As it happens, I was recently looking into Timmons, and he's not merely a lobbyist -- he has a deep history in some of the most unsavory operations of the last 40 years.
He was Nixon's chief Congressional lobbyist in 1969-74, with the title of Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, and was highly enough placed to appear on the Watergate tapes. A couple of years ago, Timmons told one of the students who were trying to identify Deep Throat, "I never talk about my days in the White House, and I'm not going to start now."
In the early 80's, Timmons was tied in with CIA Director William Casey's backchannel intelligence operations -- in particular, with Tongsun Park, who had been his college classmate. Timmons and Park are said to have worked together to prevent the ouster of Manuel Noriega around 1987-88, and George H.W. Bush may have been involved.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201650.html
During that era, Park was a fixture in Washington political circles, hosting parties at his historic George Town Club. His friends and clients included the late House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.), Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and William E. Timmons, an influential Republican lobbyist who once joined forces with Park in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the U.S. ouster of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.
Timmons was also involved, along with Park, in creating the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2ZjZGIxM2Q0NTk3ZDI3ZjgyOGY5NjdhMWY2YmFlNmY=
In the early 1990s, according to Vincent, this entailed a variety of schemes centered in Washington that simply flopped. In early 1992, he said, he hooked up with a Washington lobbyist, William E. Timmons, who had served as a congressional liaison in the Reagan administration. (Timmons did not return a call yesterday to his office at his Washington firm, Timmons and Company, where he is now listed as Chairman Emeritus). Vincent said that with the help of Timmons, he tried a number of approaches to the State Department, including a request to see John Bolton, currently the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., then assistant secretary for international organization affairs at the State Department. That resulted in meetings with “deputies of Bolton,” said Vincent, “But I never had a chance to meet with Bolton himself.” According to Vincent, Timmons also helped him approach Elizabeth Dole, then head of the American Red Cross, with a proposal that the Red Cross take part in a plan similar to, but on a smaller scale than, what later coalesced under the U.N. as Oil-for-Food. . . .
By late 1992, according to Vincent, he and Timmons concluded that the U.S. State Department would not play ball, and Iraq should look directly to the U.N. Thus, Vincent needed access to the upper reaches of the U.N., and it was at that point, he testified Tuesday, that Timmons introduced him to Tongsun Park. Within a few weeks, “Park had arranged a meeting for us with the Secretary-General of the United Nations at the United Nations headquarters.”
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