Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  But even if it wasn’t Montgomery’s idea, he ran with it as fast as he could. He told the CIA that he had found that the versions of the tapes broadcast on Al Jazeera had hidden letters and numbers embedded in them. He says that he found that each bin Laden video broadcast on al Jazeera had patterns and objects embedded in the network’s own banner displayed with the video recordings.

  Montgomery let the CIA draw its own conclusions based on the information he gave them. After he reported to the CIA that he had detected a series of hidden letters and numbers, he left it up to the CIA to conclude that those numbers and letters referred to specific airline flights. He insists that he did not offer the CIA his own conclusions about what the data meant.

  By the middle of December 2003, Montgomery reported to the CIA that he had discovered certain combinations of letters and numbers. For example, coded messages that included the letters “AF” followed by a series of numbers, or the letters “AA” and “UA” and two or three digits, kept repeating. In other instances, he told the agency that he had found a series of numbers that looked like coordinates for the longitude and latitude of specific locations.

  The CIA made the inevitable connections. “They would jump at conclusions,” says Montgomery. “There would be things like C4, C4, and they would say that’s explosives. They jumped to conclusions.” He added that he “never suggested it was airplanes or a threat.”

  Montgomery’s data triggered panic at the CIA and the White House—and urgent demands that Montgomery produce more. On Christmas Eve, CIA officials showed up at Montgomery’s house in Reno and told him that he had to go back to his office to keep digging through incoming videotapes and Al Jazeera broadcasts throughout the holidays, Montgomery recalled.

  Montgomery was telling the CIA exactly what it wanted to hear. At the time, the Bush administration was obsessed with Al Jazeera, not only because of the network’s unrelenting criticism of the invasion of Iraq, but also because it had become Osama bin Laden’s favorite outlet for broadcasting his videotaped messages to the world. Each time bin Laden released a new video, the American media immediately turned to the CIA for a quick response and analysis of whether the recording was genuine and where and when it had been taped. Each new broadcast on Al Jazeera forced the CIA to scramble to stay one step ahead of Western reporters baying for answers. At first, when bin Laden released videotapes filmed outdoors in what appeared to be the mountainous terrain of northwestern Pakistan, the CIA even tried to conduct a geological analysis of the rocky outcroppings that served as the backdrop for the video, to try to figure out where bin Laden was. His broadcast statements prompted the CIA to look for new methods of analyzing the news network, and also led some American officials to suspect that there was a covert relationship between Al Jazeera and al Qaeda.

  Former senior CIA officials say that officials from the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate, including the directorate’s chief, Donald Kerr, believed Montgomery’s claims about al Qaeda codes. They also convinced CIA director George Tenet to take the technology and intelligence flowing from Montgomery’s software seriously. As a result, in December 2003, Tenet rushed directly to President Bush when information provided by Montgomery and his software purported to show that a series of flights from France, Britain, and Mexico to the United States around Christmas were being targeted by al Qaeda. The data strongly suggested that the terrorist group was planning to crash the planes at specific coordinates.

  Based on Montgomery’s information, President Bush ordered the grounding of a series of international flights scheduled to fly into the United States. This step caused disruptions for thousands of travelers on both sides of the Atlantic, while further stoking public fears of another spectacular al Qaeda attack just two years after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

  Years later, several former CIA officials who eventually pieced together what had happened in those frenzied days became highly critical of how Montgomery’s information was handled by Tenet and other senior CIA managers. The critics came to believe that top officials in the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate became fierce advocates for Montgomery’s information because they were eager to play a more prominent role in the Bush administration’s war on terror. The scientists were tired of being shunted aside, and Montgomery gave them what they wanted: technology that could prove their worth. “They wanted in,” said one former senior CIA official, “they wanted to be part of the game.”

  But former CIA officials blame Tenet even more; the CIA director enabled the overeager scientists. He allowed them to circumvent the CIA’s normal reporting and vetting channels, and rushed the raw material fed to the agency by Montgomery directly to the president. Bush himself had no way of vetting the material he was being handed by the CIA. “Tenet made George Bush the case officer on this,” said one former senior CIA official. “The president was deciding how this was being handled.”

  One former senior CIA official said that for two or three months in late 2003 and early 2004, the intelligence from Montgomery was treated like it was the most valuable counterterrorism material at the CIA. Special briefings were given almost daily on the intelligence, but only a handful of CIA officials were told where the intelligence was coming from. “They treated this like the most important, most sensitive compartmented material they had on terrorism,” said one former CIA official.

  Officially, the CIA still refuses to discuss any details of the episode. One CIA official offered a qualified defense of Tenet’s handling of Montgomery’s information, saying that the decision to share the threat information with President Bush was debated and approved by the administration’s so-called principals committee, made up of Vice President Dick Cheney, the secretaries of state and defense, and other members of the cabinet. Only after the principals agreed did Tenet take the intelligence in to Bush. In other words, Tenet wasn’t the only one who appears to have been hoodwinked. Dennis Montgomery’s information received the stamp of approval by the entire upper echelon of the Bush administration.

  What remains unclear is how Montgomery was able to convince all of them that he had developed secret software that could decode al Qaeda’s invisible messages. While he had gotten by a few credulous military officers who came to view his demonstrations, he apparently found it just as easy to persuade the CIA as well.

  A CIA official defensively pointed out that the agency did not actually have a contract with eTreppid at the time Montgomery was providing data from the Al Jazeera videotapes. While they were working closely together during the final months of 2003, the CIA had not yet started paying Montgomery, the official said. The agency never finalized a contract with him because agency staff eventually realized they had been conned, according to this official. But that does not diminish the fact that for a few crucial months, the CIA took Montgomery and his technology very seriously.

  Montgomery was able to succeed with the CIA in part because senior agency officials considered his technology so important that they turned the knowledge of its existence into a highly compartmented secret. Few at the CIA knew any more than that there was a new intelligence source providing highly sensitive information about al Qaeda’s plans for its future terrorist strikes. In other words, the CIA officials working with Montgomery—people who had already bought into Montgomery—controlled who else was told about the man and his technology. By limiting access to the information, they enhanced their own standing within the CIA; they were the high priests in on the agency’s biggest secret. There would be no second-guessing.

  The fact that Montgomery and eTreppid had such powerful connections in Washington also reduced the incentives for anyone at the CIA to speak up. Raising questions about Dennis Montgomery would almost certainly lead to a grilling in front of the House Intelligence Committee and Jim Gibbons. It might also incur the wrath of Jerry Lewis and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which, along with the House intelligence panel, controlled the intelligence budget.

  For those few
allowed into the CIA’s charmed circle of secret knowledge, Montgomery seemed to be providing powerful and frightening information.

  The string of numbers flowing inexorably from Dennis Montgomery’s computers prompted President Bush to act. One set of flights he ordered grounded were Air France flights from Paris to Los Angeles. French security detained seven men at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for questioning, but then released them after no further evidence of a pending attack was uncovered. Christmas 2003 came and went with no attacks. But that did not make the White House any more skeptical of Dennis Montgomery.

  One former senior CIA official recalled attending a White House meeting in the week following Christmas to discuss what to do next about the information coming from Montgomery. The official claims that there was a brief but serious discussion about whether to shoot down commercial airliners over the Atlantic based on the intelligence. The former CIA official said that during the meeting, Frances Townsend—then a counterterrorism official on the National Security Council—discussed with an NSC lawyer the fact that the president had the legal authority to shoot down planes believed to be terrorist threats, and that it might be time to exercise that authority. “I couldn’t believe they were talking about it,” the former senior CIA official said. “I thought this was crazy.”

  Townsend denied ever having such a discussion. The former CIA official repeated his version of events after being told of her denial.

  Finally, the French brought an end to it. Since Air France flights to the United States were among those that had been grounded, French officials had taken a dim view of the entire episode. They began demanding answers from the Americans. The French applied so much pressure on Washington that the CIA was finally forced to reveal to French intelligence the source of the threat information. Once they heard the story of Dennis Montgomery and eTreppid, French officials arranged for a French high-tech firm to reverse-engineer Montgomery’s purported technology. The French wanted to see for themselves whether the claims of hidden messages in Al Jazeera broadcasts made any sense.

  It did not take long for the French firm to conclude that the whole thing was a hoax. The French company said that there were simply not enough pixels in the broadcasts to contain hidden bar codes or unseen numbers. The firm reported back to the French government that the supposed intelligence was a fabrication.

  At first, CIA officials were taken aback by the French company’s findings and did not want to believe that they had been fooled. Montgomery says that CIA officials continued to work with him for months after Christmas 2003, and that CIA personnel were still showing up at his offices in Nevada until late 2004.

  Once the CIA officials finally accepted the truth, however, and agreed with the French findings, George Tenet and others at the CIA who had been Montgomery’s advocates tried to forget all about him. They never talked about the operation again. Within the CIA, it was as if Dennis Montgomery had never existed.

  The CIA never investigated the apparent hoax nor examined how it had been handled inside the agency. No one involved in promoting Montgomery, in vouching for his information to the president, or in proposing to shoot down planes based on his claims ever faced any consequences. Donald Kerr, the head of the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate at the time, was never held to account for the role the CIA’s technical experts played in advocating for Montgomery. Instead, Kerr kept getting promoted. He received several other senior assignments in the intelligence community, and was eventually named deputy director of national intelligence. Kerr did not respond to requests for comment.

  At the time of the Christmas 2003 scare, John Brennan was head of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center and in charge of distributing terrorism-related intelligence throughout the government. That meant that Brennan’s office was responsible for circulating Montgomery’s fabricated intelligence to officials in the highest reaches of the Bush administration. But Brennan was never admonished for his role in the affair. After Barack Obama became president, Brennan was named to be his top counterterrorism advisor in the White House. He later became CIA director.

  In 2013, while the Senate was considering whether to confirm Brennan to run the CIA, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican who was vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, submitted a written question to Brennan about his role in the intelligence community’s dealings with Montgomery. In response, Brennan denied that he had been an advocate for Montgomery and his technology, and insisted that the Terrorism Threat Integration Center was merely a recipient of Montgomery’s information and data, which had been passed on by the CIA. He said that the center included Montgomery’s data “in analytic products as appropriate.” He claimed not to know what had become of the CIA’s program with eTreppid, “other than it was determined not to be a source of accurate information.”

  There was no further inquiry on the matter from Congress. “Nobody was blamed,” complains one former CIA official. “Instead, they got promoted.”

  Even more stunning, after the debacle over the bogus Christmas 2003 terrorist threats, Montgomery kept getting classified government contracts awarded through several different corporate entities. Montgomery’s problems with the CIA did not stop him from peddling variations of his technology to one government agency after another. The secrecy that surrounded his work once again worked in his favor. CIA officials were reluctant to tell their Pentagon counterparts much about their experiences with Montgomery, so Defense Department officials apparently did not realize that his technology was considered suspect at CIA headquarters.

  In February 2004, just two months after the Christmas 2003 airplane scare, eTreppid was awarded a new contract with Special Operations Command. The contract was for both data compression and “automatic target recognition software,” Montgomery’s purported technology to recognize the faces of people on the ground filmed in videos on Predator drones. Special Operations Command gave eTreppid access to video feeds from Predator drones controlled from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. It is not certain how long officials there tested Montgomery’s facial recognition technology before realizing that eTreppid had no secret formula for identifying terrorists from Predator drone video feeds. But eventually, Special Operations Command also began to see through Montgomery.

  “The technology didn’t meet the requirements for us,” said a Special Operations Command spokesman drily. Still, there is no evidence that officials at Special Operations Command ever talked with their counterparts at the CIA to check up on Montgomery before awarding him a contract. Special Operations Command paid a total of $9.6 million to eTreppid under its contract with the firm.

  By late 2005, Dennis Montgomery was in trouble. Employees at eTreppid were becoming more openly skeptical of Montgomery and trying to get access to his secret technology to see if it really existed. For years, Montgomery had somehow managed to hide the truth about his secret work for the government from the small number of employees he had hired. He successfully infused a sense of mystery around himself. He was like the Wizard of Oz, but now people were beginning to try to examine the man behind the curtain.

  Sloan Venables, hired by Montgomery to be eTreppid’s director of research and development, later told the FBI that another employee, Patty Gray, began to suspect that Montgomery “was doing something other than what he was actually telling people he was doing.” Venables added in his statement to the FBI that he knew that “Montgomery promised products to customers that had not been completed or even assigned to programmers.”

  At the same time, Montgomery was arguing with Warren Trepp over money; Montgomery needed cash and claimed that Trepp had shortchanged him on his share of the revenue from eTreppid’s contracts. In December 2005, Montgomery asked Trepp for a personal loan of $275,000, on top of the $1.375 million Trepp had already loaned him since 1999, according to court documents. This was too much for Trepp, who finally became fed up with Montgomery.

  But Montgomery moved first. Over the Christm
as holidays, Montgomery allegedly went into eTreppid’s offices and deleted all of the computer files containing his source code and software development data, according to court documents. He broke with Trepp, left eTreppid, and began looking for new backers. Trepp soon discovered that Montgomery had asked yet another casino host at the El Dorado if he knew of any wealthy gamblers who would be willing to invest $5 to $10 million in a new business he was about to launch. Trepp later told the FBI that on his way out the door at eTreppid, Montgomery screamed at one employee, “You’re an asshole and I will see you again!”

  Trepp was furious. According to court documents, he told the FBI that Montgomery had stolen the software eTreppid had used on secret Pentagon contracts. As federal investigators moved in to investigate the alleged theft of the technology, they heard from Trepp and others that Montgomery’s alleged technology wasn’t real. Yet they doggedly kept probing Montgomery’s theft of secret technology, and even raided Montgomery’s home searching for the computer codes, all the while largely ignoring the evidence that he had perpetrated a hoax.

  After their partnership broke up, Montgomery and Trepp remained locked in a series of nasty and lingering legal battles. The worst involved Montgomery’s allegations that Jim Gibbons, the Nevada Republican congressman whom he had met at Wayne Prim’s house, had received bribes from Warren Trepp in return for helping eTreppid to obtain defense contracts. Montgomery’s accusations were explosive because they became public just as Gibbons was being elected governor of Nevada. They helped to trigger a federal corruption investigation, but the inquiry was eventually shelved amid questions about whether e-mails that Montgomery claimed showed that Gibbons had accepted money and a Caribbean cruise in exchange for help in winning contracts for eTreppid—and thus supposedly provided evidence of bribery—may have been forgeries. Dennis Montgomery was widely suspected of having fabricated the e-mails in an effort to damage both Trepp and Gibbons.