A scholar on Soviet Russia has uncovered claims that former General Secretary Yuri Andropov wanted to subvert the west by creating child trafficking and pedophile networks to blackmail business leaders and politicians.

Details on the program were uncovered by Jeffrey Nyquist in his research on communist regimes and their influence on the west. His main source is the grandson of a former member of the Soviet Central Committee who opposed the program, and was possibly killed because of his opposition. Two other sources of his were defectors from the Soviet Union who revealed information on Soviet experiments on pedophilia and sexual perversion.

All three requested to have their identities withheld, as they believe that this abuse continues, and speaking on record would endanger their lives.

The Soviet leaders had begun planning the program in the late 1970s, when Andropov was chairman of the KGB—the Soviet intelligence agency that was set to run the operations. Nyquist noted, however, that the program was controversial even by the standards of the Soviet leaders.

His contact, who is currently living in the West, said his grandfather was part of a faction within the Central Committee that opposed the program; yet the dissenters, including his grandfather, were believed to be killed for their opposition, and the program was able to move forward.

“This grandfather told his family, ‘Andropov is building networks for child trafficking and pedophilia, and this is a project the KGB has begun internationally, around the world,’” Nyquist said. The purpose of the program was to seduce politicians and business leaders, then control them as agents through blackmail.

The grandfather understood what it meant to oppose Andropov. According to Nyquist, he told his family that Andropov would kill him if the program prevailed, and that if he died, his wife would need to flee with their children to another city; and that if the KGB ever knocked on their door, they would again need to flee, and to “never look back.”

“And of course that is what happened. The grandfather died under mysterious circumstances,” Nyquist said. “Whatever the struggle was within the central committee, he lost.” His family fled, as he requested.

Around the same time, two other eyewitness sources of Nyquist’s say the Soviet Union began conducting experiments in its Komsomol camps on how to grow sexual perversions. The camps were for members of the communist Young Pioneers, and included children aged 10 to 15. Nyquist interprets these Kosmosol events as connected to the Andropov plan his source told him about.

According to Nyquist, the Soviets were organizing orgies in some of the camps, and “they were trying to locate perverts to recruit them.”

“The idea was that in these Komsomol camps that they were looking for people who had psychological problems that caused them to become sexually perverse in different ways,” Nyquist said. “It was like they were studying different perversions and the causes, and how to cultivate that, how to extend it, what kind of things draw people towards blacker perversions.”

The ‘Ultimate Blackmail’

The program the grandfather described was a classic honeytrap—a method of espionage to lure people into compromising sexual encounters for blackmail. This program took it a step further, however, by using children as the bait.

It was a form of “false flag recruitment,” according to Nyquist, where the KGB agents likely did not reveal themselves as agents to their targets. He noted that “if the KGB honeytraps somebody, they don’t know who they’re working for, because the KGB officer may be somebody who speaks English without an accent who merely references themselves as part of an organized crime group.”

After a person has been compromised in the honeytrap, the agents or the front organization can continue offering services to the target in exchange for work, while also maintaining evidence to blackmail the targets if they have qualms about cooperating.

The tactic is still widely used, including by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP was accused in 2015 of using attractive women to seduce spies from the British MI6 intelligence agency, and lure them into honeytraps to obtain state secrets. A top secret MI6 memo obtained by the UK’s Mirror news outlet said Chinese spies were “aggressively” targeting spies and their families.

Honey traps were also very common under the Soviet Union. Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin explained it once, stating according to Foreign Policy that, “In America, in the West, occasionally you ask your men to stand up for their country. There’s very little difference. In Russia, we just ask our young women to lay down.”

In conventional honeytraps, the target may be controlled either by a lover who is secretly a special agent, or controlled with evidence of an extramarital affair—something that in politics can ruin a career.

With pedophilia, however, the scandal and consequences are much more severe, and the effects of the honeytrap are much more binding.

Nyquist referred to it as “the ultimate blackmail.”

A Wave of Abuse

The timing of the Soviet child trafficking program corresponds with a sudden uptick of pedophile rings uncovered in the West. While it’s likely similar forms of abuse had existed previously, the new scandals aligned closely with what Nyquist’s source warned of.

In the 80s and into the 90s, shocking cases of pedophilia and extreme abuse began to emerge in the United States, Australia, and Europe. Many of the cases involved high-level officials. Some were prosecuted, but many were thrown out due to lack of physical evidence and child testimony not being recognized.

Among the most prominent cases was that of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile accused of holding underage girls as sex slaves on his private Caribbean island. He flew numerous top politicians and business leaders to the island on his private plane, dubbed by news outlets as the “The Lolita Express.” According to press reports, the plane has a bed that was used for sex with young girls. According to the same reports, flight logs from Epstein’s plane show that Bill Clinton flew on The Lolita Express 26 times.

Numerous girls alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein, and Epstein was charged by the Palm Peace police department. Yet after a plea deal, he was sentenced in 2008 and served only 13 months in prison for one charge of soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old girl.

A 2006 court filing, cited by The New York Post, says that a police search of Epstein’s mansion found he wired it with hidden cameras to record his guests engaging in orgies with underage girls, which he could use for blackmail.

Epstein was very well connected. It has been reported that Epstein kept contact numbers of figures including Tony Blair, Naomi Campbell, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg, and Richard Branson, but no flight logs have ever surfaced showing any of them ever flew to Epstein’s island. Many of his A list contacts dropped him after his 2008 conviction.

Often overlooked in Epstein’s case is that the father of his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was deceased media tycoon Robert Maxwell, whom Ghislaine accused of sexually abusing her.

Robert Maxwell may have also been a Soviet spy. According to FBI files released in 2013, Maxwell, who was born in Czechoslovakia and was living in the United Kingdom, was believed to be using his Pergamon Press media empire in the 50s to provide intelligence to the Soviet Union.

The heavily redacted reports note that when Maxwell and his business partner Kurt Wallersteiner were running their Anglo-Continental Exchange firm in London in 1953, both had “allegedly been recruited by the Soviet Intelligence Service (SIS) for espionage purposes.”

Former FBI agent Marc Ruskin said in a previous interview that two agents from the Belgian national police told him of a child abuse ring in Belgium in the mid-1990s that also allegedly involved government officials.

“They had been working on a case that involved political corruption, and also there was a child pornography aspect to it as well,” he said. “And as their investigation proceeded, they began to develop subjects—targets of the investigation—who were high-level public officials.”

As their investigations grew deeper, however, the agents were called into their supervisor’s office and told to drop the case. Ruskin said, referring to political corruption of law enforcement, that “this was Western Europe—not some undeveloped country with a dictator. If it can happen in Western Europe, it can happen anywhere.”

Satanic Ritual Abuse

What Ruskin reported happened in Belgium, shocking claims of a pedophile ring servicing high-level officials whose investigation was hushed up, has happened elsewhere in the West. Unfortunately, there is no single source tracking reports of pedophile rings, and there is a pattern of mysterious events obstructing their investigation when they are reported.

Starting in 1980, victims of pedophile networks that fit the picture outlined by the Soviets began to step forward in the West, but a new element began to be common: Satanic practices. Accounts by child victims and police reports reveal shocking claims of sexual abuse, dark occult practices, and the involvement of high-level officials.

This began the so-called “Satanic panic,” which lasted into the mid-90s. It resulted in prison sentences for only a handful of perpetrators, and also led to multiple claims of government-level conspiracies behind the rings.

Among the most famous cases was the Franklin child prostitution ring case from 1988 to 1990. The case in Omaha, Nebraska alleged that high-level politicians were involved in a child prostitution ring, where children were flown to private parties of politicians where they were abused. Victims alleged other crimes including cannibalism, human sacrifice, and drug trafficking.

The defendants were eventually found not guilty, but the way the case played out was criticized as a cover-up. The three main witnesses were instead charged with perjury, and many key figures in the case would later turn up dead.

Documented problems with the case were later compiled by former state Senator John DeCamp in his book, “The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska,” where he states “Two grand juries, one local and one federal, had a mandate to consider these and other charges of child abuse connected with the Franklin Credit Union. They indicted the victim-witnesses for perjury instead!”

DeCamp also states that evidence in the case “leads into drug-trafficking, money-laundering, pornography, child prostitution, and the kidnapping and sale of children in different parts of the United States, and abroad.”

Award-winning author and filmmaker Tim Tate produced a documentary on the Omaha case, uncovering many similar findings. The Discovery Channel was set to broadcast the documentary, “Conspiracy of Silence,” in May 1994, yet abruptly canceled before it could air. Tate explains on his website the sensitivity with covering the topic of Satanic ritual abuse, noting that in his experience, “touch it, and—professionally, at least—you die.”

The full documentary, which was in the late stages of editing, was later published online.

In a case in the United Kingdom former British MP Geoffrey Dickens, who died in 1995, investigated what he said, according to The Washington Post, was a pedophile ring of powerful individuals with “big, big names.”

Barry Dickens, the son of Geoffrey Dickens, told the BBC that “My father thought that the dossier at the time was the most powerful thing that had ever been produced, with the names that were involved and the power that they had.”

His son provided the research to British authorities, but files went missing in 2014 around evidence of break-ins. An additional 114 documents on the alleged pedophile ring also went missing around the same time. The Guardian reported, “The revelation that further relevant documents have disappeared will raise fresh fears of an establishment cover-up.”

Influence and Control

According to Nyquist, when rumors of high-level Satanic-themed pedophile rings again emerged in 2016, his contact whose grandfather detailed the Soviet plot became nervous and afraid.

“I have to tell you he became very frightened, last year,” he said. “I went to breach the subject with him again, and he said ‘absolutely I do not want to talk about this; this scares me too much.’ Because he believed this is such a significant part of the Russian power, these pedophile networks, that if you talk about it you might be dead.”

Nyquist said his sources did not mention the element of Satanic abuse in the alleged Soviet-backed pedophile rings, but he noted that, as someone who has studied communist methods of infiltration and subversion, it doesn’t seem unusual.

“When the communists design an attack, they use such horrible methods; one of the advantages of a horrible method is that nobody believes that anyone would do such a thing,” he said. The elements of forcing victims to commit ritual murder—and killing any who refused to participate—would also work as a control mechanism over anyone involved, since they would all be guilty, he said.

He said the overall system, if true, would have given the Soviets and later post-Soviet participants significant power in establishing networks of influence and control. He noted that even just among business leaders, since they often fund politicians and political causes, by blackmailing them “you’re suddenly getting into the fringes of the political system. You’re able to penetrate the political system.”

“Pedophilia, if you look at it, is an important tool for corrupting, controlling, and manipulating a foreign government; and sabotaging its economy, sabotaging its political process, even sowing confusion,” he said. “This whole thing can be used in all kinds of creative ways to hurt the target country.”