dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Hammer and Scorecard is a HOAX!

How a Reno casino con man duped the CIA and pulled one of the ‘most dangerous hoaxes’ in American history

Nation Oct 14, 2014

In the winter of 2003, the CIA received a disturbing bit of information. Al-Qaida, the intelligence said, was planning to strike the U.S. by hijacking a specific list of incoming international flights from France and other nations.

The agency shared the information with the White House. They had flight numbers, schedules and possible coordinates for the attacks. After speaking with the French government, President Bush issued an order to ground certain flights worldwide, severely disrupting holiday travel.

But it turns out the intelligence was flawed. In fact, no such plot existed to crash Air France 747s in the U.S., nor was there any credible intelligence that al-Qaida was planning a Christmas attack. Few knew exactly from where the bad information had originated, thanks to silos inside the intelligence sphere. The information had come from Dennis Montgomery, a little-known government contractor who claimed he had the ability to decode secret al-Qaida messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts. After the groundings, French officials demanded access to Montgomery’s software, and handed it over to a team of French engineers to analyze.

At one point, Risen says, Montgomery’s intelligence information was so revered, the White House considered issuing an order to shoot down a passenger plane over the Atlantic.

The French engineers concluded Montgomery’s claims were an elaborate hoax. There were too few pixels in an Al Jazeera broadcast image to contain hidden messages.

Just a few years before the phony holiday terror plot, Montgomery had been a frequent presence in a Reno, Nevada casino, where he gambled compulsively and claimed to have designed software that could analyze security video to recognize betting patterns and catch cheaters—or count cards into an eight-deck blackjack game.