The Terrifying Real Reason For Jeffrey Epstein's Remote Zorro Ranch Emerges When You Examine the Ranch Next Door
Part 2 of a series of articles looking at the relationship between Epstein and the San Cristobal Ranch, owned by former OSS member Henry Singleton.
Please note: What follows is analysis and hypothesis based upon available facts. To “prove” all of it would require a level of security clearance and access to classified intelligence documents I do not possess.
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In September 1945, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9621 and abolished the Office of Strategic Services — the wartime intelligence agency that had run covert operations across Europe and Asia for the duration of World War II. Truman was a plain-spoken man from Missouri who did not believe a democracy needed a secret intelligence apparatus in peacetime. He dissolved the OSS and sent its men home.
Not all of them were happy about it.
The OSS had attracted a particular kind of American — young, educated, ambitious, comfortable with secrecy, thrilled by consequence. Many had, for the first time in their lives, felt both the specific gravity that comes from operating outside normal rules in service of large stakes. It was addictive, as was the sense of belonging this secret brotherhood conferred. Some of these men were brilliant. Some were ruthless. Many had to be both. What most of them shared was that the war that horrified the world had given them something they’d never had before: Importance. And they did not want it to end.
So they did not let it end. Not in reality. In law, sure. But they continued on, likely with a certain bitterness towards Truman. They reorganized. They planned. In secret. As they’d been trained to do. And as soon as they saw an opening, they took it.
The opening came when Truman had created a new organization called The Central Intelligence Group. He saw it as a small presidential newspaper of sorts, that could brief him, personally, on important issues of the day. The OSS veterans — who had never really stopped working — flooded back in, to make themselves indispensable. What Truman had envisioned as having 100 employees soon had 1,800. He watched, somewhat helplessly, as the men of the OSS outmaneuvered him.
The Cold War gave them the justification they needed. Within four years of Truman abolishing the OSS, OSS veterans Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles effectively controlled the new CIA’s covert operations, and the agency had reassembled everything Truman had tried to dismantle, and more. But the formal CIA was only part of what emerged from the dissolution of the OSS. The other part was informal — a network of men who had trained together, trusted each other, and understood that the real levers of postwar American power would run through not through government, but through the defense industry. Through weapons science. And through land.
They knew exactly where the land was, and it wasn’t Washington D.C..
They had watched, in July 1945, as the early morning sky over the New Mexico desert turned white as a second sun.
The Ground
The Trinity Site, where the world’s first nuclear weapon was detonated, sits in the high desert of south-central New Mexico, roughly equidistant between Albuquerque and El Paso. Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bomb was designed and built, sits on a mesa above Santa Fe. Sandia National Laboratories, where nuclear weapons components are engineered and tested, sits on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Kirtland Air Force Base, which houses the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, occupies the same footprint. To this day, the world’s largest collection of nuclear warheads is based here, beneath Kirtland Air Force Base, next door to Sandia Labs.
No other geography on earth concentrates so much of the infrastructure of American nuclear and intelligence power in so small an area. The newly created and unleashed men of the OSS understood this. After the war, some of them began to acquire land in New Mexico. Others followed. Political figures. Newsmen. All intelligence adjacent. Not all at once. Over decades. Quietly.
In the 1960s, a man named Carl H. Ingwer Jr. acquired 9,150 acres in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of San Miguel County, near Las Vegas, New Mexico. Ingwer was not a rancher by background. He was a former fighter pilot from Cleveland. He ran Mercury Aviation in Phoenix and Tucson — a fixed-base operation with documented ties to the Flying Tigers network, which after the war became the backbone of CIA proprietary aviation. He owned a decommissioned Navy PBY amphibious bomber he told the press he had converted for “personal use,” and traveled extensively through regions of Cold War intelligence interest: North Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia. His New Mexico land sat in mountain country, well-positioned relative to the national laboratories corridor.
In May 1981 — two months after Dan Rather replaced Walter Cronkite as anchor of CBS Evening News, making him the most powerful broadcast journalist in America — Ingwer sold and transferred his New Mexico acreage to an entity called Tecolote Partnership. County deed records show no reception number on the transaction, an anomaly in standard property transfers.
The partners in Tecolote Partnership were Donald Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense and was by 1981 a senior figure in Ronald Reagan’s national security orbit, and Dan Rather, who was simultaneously covering the Reagan administration’s foreign policy on CBS. Rumsfeld and Rather held that land together — through Iran-Contra, through Gulf War I, through September 11, through the Iraq War that Rumsfeld ran and Rather reported — until September 2007, within months of both men losing their respective positions. In journalism school, I was taught it was unethical to even accept so much as a cup of coffee from a source. The ethical violation of the nation’s top news anchor owning a secret ranch with the architect of the Iraq war is mind-boggling.
This is all documented in San Miguel County deed records.
Robert Maxwell Comes to New Mexico
In 1984, a British media mogul named Robert Maxwell — a Czech-born WWII veteran who had worked in parallel intelligence structures to the OSS and who former Mossad officers have described as a long-standing Israeli intelligence asset — traveled to New Mexico on behalf of his company Pergamon International.
According to declassified FBI documents, Maxwell’s purpose in New Mexico was to sell a piece of software called PROMIS to American defense installations.
The FBI’s Albuquerque field office, alerted to the problem by three whistelblowers at Sandia Labs, opened a foreign counterintelligence investigation. According to those same documents, Maxwell successfully sold an Israeli-modified version of PROMIS — which contained a surveillance backdoor — to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. United States Dept. of Justice officials in Washington, under the administration of Ronald Reagan, quickly shut down the Albuquerque investigation.
PROMIS did not just track criminals and intelligence targets. Whoever held the backdoor key could surveil whoever was using it — reading their files, their cases, their contacts. Planted in the computers of the two most important nuclear weapons facilities in the United States, it was among the most consequential intelligence penetrations of the Cold War era.
Which means: The Reagan Justice Department opened an investigation into the sale of Israeli-backdoored software to America's most sensitive nuclear weapons laboratories — and then closed it without charges. The documents were later reclassified when a private party tried to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act. Israel had been secretly developing nuclear weapons since the late 1950s, diverting American weapons-grade uranium as early as the 1960s. By the mid-1980s — the same Reagan-era period when Maxwell was selling surveillance software into Sandia and Los Alamos — Israeli scientists were visiting those same laboratories at an extraordinary rate, treated, according to a government watchdog report, more openly than visitors from other allied nations. By 1986, a former Dimona technician revealed that Israel possessed not just fission bombs but thermonuclear weapons.
In 1990, the Maxwell Foundation endowed a $300,000 professorship at the Santa Fe Institute — a private research organization founded six years earlier, primarily by scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The chair was named for Robert Maxwell.
Robert Maxwell died in 1991, his body found floating near his yacht off the Canary Islands. His death has never been conclusively explained.
Two years later, his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, convinces her “boyfriend” Jeffrey Epstein to buy a ranch 65 miles from Los Alamos National Laboratories and 45 miles from Sandia Labs.
Henry Singleton and the Ranch Next Door
In the mid-1980s, a man named Henry Singleton began quietly assembling one of the largest private land portfolios in the American West. Starting with his 81,000-acre San Cristobal Ranch south of Santa Fe — a property that would eventually share nearly two miles of fence line with what would become Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch seven years later.
Singleton ultimately purchased more than 28 ranches in New Mexico, most of them strung along the U.S. Route 285 corridor from Santa Fe to Roswell, accumulating nearly one million acres in total. People in the ranching industry noticed. The American Quarter Horse Association, in giving Singleton Ranches its most prestigious award, noted that people who knew Henry Singleton were puzzled by the ranch purchases. He was an engineer who ran a defense conglomerate. The land didn't fit the pattern.
During World War II, Singleton served with the OSS in Europe, remaining until the organization was disbanded in the fall of 1945. After the war, he worked at Hughes Aircraft, then helped found Litton Industries before departing to establish Teledyne, the defense and aerospace conglomerate that would become (and continues to be) one of the most powerful contractors in the American military-industrial complex. Teledyne’s product line included inertial navigation systems — the guidance technology at the heart of ballistic missiles and precision munitions. Singleton’s National Academy of Engineering citation honors him specifically for his contributions to “lightweight inertial navigation systems.”
Singleton was also, while running Teledyne, a co-trustee of Ronald Reagan’s personal blind trust — meaning he held discretionary control over the president’s financial assets while simultaneously holding hundreds of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. The enormous conflict of interest this arrangement represented was noted at the time and never fully investigated.
In 1989, two years after Singleton bought San Cristobal Ranch, Teledyne pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud as part of Operation Ill Wind — the FBI's massive investigation into Pentagon procurement corruption — having bribed a senior Navy engineer to steer defense contracts worth up to $174 million to Teledyne's electronics division. In a separate case, Teledyne's relays unit later admitted to falsifying test results on components supplied to the U.S. military.
Sandia National Laboratories, the same labs to which Maxwell had sold the compromised PROMIS software, designs the non-nuclear components of America's nuclear weapons stockpile — the very systems Teledyne's electronics divisions supplied.
Henry Singleton's defense conglomerate had been caught defrauding the Pentagon while its founder's new ranch sat an hour's drive from the laboratories his company supplied.
Ghislaine Delivers Epstein to the Scientists
In 1993, Jeffrey Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch — 7,600 acres in southern Santa Fe County, directly adjacent to Henry Singleton’s San Cristobal Ranch, sharing nearly two miles of fence line. Epstein bought the property from Bruce King, who was the governor of New Mexico at the time. The purchase price was approximately $12 million, and the property was a portion of the larger ranch the King family still owns to this day.
According to a deposition Ghislaine Maxwell gave the FBI, found in the latest DOJ files, it was she herself who found the New Mexico ranch for Epstein and encouraged him to purchase it.
Ghislaine Maxwell is Robert Maxwell’s daughter.
In the deposition, Ghislaine Maxwell stated that it was she who connected Epstein to the Santa Fe Institute and to its co-founder Murray Gell-Mann — through her father, Robert Maxwell, who had endowed a professorship there three years earlier. Santa Fe Institute records confirm the Maxwell Foundation’s $300,000 gift. Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, acknowledged Epstein’s financial support in his 1994 book. Financial records in the DOJ files show Epstein donated at least $680,000 to the Santa Fe Institute over the following decade, though the institute has publicly acknowledged only $275,000.
Epstein was direct, on the record, about why New Mexico interested him. In a 2019 interview with Steve Bannon, included in the DOJ files, he explained that after 1990, scientists who had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia Labs were dispersing into private research firms in the Santa Fe area — what locals called the “info mesa.” That, Epstein said, was the attraction.
He arrived in New Mexico through Robert Maxwell’s daughter, onto land adjacent to Robert Maxwell’s former intelligence network partner’s neighbor, to cultivate scientists from the laboratories where Robert Maxwell had planted a surveillance backdoor a decade earlier.
By 1996, victims, survivors and witnesses to child sex trafficking and, in one former employee’s case, murder, at Zorro Ranch, were pouring into New Mexico police departments. Nothing was done. The police investigated nothing. This is likely related to the fact that then governor Bill Richardson was among those the survivors named as their rapists. Also, then Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano and then attorney general Gary King were both recipients of campaign financing from Epstein.
A local New Mexico investigation into Zorro Ranch only arrived, however briefly, after an investigative series by Julie K. Brown was published about Epstein’s pedophile ring in the Miami Herald in 2018. After reading it, then-New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas opened an investigation. But he halted it shortly afterwards at the request of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and gave them all his files. This was likely done as a professional courtesy, but Balderas was never legally required to halt his department’s investigation and he could have reopened it at any time. He didn’t.
The ranch remained untouched by law enforcement, unsearched and uninvestigated until this year, when the New Mexico state legislature created the Epstein Survivors’ Truth Commission, with $2.5 million in funding and subpoena power, to try to get to the bottom of what happened at Zorro Ranch and why it was never properly investigated. The commission plans to release its first report in July 2026. Whatever is left to be found might be long gone, however, as the Epstein estate held onto the property for four years after his death and the new owners, who are Trump allies, have been conducting massive excavation projects and unlicensed construction there in the past year.
What it Was All For
My opinion, stated plainly: None of this is coincidence. I fully believe Epstein’s operation was, and possibly remains, a tool of an intelligence operation, likely rooted in the men of the OSS during WWII, expanding over time to include more than one government, with continuity of purpose across decades and generations.
The former OSS men and their heirs appear over and over again in the Epstein saga, including former OSS man Donald Barr, who offers Epstein his first real job, as a teacher at a prestigious prep school in Manhattan, despite Epstein lacking a college degree. Later, is is Donald Barr’s son, William “Bill” Barr, who in 2009 joins the same legal firm representing Epstein in his Florida case at that time.
Bill Barr goes on to become United States Attorney General under Donald Trump, overseeing all federal prosecutors investigating Epstein in 2018. He is still in that role when Epstein dies in prison.
Continuity of purpose.
But what is that purpose?
That purpose, I believe, for many of the original OSS men and their heirs, is a perpetual continuation of the American war machine and its nuclear military industrial complex that made and continues to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, off of government contracts that use our taxpayer dollars.
And adjacent to that purpose was another purpose, for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Their purpose was likely to do whatever it took — even using a pedophilia blackmail operation — to wrench the nuclear military industrial machine endless weapons technology secrets from the New Mexico based scientists who held them, and pass those secrets to Israel, while making sure the county, state and federal government looked the other way.
Perhaps I am just delusional and paranoid in my conclusions. I wouldn’t be the first. After all, that’s what everyone said about Truman’s secretary of defense, James Forrestal, too.
In his review of Douglas Waller’s biography of Forrestal in The Nation, March 11, 2025, Adam Hochschihld wrote: “Convinced that he was being pursued by a mix of White House officials, Zionists, and communists, [Forrestal] told friends, ‘They’re after me.’ When a fire engine’s siren sounded, Forrestal rushed out of his house screaming, ‘The Russians are attacking!’ He was eased out of his job in 1949 and, several months later, jumped out of a hospital window to his death.”
Suicide shows up a lot in the world the former OSS men made. Remember Frank Wisner, who created the CIA along with Dulles?
Yeah. Him too.
Epstein’s Neighbor and His Modem
Henry Singleton died in 1999, six years after Epstein arrived next door. In the years they were neighbors, something unusual was documented: Epstein’s personal address book — portions of which are included in the DOJ files — contains a listing for San Cristobal Ranch that includes a modem number. A review of comparable entries found no other listing in Epstein’s address book that included a modem number for any other person or property. Neighbors do not typically share modem access. Epstein, who ran a child pornography operation that collected compromising evidence of powerful people’s participation in serious crimes, was notoriously careful about his communications.
It should be noted that the Singleton Ranches in New Mexico were and are used for large-scale cattle ranching. They were once among the top cattle producers in the state, and are also known for a specific breed of cattle horse raised there, Singleton horses. Whatever else might or might not have been going on there, the San Cristobal Ranch was and is a cattle operation — though it has expanded to offering a complete old-west movie set on site, too, most recently used for filming the Michael Ricigliano movie, GODLESS.
The modem number share suggests a data connection between Zorro Ranch and San Cristobal Ranch that predates emails from 2016, released the DOJ Epstein file dump in 2026, that more clearly establish efforts by Epstein to share a communications network with San Cristobal Ranch.
That 2016 negotiation is documented in internal emails now part of the DOJ files. As the Southern District of New York deepened its investigation of Epstein, his ranch manager Brice Gordon contacted a man named “Vito” at San Cristobal — by then managed by the Singleton family heirs — to discuss sharing the cost of a major communications buildout. The proposed system was not residential internet. A contractor later involved in its construction described it as military and industrial grade. Gordon also contacted Epstein’s Little St. James island property to obtain technical specifications for the microwave system already operating there. Epstein’s reply to Gordon’s updates was unusually terse: “please push. dont wait, call again.”
A fiber feed site — a technical installation where fiber terminates and connects to wireless transmission equipment — already existed on San Cristobal Ranch, predating the 2016 negotiation. It had been built by the Singleton operation. Epstein’s people discovered it and sought to formalize a cost-sharing arrangement. Given that Epstein had nearly limitless funds, the request is striking.
The negotiation apparently stalled. Gordon pivoted. In July 2016, FCC licenses were issued to Zorro Development Corp. for a bidirectional military-grade microwave system linking Zorro Ranch to the Sandia Crest tower. Sandia Crest is unrelated to Sandia Labs. It’s just the top of the Sandia Mountains that flank Albuquerque’s eastern border. Many radio and communications towers are located there.
Those FCC licenses remain active today, in Brice Gordon’s name, maintained by the Huffines family — Trump allies from Dallas who purchased the Zorro Ranch property in 2023 and whose son Russell currently holds a position in the Trump administration. At the time the Huffines purchased the ranch, there were 5 FCC licenses listing Zorro Development Corp. and Brice Gordon still active. The Huffines terminated all but two. This seems to indicate they knowingly kept the massive industrial-grade microwave radio communications towers operating, in the Zorro name.
The Infrastructure Remains
In December 2025 — the same month the first batch of Epstein files was released under the newly passed Epstein Files Transparency Act — the Singleton heirs sold 937,000 acres of New Mexico ranchland to billionaire Stan Kroenke, almost their total New Mexico holdings. They retained only one parcel: the 81,000-acre San Cristobal Ranch, the property that shares nearly two miles of fence line with what was Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch. Three million more pages of Epstein files followed on January 30, 2026.
The fiber feed site is still there. The FCC licenses are still active. The fence line between San Cristobal and what is now the Huffines family’s San Rafael Ranch still runs for nearly two miles through the high desert outside tiny Stanley, New Mexico.
And Teledyne, according to a simple Google news search of financial markets updates, is still one of the best global investments a person can make. This quote from a March 24, 2026 Trading View article sums it up perfectly:
“Teledyne is witnessing strong demand from the defense sector, particularly in Europe, driven by rising regional defense spending. A favorable macroeconomic environment and the current U.S. administration’s inclination toward increased defense spending, with the nation being the largest weapons exporter, have been aiding the growth.”
In my next installments, I will look at the legal tactics used by Singleton, King, Ingwer and others, to forcibly purchase (or, in some people’s view, steal) their massive ranchlands from local Hispano families in New Mexico who had owned the lands communally for centuries, and who’d been guaranteed the security of their land ownership under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I will also look at the relationship between Hollywood, Bill Richardson, Jeffrey Epstein, and the San Cristobal Ranch.
Alisa;
I hope that you have excellent personal security in place, and that all of your investigative material will be automatically released to the public if, God forbid, anything should happen to you.
I would also encourage anyone who reads these Substack posts to save a personal copy offline, for example as a PDF on a removable drive. The more people do this, the better.
A few years ago, this would all have sounded like outright paranoia. In these times, not so much.
Alisa, your writing continues to fascinate and elucidate the fall-out from WWII and subsequent presidential administrations. What about Murray Gell-Mann, does Cal Tech come into this?
Every time you write about this I think more and more fondly of Ike's warning: Beware of the Military-Industrial Complex. He knew...