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Dubious intelligence sparked 2003 alert

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Investigative journalist Aram Roston says a nationwide security alert back in 2003 was based on dubious information compiled by a man in Nevada and handed to the CIA. Roston writes about it in the current issue of Playboy magazine. And he speaks with anchor Marco Werman about the case.

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MARCO WERMAN: It’s been a while since we’ve talked about color-coded terrorism advisories. The government still issues them as it’s been doing since 9-11. Today’s threat level, for instance, is yellow, or elevated. The alerts are based on intelligence of possible terrorist attacks, but the exact nature of that intelligence is always, by necessity, a bit murky. A report in Playboy Magazine shines some light on the kind of information that sparked one particular alert. In December 2003, officials declared a code orange alert, the highest-level shy of an imminent attack. Air travel was disrupted; flights were canceled, and so on. But according to that report in Playboy, the intelligence that triggered that alert was bogus. The investigative journalist on the story is Aram Roston. He joins us from New York. First of all, the man you write about who perpetrated this hoax is named Dennis Montgomery. Who is he?

ARAM ROSTON: He is an extraordinary individual in a way. He’s in his 50’s. He claims to be a scientist and computer programmer at a very elite level. So he claims to be one of the most sophisticated ones in the world, really, and able to achieve things no one else can achieve. The thing is, he doesn’t have much of a scientific education. He had a two-year medical technology degree, and he worked in hospitals as a medical technician in his younger days, and then transformed himself into this, again, this self-proclaimed scientist. He’s got a bunch of legal problems, some lawsuits against him. He’s got an immense gambling problem it seems, because according to his bankruptcy filing, he lost 3 million dollars in just 12 months alone in various casinos. He seems to like to play Blackjack.

WERMAN: Hmm. And one of the things Mr. Montgomery claimed to have achieved that no one else could have achieved is that he was finding out what Al Qaeda was up to. How exactly did he claim that?

ROSTON: Right. He said he had decoded Al Qaeda’s communications. And he said he found those communications in Al Jazeera’s feed, this satellite broadcast feed. What he said is, embedded in that video signal was encoded barcodes. In other words these numbers were placed, he claimed, within the speed. And I think the way it would have been done is rearranging pixels and so forth. And he said that he alone could secretly uncover these barcodes through his computer technology, which he said could detect anomalies in the video signal. He would then translate them into latitudes and longitudes and flight numbers. And he had a real imperative in his message. He said this is the terror targets that are coming up. So it was as if he was claiming that Al Jazeera was the secret Al Qaeda transmission system, but it wasn’t said on air, it was secretly in the signal.

WERMAN: So just to clarify, Al Jazeera, it’s just a news network, not a terrorism organization. What is the kind of evidence that leads you to believe that this whole terror alert six years ago over the holidays was indeed kind of indicated by the evidence that Dennis Montgomery so called brought forth?

ROSTON: Enough sources corroborated that. Sources in government.

WERMAN: Sources in the security services?

ROSTON: Yeah. In Homeland Security, CIA, the Bureau, FBI.

WERMAN: And along the way, no one, none of these parties attempted to verify his own [PH] bonafieties or his technology?

ROSTON: They attempted, but he was very clever. I can say clever. He would say because he was trying to protect himself and protect his technology, he never revealed what it was. So he would just say, I’ve got it, and I can’t reveal it, it’s so sensitive, you’d steal it. Somebody would steal it. It needs to be protected and so forth. So he would have gotten away without explaining what so called algorithms he was using to fund this stuff. Again, US taxpayer funds going to him.

WERMAN: So explain what Dennis Montgomery was selling, or trying to achieve, if none of this technology worked.

ROSTON: I’ve asked myself, is it possible that he believes it works? One never knows. The fact is, there’s nothing there. There are no secret terrorist barcodes in Al Jazeera’s feed. It’s just not there.

WERMAN: And how do you know that?

ROSTON: The CIA knocked it down. It’s impossible, it’s implausible, Al Qaeda can’t communicate that way. No one knows how to communicate that way. If they did, enough of this is out there that they would have stopped it if they ever did do that, but he continues to say it’s still there.

WERMAN: Investigative journalist Aram Roston in New York. Thank you very much.

ROSTON: Thank you, sir.

WERMAN: All the details of this bizarre story can be found in Aram Roston’s article in the latest edition of Playboy Magazine. We have a link at theworld.org. By the way, we asked the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security to comment on the story. Both declined.

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