Frontpage magazine interview with Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com 2/14/2008
Don’t miss HONOR KILLING, Ken’s new thriller on Iran, radical Islam,
and the war on terror. For more information, see
https://kentimmerman.com/honor-killing.html
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Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kenneth R. Timmerman, the New
York
Times bestselling author of Countdown to Crisis, The French Betrayal
of
America, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America, and Death
Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. In 2006 he was nominated for the
Nobel
Peace Prize for his groundbreaking reporting on Iran ’s nuclear
weapons
program. He is the author of the new book, Shadow Warriors: The
Untold
Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.
FP: Kenneth R. Timmerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Timmerman: It’s my pleasure, Jamie.
FP: Thank you for joining us today to discuss the assassination of
Imad
Mugniyeh, one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, in
Damascus
on Tuesday. Give us the background on this guy. Aside from al Qaeda,
no
one else surpasses him in responsibility for American deaths right?
Timmerman: That’s right. Before 9/11, Mugniyeh was the world’s most
wanted terrorist, for the simple reason that he had killed more
Americans than anyone else. The CIA has said he was behind the April
1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63
people.
Later that year, he orchestrated the bombing of a U.S. military
barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines. The very next year,
he
kidnapped, tortured, and murdered the CIA station chief in Beirut,
William Buckley, and carried out another attack on the U.S. embassy
in
Beirut. In 1985, he hijacked TWA flight 847 in a famous standoff in
Beirut, where he and his accomplices brutally murdered U.S. Navy
diver
Robbie Stethem and threw his body out onto the tarmac. He kidnapped
reporter Terry Anderson and others in Lebanon, then moved to
Argentina
in the 1990s, car-bombing the Israeli embassy there in 1992 and the
AMIA Jewish center in 1994. And that’s just his more famous attacks.
FP: How would you categorize this man?
Timmerman: He is a serial killer. One of my sources, a former
Iranian
intelligence officer who knew Mugniyeh, told me that he just liked
the
smell of blood. For the Muslim feast of Aid al-Fitr, Mugniyeh used
to
personally slaughter the lamb his family would eat, smearing himself
and his children with the blood. I tell all of these stories and
more
in my 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown
with
Iran.
FP: Sure enough, for the jihadists, as with leftist revolutionaries,
it
is only blood that can redeem the earth.
So who do you think is responsible for Mugniyeh’s killing? What is
their motive?
Timmerman: The list of Mugniyeh’s enemies is long. Hezbollah, of
course, has accused the Israelis. It won’t be long before they
accuse
us, too. One of my sources who grew up with Mugniyeh and remains
close
to his family in Lebanon, told me yesterday morning that Hezbollah
surveillance teams picked up the arrival at Beirut airport of an
8-man
U.S. paramilitary team just two days before Mugniyeh was killed.
I saw a report just yesterday suggesting that the Rev. Guards lured
Mugniyeh into a trap into Damascus, to make sure that he never
revealed
the extent of his involvement with al Qaeda in the 9//11 plot. This
was
a secret the Iranians would have liked to ensure that Mugniyeh
carried
to his grave.
I’ve got news for them, though: the word is out. Just take a look at
pages 240-241 of the 9/11 commission report, which describes in
elusive
terms the travel of eight to ten of the “muscle” hijackers in and
out
of Iran in the company of a “senior Hezbollah operative.” That
operative was none other than Imad Mugniyeh.
FP: In other words, you are saying that Mugniyeh was involved with
the
9/11 terror attack and so was Iran - and the Iranians might have
very
well killed him so that the full extent of their own involvement
would
not become known.
Timmerman: There is absolutely no doubt that Mugniyeh and his
masters
in Iran were directly and materially involved in the 9/11 plot.
First, there is the evidence discovered very late in the day by the
9/11 Commission, which I describe in detail in Countdown to Crisis.
What is astonishing is that this information has not been widely
publicized. I spoke again just yesterday with one of the top
investigators involved in reviewing the highly-classified U.S.
intelligence reports on Mugniyeh’s involvement in convoying 9/11
hijackers in and out of Iran prior to 9/11. He was astonished when I
told him that few people were yet aware of this. “That’s like saying
you didn’t know that Jesse James was a crook,” he said.
The Iranians were TERRIFIED on the day of 9/11 and for the next
month
that the United States would “connect the dots” and discover their
involvement to the 9/11 plot, as I reported in Countdown to Crisis.
Senior Iranian government officials were making desperate phone
calls
to relatives in the United States, asking them to rent apartments
for
family members so they could get out of Tehran before what they
assumed
would be a massive retaliatory U.S. military strike.
Of course, as we know now, that U.S. retaliatory strike never
occurred
– because the CIA and other U.S. government agencies succeeded in
burying the information they had collected (or the case of our
technical agencies, that they had siphoned up).
I believe when Americans realize the full extent of the Iranian
government involvement in the 9/11 plot, they will demand action
from
their president – no matter what party affiliation that president
may
have.
FP: The French and the Saudis, who are supposed to be our “allies,”
are
known for having not cooperated in key instances of catching this
terrorist, right?
Timmerman: Correct. Mugniyeh was photographed arriving at Orly
airport
in 1985 a few months after the FBI had identified his fingerprints
in
the rear lavatory of TWA 847, the plane he had hijacked to Beirut.
They
asked the French to arrest him, but the French government refused,
fearing Hezbollah retaliation in the way of bombs in the streets of
Paris – not an unreasonable fear, by the way. (I lived in Paris at
the
time and Hezbollah did this kind of thing periodically).
To their credit, the French leaked the photographs they took of
Mugniyeh to the news media – actually, to me. I distributed them
internationally through my newsletter, Middle East Defense News
(MEDNEWS). Those photos are in the appendix of my book, and also can
be
found in nearly every publication that has ever run a photo of
Mugniyeh.
In 1995, the CIA got word that Mugniyeh was flying into Saudi Arabia
and asked the Saudi government to detain him on the ground. Again,
fearful of retaliation, the Saudis told the captain he couldn’t
land.
In 1996, a similar incident happened in Qatar: hot intelligence,
transmitted to the local authorities – then nothing.
FP: What ramifications does this assassination have for Hezbollah?
For
Lebanon? For the terror war in general? There will be retaliation
won’t
there?
Timmerman: Hezbollah is no longer a small gang of bang-men and
two-bit
thugs, but a world class terror operation with extraordinarily good
intelligence, state-of-the-art communications, and networks spanning
the globe. Hezbollah always retaliates when one of their men gets
whacked. And with the exception of their top leader, Hassan
Nasrallah,
no one was more important than Mugniyeh to their organization.
One of my sources, who is close to the top Hezbollah leadership,
told
me recently that Mugniyeh won the personal loyalty of Hezbollah
fighters and the leadership in the early 1990s when he almost
single-handedly financed Hezbollah’s operations through
drug-smuggling
in the tri-state border zone in South America. When Hezbollah would
send their fighters to train in Revolutionary Guards camps in Iran,
it
was Mugniyeh who personally shook their hands and congratulated them
on
graduation day.
Today, February 14, is the third anniversary of the assassination of
Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, and his supporters are
planning a
huge demonstration in Beirut. Hezbollah is also planning a huge
demonstration, to bury Mugniyeh. The possibility that the two groups
could clash is very great. Just the morning of Mugniyeh’s death, a
leader of the anti-Syrian coalition, Walid Jumblatt, warned
Hezbollah
that the coalition would disarm Hezbollah. “If you want war, then
we’ll
have war,” he said. Things are not going well in Lebanon, and this
has
just turned up the heat on a pressure-cooker already about to
explode.
FP: This is a great day of celebration and joy for Americans,
Israelis
and all those on the side of freedom, right?
Timmerman: Without any doubt. State Department spokesman Sean
Mccormack
said it nicely on Wednesday. "The world is a better place without
this
man in it. One way or the other he was brought to justice." Other
U.S.
government officials have made similar comments. This is a man who
prided himself on never carrying out two terrorist operations that
were
identical to each other.
Over the years I have gotten to know a number of former Iranian
intelligence operatives, and people within Hezbollah and elsewhere
who
knew him personally. This is a man so utterly evil, and yet so
thoroughly respected within his tiny community of evil minds, that I
felt I should try to bring him alive as a fictional character, which
I
did in my recent thriller, Honor Killing, which tells the story of
an
Iranian plot to bring a nuclear weapon into the United States.
FP: Ken Timmerman, thank you for joining us.
Timmerman: Thank you Jamie.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a
Ph.D.
in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He
edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left
Illusions.
He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America
Left
and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union
(McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a
Good
Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles
Click
Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
Kenneth R. Timmerman was nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
along
with John Bolton for his work on Iran. He is Executive Director of
the
Foundation for Democracy in Iran, and author of Countdown to Crisis:
the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum: 2005). Original:
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