A conversation with veteran correspondent Ian Timberlake.

Ian Timberlake cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent in Timor-Leste where he initially worked as a stringer for Agence France-Presse (AFP). In the late 1990s, he witnessed the end of the Suharto regime in Indonesia and the atrocities that were inflicted in the former Portuguese colony amid the fight for independence.

Over the next three decades he spanned the globe, working with AFP from bases in Jakarta, Singapore, Hanoi, and Hong Kong and then further out in Khartoum, Riyadh, Washington, and finally Nicosia, from where he has just retired.

He is now back in Bangkok and takes an interest in white collar crime and money laundering. He does his best to keep up with the latest technological advances deployed by criminal syndicates and international law enforcement agencies alike.

Timberlake, a dual Canadian-Australian citizen, spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about a career that began in 1986 on Ontario newspapers where he specialized in his great passion, crime reporting, and shared an award for investigative reporting.

That career included stints working on the decks of an aircraft carrier during the invasion of Iraq and a fact-checking desk while taking on assignments in conflicts zones like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

Throughout it all, he says, justice is rare but journalists must speak truth to power and continue to hold world leaders accountable for their actions, despite the relentless assaults and issues confronting the press.