Since the end of World War II, government operations have acquired a level of secrecy that would not have been tolerated in previous eras. During the Cold War, strategists on both sides of the Iron Curtain knew that images and words counted as much as deeds and facts, and waged a propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Third World. NATO and the Warsaw Pact only engaged in active military conflicts over client states a few times – in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan – but information operations to incite, confuse, and demoralize were ongoing. This information war was also waged at home, as both sides worked to manipulate the perceptions and emotions of their own people in order to inoculate them against the propaganda of the enemy. In this kind of information environment, a good conspiracy theory is like a black hole, pulling together disparate facts from all directions. And in this respect, no conspiracy theory compares to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein.