in November of 1991, is that his businesses had been artificially sustained by funds from the State of Israel which were cut off between 1989 and 1990 because the Cold War had ended and Maxwell’s position as a triple agent with connections to both sides of the Iron Curtain was no longer valuable to the Mossad. Robert Maxwell was murdered in the middle of the night by a submarine-based Israeli covert ops team that surfaced near the Lady Ghislaine – the yacht named after his youngest daughter – because he had been threatening to use his newspapers to expose state secrets of Israel unless Mossad continued to pay him so that he could keep his businesses solvent.

In this light, the state funeral that Israel held for Maxwell, at which he was eulogized for “having done more for Israel than will ever be known,” is particularly macabre and sinister. I can only imagine what Ghislaine must have felt attending that. Her tortured expression in the videos and photos of the event, when taken together with things she later told her confidants about her father’s death, suggest that she knew from the outset who had murdered him and why. Allegedly, the order was given by Ehud Barak – who would go on to become the Prime Minister of Israel.

Ghislaine would have known because she was the only one of Robert’s children who had been entrusted with all of the information about the various secret projects that he was involved with, including where he had stashed a part of his fortune that would survive the prosecution of her brothers, Kevin and Ian Maxwell, for pension fund plundering that they supposedly helped their father to commit (once his businesses began to fail). That money was vouchsafed to Jeffrey Epstein. But we’ll come back to that.

For now, what is relevant about Epstein in relation to Ghislaine’s father is that, according to Ari Ben-Menashe, it was Robert Maxwell who flew Jeffrey Epstein to Israel with him, several times, in the mid-1980s, and secured a position for Epstein with the Mossad – particularly in arms-trafficking operations, including those that wound up being outed in the Iran Contra scandal. Whitney Webb has reported on this as well. Two of the four Mossad operatives with which I engaged from 2017–2018 also implied that Epstein was working with them, although not necessarily as a salaried “agent.” Prior to that Epstein had only been working for the CIA, having been recruited by Donald Barr in the 1970s, during his time as a teacher at the Dalton School. So, Maxwell, who was a triple agent, turned Epstein into a double agent. Ghislaine was not given an official position in the Maxwell business empire precisely to protect her from prosecution because she was the only one of Robert’s children who had been given the big picture and was read into all the major projects.

The most important of those projects involved control of the establishment scientific discourse and constraining the scope of public sphere technological development in the late 20^th century. Robert Maxwell turned Pergamon Press into one of the key instruments of his rise as a transnational information baron – and a tool of covert geopolitical influence. Pergamon was not simply a publishing company. In Maxwell’s hands, it became a knowledge syndicate, an intelligence operation, and a node in an emerging postwar technocratic order. Maxwell founded Pergamon Press after he took over the Butterworth-Springer scientific publishing business in the wake of World War II. Originally based in Oxford, it focused on the publication of scientific and technical journals – an area deliberately chosen by Maxwell because of its immense strategic value. This was not leisure reading material. It was cutting-edge research in nuclear physics, aerospace, information systems, and industrial chemistry.

By controlling most scientific journal publications through the acquisition and establishment of these journals by Pergamon/Springer, Maxwell was able to get a look at all the latest scientific discoveries and breakthrough technological developments. Then, as a gatekeeper, he selectively suppressed or sequestered from the public sphere of establishment techno-scientific R&D any revolutionary and destabilizing information – including defense-related research with military applications. Maxwell almost singlehandedly set up the “peer review” protocols of scientific journal publication to facilitate this marginalization of certain scientific discoveries and inventions to the fringe of established domains of knowledge. Whether these same techno-scientific discoveries and inventions were being developed secretly by associates of his remains an open question, but we will see that some of Epstein’s activities suggest that this may in fact have been the case.

Pergamon Press also functioned as an intelligence front that cultivated scientific contacts across the Iron Curtain and played a key role in facilitating communication between Soviet and Western scientists. This gave Maxwell extraordinary access to individuals, institutions, and discoveries that were otherwise sealed off by national security regimes. This access was reciprocated – and possibly directed – by Maxwell’s handlers in MI6, KGB, and the Mossad, with whom he maintained labyrinthine relationships. He used Pergamon to develop a network of collaborators, informants, and influence agents embedded in universities, defense contractors, and research institutions. It allowed him to play both sides of the Cold War divide – supplying intelligence and disinformation in a double or triple game. His role in securing scientific papers for publication sometimes veiled the laundering of sensitive research or the recruitment of operatives under the guise of editorial collaboration.

That Maxwell named the press “Pergamon” is telling. Pergamon, the ancient Greek city in Asia Minor, was the site of a vast library that rivaled Alexandria in the ancient world. It was also, not coincidentally, the location of the so-called “Throne of Satan” mentioned in the Book of Revelation – later excavated by German archeologists and brought to Berlin, where it was revered by the Nazis for its putatively occult power. The mythico-political resonance of this name cannot be ignored. Maxwell saw himself as a kind of Promethean or Mercurial intermediary – a trickster thief and merchant of arcane knowledge, and a hermetic manipulator of cultural destinies who was playing with fire. Through Pergamon, he aspired not merely to publish scientific knowledge, but to monopolize, redirect, and weaponize it.

Names were very significant to this man who adopted numerous aliases during his work as a super-spy, and officially changed his name twice. So perhaps it is also significant that the rather rare name “Ghislaine” (pronounced Gi-len), which he gave to the daughter who would become his closest confidant, means “sweet hostage.” Again, recall that he would eventually name his beloved yacht after her, and aboard the Lady Ghislaine (where he was eventually assassinated) Maxwell was known as “Captain Bob.”

Ghislaine was, in many ways, a hostage of her extremely domineering, charismatic, and sometimes sadistically brutal father. Within days of her birth, on Christmas of 1961, her brother Michael was permanently incapacitated in a car crash. In reaction to this, her mother, Elisabeth, traveled to India and Australia, leaving Ghislaine as a toddler in the care of a nanny and her father. According to an article by Victoria Bekiempis of The Guardian, by the age of three Ghislaine had become anorexic and, on one occasion, when her mother returned, the little girl cried out, “Mummy, I exist!”

Bekiempis reports that Robert Maxwell’s parenting consisted of a perverse form of ritualized humiliation. He would subject his children to Sunday “Maxwellian Drama” performances, interrogating them before high-profile guests and erupting in volcanic rage when they failed to meet his arbitrary standards. His was a dominion of fear. In one telling instance, when Ghislaine carefully used a tack to post an image of a pony on her bedroom wall, Maxwell reportedly took the hammer from her and struck her dominant hand, bruising it severely. “Captain Bob” would also regularly spank or whip his daughter’s bare behind.

Even Ghislaine’s romantic life was subordinated to his will for as long as he was alive. Her first passionate romantic engagement was crushed under the heel of his disapproval. She had wanted to become a marine biologist, but he insisted on her studying business in graduate school (after her undergraduate studies in French literature). Robert Maxwell was both the Minotaur and Daedalus of the labyrinth in which Ghislaine was raised, trained, and initiated.

“I wish I never met him.”

It was Captain Bob who introduced his daughter to Jeffrey Epstein, sometime in the late 1980s. By then, Epstein had become Maxwell’s protégé to such an extent that, when the Mossad cut off his funding, and the solvency of his business empire was threatened, Ghislaine’s father hid a significant portion of his wealth by putting it in the safe-keeping of Epstein who, as a money manager and master tax-evader on hire for billionaires, undoubtedly also worked to amplify Maxwell’s loot.

This is why, after her father was murdered in November of 1991, Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York and cultivated a relationship with Epstein. Initially, she lived in a very small apartment on the Upper East Side, and only gradually, over a few years, was she able to move into Epstein’s mansion, and eventually her own townhouse at 116 East 65^th street. Apparently, it took her a while to get access to her father’s hidden money. Then there is also the fact that Daddy had designs to convince Epstein to marry Ghislaine. Something which, after Robert’s death, Jeffrey apparently refused to do. Eventually, Ghislaine would come to consider being introduced to Epstein by her father the worst thing that ever happened in her life. Looking back, she says, “I wish I never met him.”

Given the implications of Jeffrey Epstein’s early career trajectory – particularly his employment at the elite Dalton School under Donald Barr, who had worked for the CIA since the days when it was still the OSS. Barr hired the young Epstein to teach math even though he was a college dropout from Coney Island, with no teaching credentials. Barr was also a sci-fi author, and his 1973 novel Space Relations tells the story of an interplanetary aristocracy involved in underage sex slavery. This lends the novel a retroactive air of revelation, a coded confession, or predictive programming embedded within fiction.

The fact that Barr was not only an intelligence officer but also the father of William Barr, who later served as Attorney General under both George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, further intensifies this impression. Attorney General Barr would go on to play a very significant role in the cover-up of Epstein’s murder in prison. George H.W. Bush had been the Director of the CIA, and, according to Epstein, Trump was Jeffrey’s “best friend” for a few years. The two appear in many photographs together, some of them including Ghislaine – who appears to have been better friends with Trump than Epstein himself. (The President now refers to Epstein as “a creep,” but when asked about Ghislaine in prison he said, “I wish her well.”)

I know for a fact that Donald Barr was operating as a CIA asset in private education – an extension of what some call the “non-official cover” or NOC network – because one of my mentors at the Dalton School, who was also hired by Barr, tried to recruit me into the CIA when I was a teenager. Interestingly, this teacher’s wife ran the Dalton Library, thereby giving her access to information about every book being checked out by every student at the school. A perfect position not just for surveillance but for potential recruitment profiling.

In any case, the post at my alma mater Dalton provided Epstein with access to the children of New York’s elite, a social stratum he would go on to exploit and entrap with startling efficiency. Epstein cultivated students socially and became a “pal” more than a teacher – already demonstrating the manipulative social dexterity that would later define his parasitic rise. Ghislaine Maxwell’s rolodex also became key to this rise, not just through connecting him with the aristocrats that she befriended while hobnobbing with British royalty. What was far more important were her father’s scientific connections acquired through his gatekeeping via Pergamon/Springer journal publications.

Jeffrey Epstein had key card access to both the Mathematics and Biology departments at Harvard University. We know that he was a math teacher at Dalton, and apparently a kind of financial alchemist, but what about biology? The Harvard biology division to which he had key card access was specifically the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED), where he was even given his own office space known as “Jeffrey’s Office.” According to an official Harvard University report on the matter, he visited the building more than 40 times between 2010 and 2018, in other words for a decade after he was first prosecuted in 2008. Those familiar with his interest in this domain have said that Epstein was focused on evolutionary theory and genetic engineering. Epstein was fascinated with eugenics and selective breeding. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a fellow Jew, has said that Epstein’s ideas in this area reminded him of Nazi Eugenics programs.

Epstein planned to impregnate multiple women at his New Mexico “Zorro Ranch.” The program was modeled on the SS Lebensborn project and was also inspired by the transhumanist ideas of people like George Church (who supposedly regrets his association with Epstein). Ghislaine Maxwell was at least a facilitator in this endeavor, if not Epstein’s handler and the actual leader of a project that – like so many others – was probably initiated by her father. Ghislaine would curate young, almost exclusively blond, and blue-eyed men as her live-in aides, just as Epstein preferred enlisting young women with a Nordic phenotype. She would cycle these Nordic male aids every 3 months, on tourist visas, sourcing them mostly from Sweden.

One of the aides, Rasmus Alpsjö, has reported that he noticed that his hair was being collected from his pillows and the bathroom he used, which apropos the film Gattaca, suggests that Ghislaine was collecting genetic material from these men just as Epstein planned to – or was ordered to – use beautiful Nordic women as breeders for eugenic artificial insemination and possibly more sophisticated forms of genetic engineering. (After all, Epstein funded the development of CRISPR tech.) The same aide reported that Ghislaine always kept a live grenade on her office desk, apparently with the intent of taking out whoever it was she believed was going to be sent to assassinate her.

Jeffrey Epstein was also obsessed with physics research and technological developments directed toward defying gravity. In other words, he was interested in electrogravitics or what is believed to be the power and propulsion system of UFOs. A few of the women who visited Epstein Island saw UFOs coming in and out of the ocean around the property. Ghislaine piloted the “Atlantis” submarine (we will come back to this) that took Epstein and crippled physicist Stephen Hawking down to the seabed of the Bermuda Triangle to study quantum magnetic anomalies there.

Eric Weinstein has extensively commented on the fact that Epstein became aware of his exotic alternative physics theories just as soon as they were published, again suggesting that the Pergamon gatekeeping system put in place by Ghislaine’s father – or some successor to it – was still in place. Weinstein recounts coming away from his conversation with Epstein with the impression that the man was “a construct.” This construct had the J. Epstein Virgin Islands Foundation sponsor a 2006 conference titled “Confronting Gravity,” the participants of which included all of the top physicists working on the problem of overcoming gravity at institutions such as Caltech, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Chicago, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifique and CERN.

During her one encounter with Elon Musk at a party, Ghislaine Maxwell discussed two subjects with him: one was the connection between simulation theory and contact with supposedly extraterrestrial intelligence, and the other was whether it would in any way be technically possible to permanently remove certain information from the Internet (not just the WWW) without taking out the entire Internet. In this connection, it is worth noting that Ghislaine’s sister, Christine Maxwell, is a co-founder of the Magellan search engine and one of the leading developers of Internet-related technology.

Haunted by Atlantis

When Ghislaine Maxwell went into hiding in New Hampshire after the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and before her own arrest, she adopted the pseudonym “Janet Marshall” for everything associated with her isolated property there. This was first uncovered by the Dark Journalist, who also pieced together the fact that Janet Marshall was a reference to a feminist author who is commonly published under the name Janet Stevenson but whose full name was actually Janet Atlantis Marshall Stevenson. One of Stevenson’s novels is titled Departure. It is a carefully researched and deeply immersive work of historical fiction that dramatizes the perilous voyage of a 19^th century American ship through the eyes of its central character, Amanda Bright. The novel is inspired by a real but obscure historical account of an unnamed woman who took command of a ship under extraordinary circumstances – an event that Janet Atlantis Stevenson discovered in an old volume titled Women on the Frontier (1878).

Amanda’s presence aboard is unusual and taboo, especially to the Polynesian sailors who believe a woman brings bad luck at sea. Her initial struggle is to maintain her identity and purpose in an environment dominated by strict hierarchies and male roles. Amanda starts out largely defined by her marriage and societal expectations but becomes increasingly autonomous and capable. Her yearning for motherhood – and her fear of never conceiving – serve as emotional undercurrents that parallel her desire for a fuller, more purposeful life. Her husband, and the captain of the ship, Jonathan Bright, recognizes Amanda’s intelligence and emotional strength, and begins teaching her navigation. When a fever incapacitates both Jonathan and his first officer, Mr. Smith, Amanda is left in a position of de facto command. Though she lacks formal authority or experience, her clarity of mind, sense of purpose under pressure, and an ability to learn quickly become the ship’s only hope.

Departure is ultimately about what it means for a woman to seize control – of a ship, sure, but more importantly, of her own destiny. The novel challenges traditional maritime tales by placing a woman not only aboard the ship, but also at its helm, literally and figuratively. It is a story of courage, capability, and crossing thresholds.

As a polyglot and student of literature, Ghislaine Maxwell was probably as fond of double entendre and occulted polyvalence as her father, when he named Pergamon Press. So, it should be no surprise if “Janet Atlantis” is a pseudonym with more than one meaning, and that it was also meant to signify something else. As someone who regularly flew around in private planes with Epstein, and as an intelligence operative, Ghislaine would know very well that JANET is an acronym that refers to nodes in a network of secret airports that are used by the Deep State and the Military-Industrial Complex. It means “Just Another Non-Existent Terminal.” As I learned when I began studying the UFO phenomenon and its association with the American Deep State more than thirty years ago, JANET flights from out of Las Vegas take contractors out to Area 51 and S4.

What is more interesting in this pseudonym is “Atlantis,” especially since, as the Dark Journalist first brought to light, Ghislaine also named her submarine – the one that she piloted for Epstein – the “Atlantis” submarine. Little Saint James, Epstein’s private island, featured a temple dedicated to Poseidon – the patron deity of Atlantis. Meanwhile, the Zorro Ranch had a maze in the shape of Plato’s description of the ground plan of Atlantis. Ghislaine’s last boyfriend, the one she was with when she was arrested, Scott Borgerson, was a former Navy SEAL and CIA operative who is on record having stated that the eventual melting of Antarctica would bring Atlantis from the realm of imagination to reality. (We will come back to Borgerson and his Cargometrics company.) Fashion designer Alexander McQueen was one of Ghislaine’s close friends. His flagship store in Manhattan was around the corner from her townhouse. McQueen was found dead shortly after releasing what would wind up being his last clothing line, titled “Plato’s Atlantis” with an archeo-futuristic quasi-alien maritime transhumanist aesthetic.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s fascination with Atlantis, and with the oceans, began in her childhood on account of her father’s friendship with Jacques Cousteau. Not only was Robert Maxwell friends with Jacques Cousteau, but Captain Bob’s Lady Ghislaine yacht was also eventually fitted out with equipment and design features provided through channels connected to Cousteau’s oceanographic network. As reported by the Dark Journalist, Cousteau confessed to Maxwell that his lifelong exploration of the oceans was secretly, and obsessively, motivated by a quest to find Atlantis. Ghislaine, who is bisexual, tried to cultivate a relationship with Cousteau’s granddaughter, Alexandra, who has denied witness testimony that she was on the island with Maxwell and Epstein.

Ghislaine undoubtedly learned to become a professional deep-sea diver and a submarine and helicopter pilot to facilitate her search for Atlantis, initially in the region of the Caribbean known as “the Hot Zone” by US military intelligence. The Dark Journalist has done an extensive video series by that name on this subject, which readers can consult for a deeper dive into Maxwell’s work in this region. There are many USO sightings in this area, which extends from Cuba all the way to the Bermuda Triangle.

At one point, Maxwell brought Epstein with her to meet with Fidel Castro to try to secure his approval for them to dive on a restricted site off the Western coast of Cuba. As reported by Brad Yoon of Ancient Origins and a number of other journalists circa 2021, this is where Canadian marine archeologist Paulina Zelitsky discovered an entire city’s worth of Atlantean ruins that were mapped in detail using sonar and other underwater mapping technology. Zelitsky was eventually arrested, severely intimidated, and successfully silenced, while the scientific community suppressed her astonishing findings. According to the Dark Journalist, Ghislaine wanted Castro to grant permission, and protection, for her to dive on the same site.

She also dove at Bimini, where megalithic structures that form a kind of road or wall surfaced in the late 1960s, decades after the medium Edgar Cayce had psychically predicted that evidence for Atlantis would surface at that location. That she would take Cayce’s psychic abilities seriously is no surprise. Both Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were very interested in psychic phenomena and the occult.

Epstein had threatened journalist Vicky Ward with the use of “voodoo” if she were to give him bad press. As for Ghislaine, her favorite holiday is Halloween, and we know from her remarks at the Iceland Arctic Circle Forum in 2014 that she believes in ghosts: “It was Halloween yesterday. I’m scared of ghosts, and we can all be scared of things. Ebola, and so on. Some people are irrationally afraid of spiders or snakes. I would argue that maybe we should be more scared of the ocean.” Ghislaine was such a fan of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks that she arranged to meet and befriend Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Dale Cooper), the lead actor and protagonist of the haunting supernatural series.

TerraMar and Antarctica

Professor Charles Hapgood, who worked for the CIA, proposed a theory of Earth-crustal slippage, which was built upon by researcher Rand Flem-Ath to arrive at the hypothesis that the massive island-continent of “Atlantis” described by Plato is really Antarctica. According to this theory, the Earth’s crust catastrophically slipped by a few thousand kilometers approximately 12,000 years ago – leading to tsunamis and the devastation of a worldwide advanced seafaring civilization that was principally based in Antarctica. Once the island-continent was pulled entirely into the south polar region, the ruins of the Atlantean civilization were trapped under miles of ice.

How interesting, then, that after finally leaving Jeffrey Epstein, the next man that Ghislaine gets seriously involved with is a certain Scott Borgerson, whose Cargometrics hedge fund based on shipping lane metrics is particularly concerned with the question of regulation, or the lack thereof in the Antarctic. Did Ghislaine follow Wilson, Flem-Ath, and Hapgood, in considering that, despite having extensive colonies in what is now the Caribbean and the Bahamas, perhaps all the way up to the Azores, the Atlantean homeland may actually have been Antarctica?

Here is what Borgerson, who Ghislaine secretly married, had to say about the lack of regulations and the potential for resource exploitation in Antarctica after climate change-induced de-glaciation, in an article that he penned for The Guardian: “While at the top of our world sits the polar sea, at the bottom lies the ice-covered continent of Antarctica. As its ice cover melts this isolated continent will rise from the shadows like Atlantis transmigrating from imagination to reality.”

Scott Borgerson helped Ghislaine to manage her TerraMar Project, which she launched in 2014. Many in the mainstream media have speculated that TerraMar was some kind of front or publicity stunt aimed at remaking her image after distancing herself from Epstein. I do think that it was a front, but not at all the kind of publicity stunt that these professional peddlers of disinformation would have the public believe.

First of all, Ghislaine Maxwell has genuinely had a lifelong deep interest in the oceans. As noted above, she wanted to be a marine biologist, but her father would not let her – insisting that she go into business, his business. That having been said, TerraMar was a front – for continuing her search for Atlantis and, potentially, for building a New Atlantis. It is this phase of Ghislaine’s quest that became the basis for the vision of her in my philosophical novel Psychotron, as the project leader of Dana Avalon’s NovAtlantis initiative.

Borgerson, whose profile fits that of a former Naval Intelligence operative, boasted that Cargometrics was aiming to become “the NSA of the seas.” Detailed information on the movements of various types of vessels along all of the shipping lanes of the world would be very useful in determining just what sectors of the high seas were most secluded and ungoverned. Over and over again during her various speeches promoting the TerraMar Project, including nine addresses to the United Nations, Ghislaine Maxwell emphasized the lawlessness of the high seas, which make up no less than 45% of our planet. 71% of the Earth is ocean. 64% of the ocean lies outside the territorial waters, and the legal jurisdiction, of any one nation.

On the face of it, her advocacy for universal adherence to the Law of the Seas Convention seems to be geared toward ocean conservation and wildlife protection, addressing the tragedy of “the global commons” that no one in particular cares about because it is owned by no one and belongs to everyone. But what Ghislaine was really after by pushing, for example, for the United States to finally sign the convention, was to make sure that as little of the oceans as possible were under the legal jurisdiction of one or another nation-state and, by extension, within the scope of enforceable international law. While lamenting the overfishing done by certain countries and corporate syndicates, Ghislaine’s real aim was to keep as much of the high seas as free of regulation as possible. To preserve their outlaw status as the aquatic equivalent of the Wild West, a frontier for pirates of all kinds – including Promethean pirates.

Nemo and the Sea Wolves

If Maxwell has not read Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan, then I wager that she at least understands his argument there intuitively, especially where Schmitt enters into the subject of “cosmopirates and cosmopartisans” of the future. It is at the margins of state power that the true nature of sovereign authority and its relationship with constitutional and international law can really be understood. Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) or Captain “Wolf” Larsen in Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (1904) are figures that Schmitt could have used to radicalize his argument for how sovereign power, and the constitutional order that it produces, precedes and is unbound by the legal system that it may formulate or dissolve.

Granting that Schmitt was right that a law lacking any sovereign power to enforce it is no binding law at all, in international waters, beyond the enforceable jurisdiction of any nation-state, order still endures aboard the ships of outlaw captains. Ghislaine’s intense interest in The Outlaw Ocean series of articles written by Ian Urbina of The New York Times, which was subsequently adapted into a book, is a clue to what she was really after with TerraMar and the value she saw in associating herself with Borgerson and Cargometrics.

In The Outlaw Ocean, Urbina writes: “The rule of law – often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes – is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.” This is tremendously significant in light of the fact that “merchant ships haul about 90 percent of the world’s goods” since “moving freight by sea is much cheaper than by air partly because international waters are so uncluttered by national bureaucracies and unconstrained by rules.” In other words, a sufficiently powerful group of stateless pirates could, in theory, hold the population of the entire planet hostage by dominating or disrupting global shipping lanes.

In her capacity as the founder and director of TerraMar, Ghislaine Maxwell did an excellent video interview of Ian Urbina that can still be found online – if one searches hard enough through the sea of garbage about “sex trafficking.”

In 2014, Urbina managed to convince The New York Times to send him on assignment abord a ship called the Bob Barker, which belonged to Sea Shepherd, a vigilante ocean conservation group. They were using the vessel to chase after a notorious pirate ship called the Thunder. Ships like the Thunder rarely, if ever, go into a port. They stay out at sea, sometimes a couple of hundred miles from any coastline, and are both refueled and resupplied by other vessels that do call at ports but are less infamous and are not known to have dealings with pirate ships. Sea Shepherd was run by Paul Watson, who had been a co-founder of Greenpeace, before being kicked out of Greenpeace for being too radical and aggressive in his environmentalist activism on the high seas. Sea Shepherd had a small navy consisting of ten ships, two drones, and 120 men and women with backgrounds from twenty-four different nations. Sea Shepherd’s motto is: “Takes a pirate to catch a pirate.”

Urbina describes their chase of the Thunder as “a battle of bold vigilantism against persistent criminality.” The Thunder, which also sailed under other aliases, was an illegal fishing vessel, whose true ownership was obscured by multiple shell companies in the Seychelles, Nigeria, and Panama, with some authorities suspecting (but unable to prove) that the Spanish fish-poaching company Vidal Armadores was the true owner. The illicit seafood trade is a business that rakes in $160 billion a year for the criminals who run it. One in every five seafood dishes served at first world restaurants has been netted illegally. At one or another time, the Thunder sailed under the flags of the United Kingdom, the Seychelles, Belize, Tongo, and at the time of Urbina’s reporting, was alternating between flying the flags of Mongolia and Nigeria.

Pirate ships would sail under the infamous Jolly Roger or flag of the skull and crossed bones in the days when seabound vessels still only flew the flags of the country at whose port they were based or at whose behest they sailed. Beginning as a response to Prohibition (of alcohol) in the United States, from 1920–1933, which extended to regulations against US vessels even serving alcohol in international waters, a practice began of re-flagging merchant ships by paying companies in foreign countries for licenses to sail under the flag of the country hosting that company. These “flags of convenience” are, as Urbina explains, “cloaks of misconduct” that companies in third world countries are particularly eager to provide to customers who pay well. The governments of many of these countries, in Africa or Latin America, are also in on the corruption of these companies, since it is the country’s flag that is being flown after all, as long as the state officials are given their cut of the corporate licensing profits. If, or when, Interpol comes after any one of these countries for such corporate practices, the companies revoke the pirate ship’s license to fly that country’s flag, and the ship’s secret owners turn to another company in another country. That is what is behind the Thunder flying so many false flags. Instead of a proper port registry name and number painted on its hull, the Thunder had what are called “James Bond license plates” or a variety of different port registry signs that hung from its stern and could be quickly swapped. Finally, like all such pirate ships, the Thunder would sail with its AIS or locational transponder turned off so that it could not be electronically tracked by Interpol or anyone else.

For such vigilantes as the Sea Shepherd pirates that Urbina sailed with on board the Bob Barker, chasing and attempting to illegally “arrest” the crew of illegal fishing vessels like the Thunder is not just a question of the illegality of the fishing, but the ethics of ocean life conservation. Sharks are finned for shark fin soup and left to slowly die at the hands of other predatory fish as they sink to the ocean floor. Aside from the barbarity of this treatment, which I believe Ghislaine Maxwell was sincere in condemning when she mentioned it in all of her public addresses, sharks are a keystone species. As apex predators they keep the population of smaller fish down to a level that prevents the latter from eating too many of the microorganisms that sustain coral reefs. Consequently, poaching sharks and leaving them for dead ultimately means killing entire coral reef habitats.

Consider the case of Palau. Measured in square miles of land, the island nation of Palau is only about the size of New York City. 177 square miles to be precise. However, the chain of Palau’s 250 small islands is so spread out in its expanse that the territorial waters of Palau extend the nation’s sovereignty over 230,000 square miles, an area comparable to the size of Texas. Consequently, considering its small population and relative inability to defend its territory, the waters of Palau are a popular target for piratical fish poaching, including of very high value seafood items such as Pacific bluefin tuna and Chinese sea cucumbers. At one point, Palau attempted, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a deal with the private mercenary military force of Blackwater to protect its waters. It is no mere coincidence that during one of her nine addresses to the United Nations regarding the TerraMar Project, Ghislaine Maxwell was seated next to the representative from Palau.

From the Sea, Freedom

Gaining control of a relatively powerless but expansive island chain country like Palau would be tremendously advantageous to a large-scale seasteading project. Seasteads are to the new frontier of the outlaw ocean what homesteads once were in the largely lawless American frontier of the “Wild West.” This is another subject that Urbina discusses in The Outlaw Ocean. Seasteads are platforms or other habitable structures moored in international waters; they could even be adapted out of large, anchored ships – such as cruise ships. For example, the startup “Blueseed” seastead that Dario Mutabdzija proposed to be built in international waters off the coast of Silicon Valley.

Urbina focuses on one particularly controversial seastead, Sealand, which also became a micronation. Located off the coast of England in the North Sea, just beyond British territorial waters, Sealand began as an abandoned 1940s British Navy platform with a helipad, built in brutalist style, with an expanse not larger than two tennis courts, sitting on top of two concrete towers that raise the structure sixty feet above the ocean. In the late 1960s, it was taken over by Roy Bates, together with his family and friends. Initially, Roy used it as the base for a pirate radio station broadcasting pop music bands back into the British Isles. But by the 1970s, the Bates family had declared Sealand to be a sovereign nation, with its own flag, passport, coat of arms, embossed gold and silver coins, air mail stamps, and a motto: E Mare, Libertas, “From the Sea, Freedom.”

Initially diplomatic recognition was hard to get, and there were a few skirmishes between the Bates family and the British Royal Navy. The courts, however, decided in favor of Bates and Sealand, declaring that the United Kingdom had no jurisdiction there. But de facto recognition eventually came when West Germany was forced to send an ambassador to Sealand in 1978 to negotiate the release of a certain Gernot Pütz, who was involved in a failed coup attempt organized by Alexander Gottfried Achenbach, the so-called “foreign minister of Sealand,” together with a few other Germans. The fact that the coup plotters were thrown in the brig by a triumphant Roy Bates, and that Pütz was held there for two months, until the West German ambassador was able to negotiate his release for a sum of 75,000 Deutsche Marks to be paid to the Bates family, is itself an interesting study in the dynamics of constituting sovereign authority in a realm beyond the reach of any national law and forcing others to at least implicitly recognize this claim.

Over the years following this victory, Sealand’s size may not have grown but its stature and reputation did, to the point where in 2010, WikiLeaks approached Sealand with a request to allow Julian Assange to take refuge there. Bates declined. At one point a server company called HavenCo wanted to use Sealand as a site for secure servers, since seawater can be used to cool these servers just as well as the very expensive air-conditioning systems that are required to do so when they are land-based. Even Google has shown interest in building offshore data storage centers with seawater-cooled servers. However, as one can imagine, Sealand also became a nexus for global organized crime. Various crime syndicates, including arms dealers, began to forge Sealand passports – or at least Bates claims that they were forged – in order to secure diplomatic immunity, or the appearance of it, in various countries wherein their operations were liable to get them prosecuted. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, Sealand passports were used by one group of arms dealers who managed to sell no less than fifty Russian tanks, ten MiG-23 fighter jets, and armored vehicles and artillery to buyers in Sudan for a sum of $50 million.

Sealand was located in a relatively accessible stretch of ocean, just outside of British territorial waters. There are, however, parts of the outlaw ocean that are nearly impenetrable by surface vessels. With two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds and ninety-foot-tall waves, the international waters between Argentina and Antarctica are particularly hard to navigate. A sufficiently robust seastead firmly moored in an area like this, perhaps with most of the structure extending below the gigantic waves, would be an almost unreachable lair, except by submarine. There is an old sailing proverb to the effect that “below latitude 40° south there is no law, and below 50° south, no God.” Urbina goes on to remark that the outlaw ocean is not only “a cold and predatory environment… a habitat for the brutal exercise of evolutionary fitness…” but “also a place of discovery, of limitless aspiration and reinvention.”

It was certainly all of those things for Ghislaine Maxwell. There is this really revealing line that she repeats in most of her TerraMar speeches, about how she is a “speed demon” and if there were no traffic cops, she would be the one running all the red lights on the road: “I’m a bit of a speed demon, so I’d be whipping through those red lights as long as I knew that no one was tracking me.” As I suggested in Psychotron, the regulatory objectives of TerraMar were meant to set the stage for preservation of “the blue heart of the Earth” and the seabed, including subsurface mountain ranges and ridges of the high seas, for stealth colonization by “a new country” as Ghislaine often put it with diabolical tact. An outlaw nation. NovAtlantis.