I think almost no one, including the media, knows what really happened. There are a huge array of different forking possibilities.
There are evil men in Afghanistan raping boys and there are evil men in Washington defending allowing them to do so.
Was Dahmer an asset? No!
Was Foobar an asset? No comment.
It's not in their best interest to publicly deny any assets I don't think.
Epstein is very small fry for that organization.
We know Epstein was a genuine pedophile. It's not impossible that his actions were his (and Ghislaine's) own. Maybe he was trying to blackmail people for his personal profit, or maybe blackmail wasn't part of it. Maybe he saw it as a way of sharing his "hobby" with people he liked and wanted to get to know more, partly to acquire clout and connections and partly because pedophilia was his passion and something he considered worth doing with others, just like some rich people invite other rich people to go golfing.
There are so many possibilities. Maybe the above is true but he was also an intelligence asset. Maybe he was an asset but the agency/agencies involved weren't aware actual underaged people were involved and dropped him after his 2008 arrest and he then just continued for his own pleasure. Maybe he really was working for one the whole time and the people responsible thought the ends justified the means. Maybe he wasn't and essentially was trying to run his own private intelligence agency, perhaps to sell information to other intelligence agencies, and companies and people who would pay a lot for that dirt.
There's no evidence of anything concrete either way. The prosecutor saying he was told to back off and that he belonged to intelligence is what really sparked all of this, but the meaning of this is still unclear. If the person who told him this wasn't lying, it definitely could mean he was an asset all along, or it could mean that intelligence agencies weren't aware of him until his arrest and realized the potential of the information he might have and promised him leniency if he informed them about every important individual involved, then stopped dealing with him after he was sentenced.
If this is true, this sort of thing isn't uncommon with mass murderers - look at Sammy the Bull. The fact that he kept doing it for a decade when he got out, the unknown sources of his money, and other weird factors certainly could be seen as additional evidence of his actions being sanctioned by some sort of intelligence, but it could mean other things, too.
It's all just speculation. We also honestly don't know if he was murdered or killed himself; or if he killed himself, if he was permitted or encouraged to do so or if it really was just an ordinary suicide (he'd certainly have strong motive to kill himself). Maybe the base rate of incompetence is so high in that prison that this could happen; maybe 1/3 of the other cameras weren't working then, either, and maybe a lot of guards were slacking off and faking data for years.
Most people seem to jump to the most extreme version of all of these possibilities, but we have almost nothing to go on. Maybe we'll learn the answers someday, but who knows.
Listen to yourself. The end these people seek is to set themselves above the law so they can hollow out the world to line their own pockets, play with the lives of entire nations like pieces on a chessboard, and rape children.
I think maybe your cynicism is misplaced. The world is a far uglier place than your comment presumes. And relative to the kinds of people intelligence agencies must deal with sometimes, Epstein's crimes and alleged crimes probably wouldn't raise an eyebrow. (Which isn't a comment on whether they were blackmail worthy.)
First off, he may have had no involvement with intelligence whatsoever, or beyond being interrogated after his arrest.
If the intelligence agencies did set all of this up and told him to get real underaged girls (rather than actors pretending to be underaged) to blackmail people, or knew this was happening and allowed it to continue for so long, that'd actually be big. That's state-sponsored child sex trafficking and rape. But there are so many other possibilities in between that and "no involvement".
If someone asked you right now "you have two options: topple a government and replace them with a puppet, or run a child sex trafficking ring", and you had to pick one, which would you choose? If I had to choose, I'd definitely choose the former.
The current head of the CIA is a torturer who illegally destroyed evidence. “Shifted a little” is awfully generous.
Time to watch...let's see..."Scandal", "Snowden", Canadian TV show "Intelligence", Shooter...those are just the "fictional" accounts.
What's even more conspicuous is that there is clearly a strong interest by the public. Even if all these "conspiracy theories" are false, you could get a LOT of viewership just going around debunking them. But it's like complete silence from the traditional corporate media.