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.

It was strange to be reminded of her in that way. Colvin was a Sunday Times reporter who was relentless in her pursuit of a story. Her focus was always on the civilian cost of war, and she paid the price for her firsthand reporting with both emotional and physical trauma. In Sri Lanka, she lost an eye. In Syria, she lost her life.

I worked in the same war zones she did. I knew what the broken neighbourhoods of Homs, Daraya and Aleppo looked like. We were journalists, and our words reached a crucial audience. We wanted to shift policy. We calculated the risk was worth........

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