Pay Any Price (7 page)

Montgomery had a lot of support when it came to dealing with the government. Through Warren Trepp, he had excellent political connections, and in Washington that can take you a very long way.

To help eTreppid get more government business, Trepp brought in Letitia White, a Washington lobbyist with ties to congressional Republicans. She was particularly close with her former boss, California congressman Jerry Lewis. He, in turn, was chairman of the powerful House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee (he later became chairman of the full appropriations committee) and so was able to steer billions of dollars in spending to programs he favored throughout the Pentagon. Letitia White, who had been one of Lewis's closest aides, had left to go to work with the Washington lobbying firm of Copeland Lowery, where she specialized in arranging custom-built earmarks in the defense and intelligence budgets for her clients.

The connections among Lewis, White, and Copeland Lowery later became the subject of a long-running criminal investigation by the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles probed whether Lewis had steered huge amounts of money to Copeland Lowery's clients in return for large campaign donations from the lobbying firm and from the defense contractors that were its clients. The investigation of Jerry Lewis was ongoing when the U.S. attorney handling the case, Carol Lam, was fired by the Bush administration in 2007, making her one of eight U.S. attorneys pushed aside by the Bush White House in a famously controversial, possibly political decision. The investigation into Lewis and his ties to Copeland Lowery was eventually dropped, but the lobbying firm broke up under the pressure, and Letitia White moved to a new firm. In 2009, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) named Lewis one of the fifteen most corrupt members of Congress.

But Trepp wasn't finished after hiring White. He convinced another heavyweight Nevada investor, Wayne Prim, to put money into eTreppid. In September 2003, Prim hosted a dinner that brought together Trepp, Montgomery, and Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada, a former airline pilot and rising star among congressional Republicans. Gibbons, an influential member of the House Intelligence Committee, almost certainly played a critical role in helping Montgomery to gain access to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Gibbons did not need much coaxing to try to assist eTreppid. Not only was the company based in his home state, but both Prim and Warren Trepp were longtime campaign contributors. After the dinner at Prim's house, Gibbons went to work immediately opening doors in Washington for eTreppid. Flynn said that Montgomery later told him that Gibbons quickly arranged to meet with Porter Goss, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to discuss eTreppid and Montgomery's technology.

By the fall of 2003, Dennis Montgomery had made a series of impressive moves to gain access to the black budget of the government's national security apparatus. He had the backing of two wealthy investors, had one of the nation's most influential lobbyists scouring the federal budget for earmarks on his behalf, and had the support of a key member of the CIA's oversight committee. After obtaining a series of small contracts with the air force and the Special Operations Command, Montgomery was ready for the big time.

 

For a few months in late 2003, the technology from Dennis Montgomery and eTreppid so enraptured certain key government officials that it was considered the most important and most sensitive counterterrorism intelligence that the Central Intelligence Agency had to offer President Bush. Senior officials at the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology began to accept and vouch for Montgomery to officials at the highest levels of the government. Montgomery's claims grew ever more expansive, but that only solidified his position inside the national security arena. His technology became too impossible to disbelieve.

Montgomery's big moment came at Christmas 2003, a strange time of angst in the American national security apparatus. It was two years after the 9/11 attacks, and the war in Iraq was getting worse. Iraq was turning into a new breeding ground for terrorism, and Osama bin Laden was still on the loose, regularly thumbing his nose at the Americans by issuing videotaped threats of further terrorist strikes. The CIA, still stumbling in the aftermath of the two greatest intelligence failures in its history—missing 9/11 and getting it wrong on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction—was desperate for success, a quick win with which to answer its critics.

The CIA's Science and Technology Directorate, which had largely been stuck on the sidelines of the war on terror, saw in Dennis Montgomery an opportunity to get in the game. The directorate had played an important role in the Cold War, but in the first few years of the war on terror, it was still struggling to determine how technology could be leveraged against small groups of terrorists who were trying to stay off the grid.

Montgomery brilliantly played on the CIA's technical insecurities as well as the agency's woeful lack of understanding about al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism. He was able to convince the CIA that he had developed a secret new technology that enabled him to decipher al Qaeda codes embedded in the network banner displayed on the broadcasts of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network. Montgomery sold the CIA on the fantasy that al Qaeda was using the broadcasts to digitally transmit its plans for future terrorist attacks. And only he had the technology to decode those messages, thus saving America from another devastating attack. The CIA—more credulous than Hollywood or Las Vegas—fell for Montgomery's claims. In short, he convinced CIA officials that he could detect terrorist threats by watching television.

By late 2003, CIA officials began to flock to eTreppid's offices in Reno to see Montgomery's amazing software. Michael Flynn, Montgomery's former lawyer, said that Montgomery had dealings with or knew the identities of at least sixteen different CIA officials. These people now joined the senior military officers who had frequented the company since the previous spring, when it first began to work on the Predator program.

Montgomery persuaded the spy agency that his special computer technology could detect hidden bar codes broadcast on Al Jazeera, which had been embedded into the video feed by al Qaeda. Allegedly, al Qaeda was using that secret method to send messages to its terrorist operatives around the world about plans for new attacks. Montgomery convinced the CIA that his technology had uncovered a series of hidden letters and numbers that appeared to be coded messages about specific airline flights that the terrorists were targeting.

Montgomery insists that he did not come up with the idea of analyzing Al Jazeera videotapes—he says that the CIA came to him in late 2003 and asked him to do it. CIA officials brought Montgomery two different versions of al Qaeda videotapes, he claims. They gave him original al Qaeda videotapes obtained independently by the CIA, and then also gave him recordings of the same videotapes recorded as they had been broadcast on Al Jazeera. The CIA wanted him to compare the two, he claims.

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.