The CITIC Files: Epstein Introduced to China’s Military-Intelligence Complex Through a Network Launched by Lord Peter Mandelson

LONDON — Lord Peter Mandelson had a plan. Use the people’s business as cover to build his personal fortune. But discreetly.

“My schedule in China is a bit complicated,” the Labour Party powerbroker wrote to Desmond Shum on August 30, 2010. “I arrive on Monday 13 Sep with an official UK delegation until Wednesday. I then want to stay on until Fri/Sat unofficially to meet people and network for the future but I am not sure how to do this, where to stay or get myself around because I want to be independent of the Embassy.”

The email, released among more than three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein files by the U.S. Department of Justice, shows the former British First Secretary of State asking a Chinese billionaire with deep ties to the Politburo Standing Committee to arrange private networking on a government trip to Beijing — beyond the knowledge of British diplomatic staff.

Six months earlier, Mandelson had personally introduced Desmond Shum to Epstein, a convicted sex offender. Six weeks after Mandelson’s compromising request for private networking access in Beijing — while travelling on Westminster’s official business and supposedly working for the British people — Shum would make his own introduction.

Email evidence shows that Shum introduced the senior leadership of CITIC — a Chinese conglomerate already identified in the late 1990s by North American media reports as a front for the People’s Liberation Army, with links to Chinese Triads and illegal weapons trafficking in North America — directly to Epstein.

What these documents reveal is a web of mutual profit linking Western political and banking elites to the core entity of China’s most aggressive intelligence and influence operations — a conglomerate with documented ties to influence campaigns targeting the Clinton White House and the Liberal Party of Canada in the 1990s, and now, through the Epstein disclosures, a newly visible record of sustained operations cultivating the political leaders and business patrons of the Anglo alliance into the 2010s.

The Epstein files have reopened a stark window onto CITIC’s Western reach across three decades. And they show that this network was relaunched, in part, by Peter Mandelson. Its broker was the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The consequences of these revelations may now reach into the heart of Keir Starmer’s government, and its inscrutable pro-Beijing turn.

“We’re the government”

To understand what CITIC is, begin with what its own representatives said when asked.

On July 16, 2015, literary agent John Brockman — a longstanding Epstein associate — emailed Epstein with the subject line “Citic (China)” and marked “CONFIDENTIAL.”

Brockman explained that a banker from Vermillion Partners had called on behalf of CITIC, which Brockman described as “a huge Chinese conglomerate and [our] biggest customer.” CITIC wanted to explore developing “a strategic relationship.”

Brockman recounted a previous encounter: “When we first met them, they showed up with computers, printers, and bought translation rights to 60 books on the spot, generating contracts as they went along.” He added that when someone asked the CITIC representatives who they were, the reply was to the point: “We’re the government.”

Anyone with a New York Times subscription could have known that.

On December 21, 1996, David E. Sanger laid bare the architecture of CITIC in one of the defining dispatches of the Clinton era. The conglomerate’s chairman, Wang Jun, had walked into a White House coffee reception that February — brought by a Little Rock Chinese restaurateur and Democratic fundraiser — while simultaneously heading the Poly Group, the commercial arm of the PLA’s global munitions operation. At the very moment Wang Jun was meeting with the President, a federal sting code-named “Dragon Fire” was closing in on Poly Technologies for smuggling 2,000 automatic rifles into the United States — the largest seizure of smuggled automatic weapons in American law enforcement history. The weapons were destined for California street gangs. The suspects had to call PLA headquarters in Beijing to authorise the shipment.

The affair became the central scandal of the 1996 Democratic fundraising controversy — “Chinagate.” The DNC returned at least $2.8 million in PRC-linked donations. The FBI briefed Congress that it had uncovered a deliberate Chinese government campaign to buy influence in the Clinton administration.

Across the border, Canadian intelligence was reaching the same conclusions.