Author Description

The early conviction that the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City was the work of Islamic fundamentalists is testimony to the depth of current American fears of Middle Eastern terrorism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, terrorist attacks have rapidly replaced nuclear armageddon as the foremost lurking threat in the nation's consciousness. Is militant Islam an unstoppable juggernaut, an imminent danger to both moderate Muslim governments and Western ones? Or will it inevitably burn itself out? Regardless, its record during the past decade and a half is impressive and bloody. With the destruction of Israel as its stated goal, the Islamic fundamentalist movement has embraced terrorism as the means to this end. In his bid to consolidate power in Iran after the Islamic revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, facing terrorist opposition, curbed it by extreme measures, gaining a taste for this form of warfare and using it as an arm of Iranian foreign policy to aid like-minded terrorist groups and embarrass Iran's national enemies. Since then, Iran has been at the heart of both the fundamentalist movement and the terrorism which seems inextricably linked to it. The Iranian Connection is a world-wide network of embassies and diplomatic missions--staffed with intelligence personnel-- which shelters terrorists, stores their weaponry, and monitors potential targets. With this book, Edgar O'Ballance has written a readable investigative account of Iran's involvement in international terrorist activity.