Kenneth R. Timmerman
Columnist for Insight Magazine & Investigative Author

WHEN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER AND AUTHOR Kenneth R. Timmerman profiled Osama Bin Ladin for Reader's Digest in July 1998, few people had ever heard of him. Just weeks later, Bin Ladin's terrorists blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa, prompting the U.S. government to launch an international manhunt.

In 1982, Timmerman was taken hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, and spent 24 days in an underground cell under constant aerial and artillery bombardment.

Timmerman has published three books and a dozen monographs on terrorism, weapons proliferation, and Islamic fundamentalism. In the late 1980s, he was the first Western reporter to interview the heads of Iraq's missile and chemical weapons programs; his first-hand account, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991 and translated into five languages. Over his career he has worked for TIME magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times and major television networks, and appeared regularly on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

After 18 years overseas he returned to the United States in 1993 to work on the professional staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and conducted several Committee investigations into weapons proliferation. Since leaving government service, he has written for The American Spectator, Reader's Digest, and Insight Magazine on foreign policy and proliferation. Because of his special expertise in Middle East defense issues, he has been asked to give seminars at the U.S. Army War College and other U.S. government agencies, and to testify before Congressional committees and special commissions, including the Commission To Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States chaired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

From 1994-2000, Mr. Timmerman published a confidential newsletter on strategic policy and trade, THE IRAN BRIEF. His Middle East Data Project, Inc. consults for government and business clients and maintains extensive data bases on terrorism and strategic technology transfers to rogue states. He is also active on the human rights front, and serves as Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, a non-profit advocacy group based in Maryland.

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