Pay Any Price by James Risen Read Free Book Online Page B

by powerful Iraqis.
    And so, today, the bunker full of cash in Lebanon serves as a fitting monument to the excesses of the American war on terror. It certainly seems like a more appropriate symbol of the American adventure in the Middle East than the half-forgotten statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square that was pulled down on the April day in 2003 when Baghdad fell.

2
The Emperor of the War on Terror
    Greed and power, when combined, can be devastating. In the case of the missing cash of Baghdad, greed tempted Americans and Iraqis alike, while the power of the Coalition Provisional Authority to make fast, sweeping decisions with little oversight allowed that greed to grow unchecked. Billions of dollars disappeared as a result.
    Throughout the war on terror, greed and power have flourished just as readily back home in the United States, where the government’s surging counterterrorism spending created a new national security gold rush. The post-9/11 panic led Congress to throw cash at the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon faster than they were able to spend it. Soon, a counterterrorism bubble, like a financial bubble, grew in Washington, and a new breed of entrepreneur learned that one of the surest and easiest paths to riches could be found not in Silicon Valley building computers or New York designing clothes but rather in Tysons Corner, Virginia, coming up with new ways to predict, analyze, and prevent terrorist attacks—or, short of that, at least in convincing a few government bureaucrats that you had some magic formula for doing so.
    Consider the example of Dennis Montgomery. He provides the perfect case study to explain how during the war on terror greed and ambition have been married to unlimited rivers of cash to create a climate in which someone who has been accused of being a con artist was able to create a rogue intelligence operation with little or no adult supervision. Crazy became the new normal in the war on terror, and the original objectives of the war got lost in the process.
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    Whatever else he was, Dennis Montgomery was a man who understood how best to profit from America’s decade of fear. He saw the post-9/11 age for what it was, a time to make money.
    Montgomery was the maestro behind what many current and former U.S. officials and others familiar with the case now believe was one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history, a ruse that was so successful that it nearly convinced the Bush administration to order fighter jets to start shooting down commercial airliners filled with passengers over the Atlantic. Once it was over, once the fever broke and government officials realized that they had been taken in by a grand illusion, they did absolutely nothing about it. The Central Intelligence Agency buried the whole insane episode and acted like it had never happened. The Pentagon just kept working with Montgomery. Justice Department lawyers fanned out across the country to try to block any information about Montgomery and his schemes from becoming public, invoking the state secrets privilege in a series of civil lawsuits involving Montgomery.
    It was as if everyone in Washington was afraid to admit that the Emperor of the War on Terror had no clothes.
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    A former medical technician, a self-styled computer software expert with no experience whatsoever in national security affairs, Dennis Montgomery almost singlehandedly prompted President Bush to ground a series of international commercial flights based on what now appears to have been an elaborate hoax. Even after it appeared that Montgomery had pulled off a scheme of amazing scope, he still had die-hard supporters in the government who steadfastly refused to believe the evidence suggesting that Montgomery was a fake, and who rejected the notion that the super-secret computer software that he foisted on the Pentagon and CIA was anything other than America’s salvation.
    Montgomery’s story demonstrates how hundreds