Terror alerts and loss of liberty based on a scam: Swindler duped CIA over decoding Al-Qaeda ’secret messages’
December 23, 2009 by supermario
Filed under US News
(AFP)
A con artist convinced the CIA and other US agencies in 2003 that he could decode secret messages sent by Al-Qaeda through Al-Jazeera broadcasts, Playboy magazine reported.
Duped by claims that “bar codes” on Al-Jazeera television contained targeting information for Al-Qaeda attacks, former president George W. Bush’s administration raised the terror alert and cancelled several transatlantic flights in December 2003, the report said, citing former CIA officials.
The swindler at the center of the scam was Dennis Montgomery, head of a small software company in Reno, Nevada. He persuaded the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security that his technology could decipher messages with flight numbers and longitudes and latitudes meant for Al-Qaeda operatives.
With assistance from French intelligence, CIA officials eventually concluded there were no secret messages in Al-Jazeera television broadcasts, said the report, published in the magazine’s latest edition.
“A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake,” it said.
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