Con Man’s Scam Exposes Terror Alert’s Weakness: Report

A con man took the Department of Homeland Security for a ride, according to Playboy magazine.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. — A con man took the Department of Homeland Security for a ride, according to Playboy magazine.

Dennis Montgomery convinced the Bush White House that he could break codes being broadcasted to Al Qaeda through Al Jazeera’s television signals.

As a result, the color-coded terror alert system rose to level Orange (high) in December 2003.

At the time then-DHS secretary Tom Ridge warned that coming were “near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experience on September 11.”

Ridge has since admitted that he and his office were being used as polical tool for the Bush administration.

The Playboy report details Montgomery’s manipulation of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology and his subsequent dismissal.

In the end, the French convinced the American intelligence community to see the light, reported Aram Roston.

“A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was there was not. Quietly, as far as the CIA was concerned, the case was closed. The agency turned the matter over to the counterintelligence side to see where it had gone wrong,” Roston wrote.

Montgomery is still operating amongst other government agencies and has a string of lawsuit pending.