Countdown to Crisis:
Iranian Spy Stories and Fear of Armageddon
by Larry Kelley
Posted Sep 13, 2005
Throughout the 1930s, Winston Churchill, although a popular war hero,
author, Lord of the Admiralty and former cabinet minister, remained a
“back bencher” who barely held on to his seat in the
House of Commons. He was scorned by the media, and virtually the
whole of the political elite considered him a pariah because he would
not refrain from telling the British public what it so desperately
did not want to hear. An entire decade before the German bombing
blitz over London, he warned his countryman that they would
inevitably have to fight Germany again or perish as a sovereign
nation.
Ken Timmerman’s book, Countdown
to Crisis, should be
required reading for all the neo Neville Chamberlains at the State
Department, National Security Council, or elsewhere in the Bush
Administration for those wishing to give appeasement one more chance.
Timmerman makes clear that the U.S. is facing the specter of Iran,
the oldest and most active state sponsor of terror, armed now with
nuclear weapons. With remarkable prescience, the author scoops every
news agency that is investigating the recent London bombings.
In late 2004, Ayman al-Zawahri met again with top regime leaders,
this time in a guesthouse to the north of Tehran& After the first
day of meetings, bin Laden himself was brought to the safe house
& an intravenous tube was strapped to the back of his hand. He
looked frail and old. Janati spread out a map of the world and they
discussed different places where bin Laden felt his men could launch
spectacular attacks against the United States and its key allies.
They discussed specific sites in Britain—
The book contains many new revelations, investigative bombshells
for those who are still in denial of the dangers we face. Its
essential message is two-part. With vivid corroborating detail, the
author convincingly makes the case that, for more than 18 years, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN’s nuclear weapons “watchdog
agency) and the CIA actually aided Iran in acquiring nuclear
weapons, doing so through differing degrees of duplicity and
ineptitude. But secondly and perhaps more ominously, Timmerman
demonstrates that the Iranian Mullahs have forged very strong ties
with al Qaeda and have been co conspirators with bin Laden from the
beginning of his attacks on America.
Timmerman’s first chapter, "The Defector," may very well be a
historic anecdote for the ages. It opens on July 26, 2001, in a
backwater U.S. Embassy in Baku Azerbaijan. A high-level Iranian
security official, Hamid Reza Zakeri, walked in and told the
receptionist that he wanted to speak to the CIA because he had
information related to the security of the United States. He
explained to the station chief, “Joan,” that in his
capacity as a high-level security officer at Iran’s Ministry of
Information and Security (MOIS) headquarters, he had observed the “Arabs”
who were trained pilots, being briefed on their appointed targets,
and even described, on the table in their meeting room, models of the
World Trade Center, the White House, the Pentagon, and Camp David. He
told her that the attack was coming from the air; that the Arab
pilots had already left for America; and he even knew the date for
the attack: Sept. 11, 2001.
Joan called for backup. Several days later when “CIA George”
arrived from headquarters to debrief the “walk in,” he
immediately decided that Zakeri was peddling lies, told him so, paid
him $200, and told him to get out. The information that could have
saved 3,000 lives was never passed up the chain of command. The
reader would have to wonder if Timmerman’s story was not one of
the reasons that Tenet resigned so suddenly, getting out himself,
while the getting was good.
With photos and documents included in the appendix, the author makes
a good case that Zakeri, the Baku “walk in,” is a highly
credible informant, his information, corroborated by other reports
from defectors, sources (spies) still inside Iran and independent
intelligence reports. The reader senses that for Timmerman, Zakeri is
the primary source for this book and that they, the author and
informant, have developed a strong bond in their efforts to forestall
Armageddon.
The author also persuades the reader that with his access to
transcripts of wiretaps and sources both inside the Iranian regime,
he can recreate such the following where the¬Ý Iranian
hierarchy awaits word of its operation--the June 1996 Khobar Towers
bombing in Dhahran Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. The
author’s account gave off the aura of a passage from a
crime-family novel:
On the evening of June 25, 1996 the most powerful officials of the
Islamic Republic gathered solemnly at the home of president
Rafsanjani& a few minutes past 10:00 pm the telephone rang, and
Rafsanjani snatched it up.¬Ý A hush fell over the room.
Rafsanjani listened, nodding his head.¬Ý Then a great
smile spread across his face.¬Ý “The package was
delivered,” he said. &The room broke into cheers before he
could replace the receiver.
The reader learns that the phone call had been intercepted and was
discussed in great detail later that year in closed-door hearings
before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. U.S. intelligence
personnel were even able to identify the operatives on the other end
of the phone with Rafsanjani, one of whom was Imad Mugniyeh, Iran’s
“star terrorist planner, and primary liaison to al Qaeda. The
Senate Committee agreed with the CIA—it had been an Iranian
operation all the way.
Unlike the surprise attack of 9/11, the Clinton Administration had
been warned repeatedly in mid-1996 of impending terrorist attacks on
military personnel based on the Arabian Peninsula. Some reports even
cited Iranian agents photographing the Khobar Towers complex. But
1996 was an election year and, as Timmerman puts it, no one in the
administration wanted hear about the danger. After the attack, in an
utterly Neville Chamberlain-like gesture, Clinton made a quiet offer
of more talks, to “hold a frank dialogue” with the Tehran
regime in hopes that they would stop killing Americans, at least
until the election was over. In exactly the same manner that Hitler
treated with contempt the supplicant British prime minister, the
state run newspaper in Tehran, Kehan, ran a banner headline: “Clinton
Requests Negotiations with Tehran.” And in the body of the
story, it commented that “Clinton was behaving like a drunk
bastard, shouting in the street and should be treated like a thug.”
Next, Timmerman drops another bombshell by providing new evidence
that Iranians did not stop killing Americans in 1996. One month after
the Khobar bombing, sources inside Iran were warning the author of an
impending attack on an American airliner, these coming just days
before the July 1996 explosion of Flight 800 off the coast of Long
Island, which killed 230. While the author’s sources described
the planned attack as a “hijacking,” not a bombing, they
revealed that the operation would be mounted in Athens. Flight 800
did in fact originate in Athens.
Recently released information from intelligence agencies seem to
corroborate Timmerman’s sources. In early July there were many
other independent reports coming from inside the regime, one from a
different controlled source inside Iran, warning of an impending
airline attack. A counterterrorism analyst consulted for the book
alluded to the plausible explanation that the attackers planted a
bomb that was activated by a “double timer” similar to
the device al Qaeda terrorist Ramsi Yousef used to blow up a Japan
Air jetliner. Such a device works on barometric pressure and explodes
the bomb at a given interval of time after the second takeoff.
Clinton surely knew that, as a “serial appeaser,” he
would be at a disadvantage if he had to run against a war hero, Bob
Dole, while war in the Middle East was breaking out. He sent his
national security adviser, Richard Clarke, who, shockingly, was
himself briefed on the warnings that Iran was about to attack an
American airliner, and instructed Clarke to tell the investigators to
“back off’ until the administration had time to sell the
country on the “exploding fuel tank” theory. Timmerman
makes clear that his newly revealed evidence doesn’t prove that
Iran planned the destruction of Flight 800, only that the regime
should still be considered a strong suspect. But the reader can also
surmise that even if Iran were not the planner of the attack, it was
no doubt further emboldened by this shameless display of duplicity
and craven cowardice.
Timmerman’s highly detailed and assiduously footnoted narrative
proceeds along two parallel time lines and tells two separate
stories. The first, excerpted above, chronicles how Iran has been
committing acts of terrorism against the U.S. since it took our
embassy hostages in 1979 and how it has entered into an alliance with
al Qaeda. In another bombshell, the author records that like the Rose
Law Firm records that mysteriously appeared late in the Whitewater
investigations, one week before the 9/11 Commission report was to be
sent to the printer, 75 documents were suddenly discovered linking
the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers to Iran. They corroborated what Zakeri
had told the CIA in Baku, and they were filled with references to
Imad Mugniyeh who accompanied eight of the 10 Saudi “muscle
hijackers to Iran for their training sessions, providing them with
airline tickets, money, and political cover. Perhaps because the
commissioners did not have enough time to fully vet the reports, the
75 documents were boiled down to two squeamish pages (240, 241) in
the final 9/11 report and shamefully do not even mention Mugniyeh.
Both the CIA and some members of the commission were covering for
something of some people.
The second story describes in great detail how Iran’s
relentless and successful quest for the acquisition of nuclear
weapons was aided by the UN generally and the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) specifically, and how the agency colluded with
the weapons systems “exporters” France, Germany, Russia
in their joint effort to ready Iran for a potential nuclear attack on
Israel and the United States.
The book provides a timely showcase of John Bolton in his capacity as
the person in charge of arms control and international security at
the State Department. Now that he is ambassador to the UN, readers
will understand why Bolton’s confrontational style is utterly
vital for that position if we in the West hope to stop or even slow
weapons proliferation to rogue enemy states.
I spoke to Timmerman by phone after reading his
book.
I was curious what he thought about very recent events in London and
as well as what he knew about the most recent nuclear weapons
development by the Iranians.
Ken Timmerman: Spanish
officials (who are aiding the British in their investigation of the
attacks) believe that the mastermind of the Madrid (commuter train)
bombings of 2003 has close ties to the first set of bombers in
London. And he was also linked by Spanish investigators to Iran
directly. Let’s not forget, the Iranian regime has the longest
track record as a state supporter of terrorism of anyone.
Have the Iranians weaponized their nuclear materials? And do they
have finished product?
Timmerman: That is the big
question. Here’s what we know: We know they have all the
ingredients. We know they have been mining natural uranium since
1989. By the way, with the knowledge and assistance of the IAEI. We
now know that they have been secretly enriching uranium for many
years. They imported a large network of centrifuges from the A.Q.
Khan network (Pakistan’s rogue nuclear weapons developer). We
have a copy of that contract. We know that they have enough fissile
material for 20 to 25 bombs. We don’t know that they’ve
actually done that [weaponized]. But we do know that they
have all the materials and that they know how to make them.
Timmerman: On Colin Powel’s
final trip as secretary of State to Chile in 2004, he stunned
reporters and the CIA by revealing that we had a “walk in,”
an Iranian missile engineer, that provided the U.S. government with
over 1,000 pages of technical drawings showing how they were
planning, in mid 2004, to mate their nuclear warheads to the Shahab
missiles.
Timmerman: That is the bottom
line. My sources describe, in, let me be careful in saying,
uncorroborated reports that in Iran, in a deeply buried bunker, the
Iranians are now stockpiling nuclear warheads and Shahab-3 missile
launchers.
Like other key Iran watchers such as Mike Ledeen and Jerry Corsi,
you say in your book that our best option is to encourage regime
change through an Iranian revolution. Do you see any reason for
optimism that this is beginning?
Timmerman: No. We need to
identify Iran as a clear and present danger and refer it to the UN
Security Councel for nonproliferation treaty violations. We need to
provide massive assistance to the pro democracy forces. They need
money, organizational help and equipment. And these are things we
know how to provide. But that decision has not yet been made.
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