Who is Tim Guldimann?

Tim Guldimann is a name we will be hearing a lot of this week. On May 2, 2003, he faxed an alleged peace offer from Tehran to the State Department and National Security Council. Newsweek’s has posted a copy of the Fax (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17049526/site/newsweek ). In 2003, Mr. Guldimann was the Swiss Ambassador in Tehran, and thus represented our interests in that Axis capital. His job was to pass messages, but sometimes his enthusiasm for negotiations made him an advocate for such processes.

I hear there is in regard to the alleged peace offer, a long and classified email chain from the State Department, CIA and National Security Council. Other sources say the fax was Mr. Guldimann’s notes of an informal conversation he had with a senior liaison to Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Already, Secretary of State Rice on Wednesday said she has no recollection of having seen the fax. Others, like a former aide to convicted felon and Congressman Robert Ney, Trita Parsi, and a former senior National Security Council official, Flynt Leverett, say important Iranians have said subsequently that this deal was from the supreme leader.

We have yet to hear from Mr. Guldimann, who is not talking to reporters about the story. According to the fax, Iran was willing to submit to a North Korean style deal on its nuclear program, recognize pre-1967 Israel if post-1967 Israel was relinquished in negotiations, end material support for Palestinian terrorists and take “decisive action” on al Qaeda in its own territory. As a bonus, the Guldimann memo commits Iran to supporting “political stability” in Iraq and take “action on Hezbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon.”

All the Iranians wanted in exchange was for America to lift all of its many sanctions and counterterrorism investigations, press the government that replaced Saddam to pay war debts to Iran, and allow the international community to openly give them advanced centrifuges, debt refinancing, favorable trade agreements and some biological and chemical technology that may be helpful to germ or gas warfare. President Bush should also take Iran out of the axis of evil.

Why don’t we just throw in Fort Knox while we’re at it?

The Iranians are saying, we stop terrorizing Iraq, Israel and Lebanon and all you have to do is make Israel give up all the land Arafat wouldn’t take and let us enrich uranium and promise not to attack us. Anyone who puts this in the context of Iran’s recent and not so recent behavior can see that this amounts to extortion. At the time of the offer, the Iranians had reluctantly confessed to building an underground centrifuge facility in Natanz, and would promise in a few months to allow surprise inspections on the condition that the United Nations Security Council not discuss its hitherto secret nuclear program. In 2002, the Iranians sent a boat of explosives to the terrorists they promise in 2003 to cut off. If, like Arafat, they decide they don’t like the terms of the American deal later on, what is to say they will not start arming their proxies later on?

And that’s where Mr. Guldimann comes into the picture. If the Iranians wager that most of America’s diplomats and certainly Europe’s diplomats are like Mr. Guldimann, then they can save money on public relations because a group of respected and credentialed westerners will excuse their international law breaking for them.

Last summer, into the second week of Israel’s war with Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, Mr. Guldimann told Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review that, “Iran definitely does not want the escalation.” Indeed, as the Israelis were finding out about Hezbollah’s Chinese made silkworm missiles, the Swiss government was standing with Foreign Minister Mottaki in Damascus asking for both sides to stop fighting without the release of the Israeli hostages.

Mr. Guldimann goes on. He quotes at length, a July 2006 speech from President Ahmadinejad where he said, “Just as you founded the occupying regime on lies and conspiracy, you had better disintegrate it yourself. If you apologize to the people of the region, the noble regional nations will disregard the past. The Zionists should lay the cornerstone for a positive and constructive exchange with the regional nations, otherwise the fury of the world nations will rise, and they will investigate the crimes committed by the regime and its supporters. If you are unable to end such conspiracies, and can hardly manage to apologize for your aggressive moves, let the Palestinian people have a free election to decide their own fate.”

For Mr. Guldimann, the speech was “interesting. “Of course, we know that there are some ambiguities in his vocabulary, but still, this could be good stuff,” he was quoted as saying. “By the way, he also has watered down his point on the Holocaust, saying that we do not know how many had been killed, maybe more than 6 millions.”

For the Swiss diplomat, Israel has nothing to worry about if Iran begins enriching uranium on an industrial scale. On May 16, 2006, he told the Asia Times, “The goal, which has not been officially recognized, is to have the military option, but not a bomb. . . The Iranians were attacked by Iraq with weapons of mass destruction; 600,000 died. When that happened they stood alone, without the support from outside. That history is critical in Iranian considerations.”

As for President Ahmadinejad’s promises to wipe Israel from the map. Well I suppose those are just “some ambiguities.”

Eli Lake is a staff reporter of The New York Sun