Free Pay Any Price by James Risen

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.
    Â 
    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.
    Â 
    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