Murderous governments and armed groups always considered reporters like Marie Colvin a nuisance – now they see them as legitimate targets
A friend wrote to me last week to tell me that my name appeared in the Epstein files. “But it’s for a good cause,” he wrote. “Nothing sinister.”
In 2012, shortly after my friend and colleague Marie Colvin was killed in Homs, Syria, I met with the now-disgraced Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen. Rød-Larsen was a renowned fixer who had negotiated the 1993 Oslo accords.
Colvin had been killed by government shelling on 22 February 2012. But the fighting between Bashar al-Assad’s government forces and the Free Syrian Army was so fierce that retrieving her corpse was nearly impossible.
Rød-Larsen had made so-called peace between the Palestinians and Israelis; perhaps, I thought, he could find a way to bring Marie’s body home. Unbeknown to me, Rød-Larsen forwarded my request to Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was not a household name in those days, but one can only assume Rød-Larsen knew about his alleged Mossad connections. In the end, nothing came of it that I know of.
