Tim Shipman’s piece in last week’s Spectator described how the Palace is reportedly terrified that Andrew may have revealed defence-related information to figures such as Jeffrey Epstein and others. I am also hearing from my own sources that the role of foreign intelligence services in potentially compromising Andrew — exploiting both his greed and his appetite for female company — could form a significant strand of the unfolding story.
I wrote extensively in Entitled about Andrew and Sarah Ferguson’s closeness to figures such as Dr Johnny Hon and Yang Tengbo, both of whom have been reported to have links to Chinese state or security networks. Similarly, individuals such as Selman Turk and convicted gun-runner Tarek Kaituni had connections to authoritarian regimes and the criminal underworld. Andrew also cultivated relationships with elites in the Gulf and in countries including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
The Yorks were repeatedly warned about such figures by both friends and by the security services, but the advice was consistently ignored. What’s so shocking is that Andrew didn’t even need to be blackmailed, his greed and lust were sufficient for him to do whatever might be required.
The Russia dimension is now attracting increasing scrutiny, particularly in relation to Peter Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor. In this clip and transcript from this week’s Lownie Report podcast, I read from a confidential intelligence document recently obtained from one of my sources.
You’ve spoken a lot in the last few days about the security angle of this. Can you just take us through why you think that might be the next big shoe to drop?
Yes. I think the second thing is it’s a really big issue. I’m picking up all sorts of stories from my sources. It’s interesting to see that Tim Shipman, in last week’s Spectator Diary, said it was a national security issue and had been briefed by Whitehall. And in fact, if I look now at a file I’ve got here, I can actually read out part of it.
This is an intelligence report not cleared for release. Political corruption. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Designated Russian Union. Date 15th of January, 2026. Russian state services have been using Western government infrastructure programs, especially green energy subsidiary programs, as a source of legitimate revenue, which is then repurposed for political corruption operations. All this originally developed these networks using figures such as Jeffrey Epstein for access to political and business leaders, and to control any possible domestic law enforcement actions.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was cultivated by RIS to cultivate a figure close to the British royal family, as protection for them to conduct both intelligence and corruption operations within the EU, UK, US. Using AMW as a front provided legitimacy to corruption operations worldwide. AMW was not blackmailed or otherwise coerced into this role. It states AMW was a willing participant in these schemes due to financial, sexual, and personal reward.
This is based on RIS dossier documents personally seen. So I mean, that’s very interesting, but we’ve also got a lot of intelligence officials beginning to brief the press. I noticed — not briefing me. And, you know, it’s obvious the intelligence services, particularly the Russian and Chinese ones, could see that the vulnerability into the British state was through the royal family, because there was no scrutiny or accountability.
And there was this greed. And so they targeted them. I mean, we’ve seen Johnny Hon, for example, paying Sarah Ferguson large sums of money each year as the director of a company which she really had no knowledge of, and neither of them being able to explain what actually they did for this money. We’ve had the alleged Chinese spy being the sort of pinpoint person in China for pictures at the palace.
We’ve had stories that I talk about in the book of Andrew having kompromat on him in Russia from people like Tim Riley of Cambridge Analytica. So there’s plenty of evidence for the national security angle. I had lunch with an intelligence source this week who said, this is the next big thing. It’s actually worse than I think everyone realizes. So, you know, this isn’t just a story about sex trafficking and financial corruption.
It’s about how heavily penetrated the British state has become through the royal family, who are meant to represent it.
And I suppose Andrew might plead naivety, but he must have started to get an idea, as the years or even decades rolled on, what was valuable in terms of what to hand over. To what extent do you think it’s naivety, and to what extent do you think it was just simple complicity?
Oh, I think he was greedy. He has no moral boundaries. He was operating entirely in his own self-interest, and he was giving people like Epstein whatever they wanted. So they would probably say, I’m going to China, I’m going to see so-and-so. And Epstein would say, well, I think it’d be very interesting to know about this or to see that.
And Andrew would get it. We saw it with the Icelandic banking crisis, where he actually requested Treasury briefing documents to pass to David Rowland, who was buying up an Icelandic bank. I mean, information on the Royal Bank of Scotland during the banking crisis, which clearly would have been very useful to people who were buying up assets or whatever they were doing.
So I think you’ve got to be pretty stupid not to realize the significance of the stuff that you’re passing on and how secretive it needs to be. So I don’t think he can claim any sort of defence that he didn’t realize — however entitled he is. I mean, he was briefed. He must have been told about the dangers of breaking any confidences.
I mean, anyone who goes abroad on any sort of trip is warned about honey traps and the importance of document security, etc. And this was a guy who’d been in the Navy, working with the Ministry of Defence. I mean, it’s inconceivable that he didn’t know what he was doing.
So to what extent do you think Epstein and Andrew and Mandelson were shielded by American and British secret services, or maybe even used by them?
Well, intelligence services, you know, do use people. I mean, they debrief them. They can actually set them up, often inadvertently, as assets. And I think that would be very likely. I mean, there were intelligence personnel I know on some of these trips abroad — I identified them — but they would not be able to get them to speak to me. And, you know, I’ve often wondered what they were doing on these trips, two different individuals on very different trips from different sources.
But certainly the British intelligence services had come across Andrew and Fergie, not because they were looking out for them, but because they were associating with people who were of interest to them. And this would have been reported back to the head of MI6, it would have been reported back to the palace, and I can only assume that the palace ignored these warnings, in the way that they were ignored with entertaining these Iraqi oil dealers at Buckingham Palace, and the way they ignored the concerns about Peter Mandelson.
So, I mean, that’s the problem. We have an intelligence service. They actually were doing their job, but no one listened to them. It’s back to the politicisation of intelligence, which we saw with the dossier on Iraq.
