Official with links to Russian spy agency collected information on woman to pass on to Epstein, emails show. Jeffrey Epstein used a former Russian official with links to Moscow’s FSB intelligence services to collect information on a woman he claimed was attempting to blackmail his business associates, according to documents released by the United States Department of Justice. Epstein reached out to Sergei Belyakov, a former deputy minister of economic development, for advice in 2015 about what he described as an attempt to blackmail a group of “powerful” businessmen in New York, the documents contained in the latest tranche of the so-called Epstein files show. “I need a favor,” Epstein wrote to Belyakov in a July 2015 email, describing an extortion attempt by a Russian woman who had arr...