Montgomery v. Risen

• Decision Date: 15 July 2016
• Docket Number: Civil Action No.: 16-0126 (RC)
• Citation: 197 F.Supp.3d 219
• Parties: Dennis L. MONTGOMERY, Plaintiff, v. James RISEN, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Columbia

197 F.Supp.3d 219

Dennis L. MONTGOMERY, Plaintiff,

v.James RISEN, et al., Defendants.

Civil Action No.: 16-0126 (RC)

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

Signed July 15, 2016

Larry E. Klayman, Klayman Law Firm, Washington, DC, for Plaintiff.

Laura Rose Handman, Lisa Beth Zycherman, Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP, Washington, DC, for Defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION

RESOLVING ALL PENDING MOTIONS AND GRANTING DEFENDANTS' MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT

RUDOLPH CONTRERAS, United States District Judge

I. INTRODUCTION

The twists and turns of this case could fill the pages of a book. In fact, much of it already has. In October 2014 Defendant James Risen authored, and his co-defendants Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company (collectively, "Defendants")¹ published, Pay any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War . One of the book's chapters focuses heavily on Plaintiff Dennis Montgomery, who claimed to have developed several technologies that the government subsequently employed in the war on terrorism in the years following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. One of those technologies, Montgomery claimed, could detect hidden numbers and letters that appeared in Al Jazeera broadcasts. Government officials purportedly concluded that those strings of letters and numbers identified airline flight numbers or longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates representing targets of anticipated al Qaeda terrorist attacks. If this sounds too good to be true, you are not alone. The relevant chapter in Pay Any Price explains how government officials, Montgomery's former employees, and others came to believe that his technology did not work as billed. The chapter repeats others' assertions that Montgomery is a con man and describes his technology as a hoax.

This memorandum opinion is an extended epilogue of sorts, and picks up where Pay Any Price leaves off. Montgomery filed this action claiming, primarily, that Defendants defamed him in the chapter and in the course of promoting the book. After a protracted, and largely unresolved, saga in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the case was transferred to this district and assigned to the undersigned. Before the Court are Defendants' motion to dismiss and motion for summary judgment and a number of outstanding discovery related motions. The tale of the Court's resolution of those motions follows. For those not otherwise tempted to skip to the final chapter—spoiler alert—the end result is that the Court will grant Defendants' motion for summary judgment.

II. FACTUAL & PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

A. The Challenged Chapter

Defendant James Risen is the author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War , which was published on October 14, 2014 by Houghton Mifflin. See Defs.' Stmt. of Undisputed Material Facts ¶¶ 1, 3 ("Defs.' SUMF"), ECF No. 202. The nine-chapter book "describes how the war on terror led to waste, fraud, and abuse by U.S. government officials and the contractors who stood to gain from it." Id. ¶ 5. Chapter two of the book ("the Chapter"), entitled "The Emperor of the War on Terror," claims that in the post-September 11th era government officials were quick to fund potential counterterrorism efforts. The Chapter posits that, as Congress "thr[ew] cash at the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon," 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 ... in Tysons Corner, Virginia, coming up with new ways to predict, analyze, and prevent terrorist attacks—or, short of that, at least convincing a few government bureaucrats that you had some magic formula for doing so." Am. Compl. Ex. A at 31 ("Chapter"), ECF No. 44.²

To illustrate this point, the Chapter presents "the example of [Plaintiff] Dennis Montgomery." Id. at 31. Risen describes Montgomery as "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." Id. at 32. The Chapter claims that Montgomery's example "demonstrates how hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the war on terror went to waste." Id. at 33.

The Chapter focuses on several types of technology that Montgomery developed. The Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA") and other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies apparently relied on the technology beginning in or around 2003. Id. at 37. The Chapter claims that the technology did not work as billed. For example, Montgomery allegedly created video compression and object recognition technology which the Air Force and other agencies believed could be helpful in storing and analyzing Predator drone video. Id. at 36. In particular, the Chapter states that "Montgomery claimed that his facial recognition software was so good that he could identify individual faces from the video camera flying on a Predator high above the mountains of southern Afghanistan." Id. at 37. By 2003, the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Air Force had awarded government contracts related to the technology to eTreppid Technologies, the company Montgomery founded along with his financial backer, Warren Trepp. Id. at 34–35, 37.

The Chapter claims that while Montgomery performed field tests of the object recognition technology for Pentagon officials, former employees now allege that those tests were fabricated. Specifically, the Chapter reports one occasion on which Montgomery attempted to show that his technology could detect, from a great distance, a toy bazooka Montgomery carried in a field outside eTreppid. Id. at 37. According to the Chapter, Warren Trepp informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") that "Montgomery told two eTreppid employees to go to an empty office and push a button on a computer when they heard a beep on a cell phone." Id. While carrying the bazooka, Montgomery purportedly "used a hidden cell phone to buzz the cell phone of one of the eTreppid employees, who then pushed a key on a computer keyboard, which in turn flashed an image of a bazooka on another screen prominently displayed in front of the military officers standing in another room." Id. This course of events "convinced" the military officials "that Montgomery's computer software had amazingly detected and recognized the bazooka in Montgomery's hands." Id.

The technology most emphasized in the Chapter, however, is technology Montgomery claimed he had developed "enable[ing] him to decipher al Qaeda codes embedded in the network banner displayed on the broadcasts of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news network."Id. at 40. This software is often referred to as the "noise filtering" software. See, e.g. , Decl. of James Risen ¶ 15 ("Risen Decl."), ECF No. 203; id. Ex. 11 at 2, ECF No. 203-11. Risen writes that "Montgomery sold the CIA on the fantasy that al Qaeda was using the broadcasts to digitally transmit its plans for future terrorist attacks"—which included "series of hidden letters and numbers that appeared to be coded messages about specific airline flights that the terrorists were targeting." Chapter at 40–41. By late 2003 CIA officials visited eTreppid's offices in Reno, Nevada to observe the software. Id. at 40.

The Chapter posits that "Montgomery brilliantly played on the CIA's technical insecurities as well as the agency's woeful lack of understanding about al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism." Id. Although noting that "Montgomery insists that he did not come up with the idea of analyzing Al Jazeera videotapes," and that the CIA instead came to him, Risen writes that "even if it wasn't Montgomery's idea, he ran with it as fast as he could." Id. at 41. Montgomery allegedly informed the CIA that the Al Jazeera broadcasts had hidden letters and numbers embedded in them, which "included the letters ‘AF’ followed by a series of numbers, or the letters ‘AA’ and ‘UA’ and two or three digits." Id. Other series of numbers "looked like coordinates for the longitude and latitude of specific locations." Id.

The Chapter states that "[t]he CIA made the inevitable connections," and Risen contends in the Chapter that the technology "so enraptured certain key government officials that it was considered the most important and most sensitive counterterrorism intelligence that the Central Intelligence Agency had to offer President Bush." Id. at 41, 39. Senior CIA officials in the agency's Directorate of Science and Technology began to vouch for Montgomery's work. Id. at 39. The Chapter reports that the Directorate's chief, Donald Kerr, believed the claims about the embedded codes, and convinced George Tenet, Director of the CIA, to take the information seriously. Id. at 42. "As a result, in December 2003, Tenet rushed directly to President Bush when information provided by Montgomery and his software purported to show that a series of flights from France, Britain, and Mexico to the United States around Christmas were being targeted by al Qaeda." Id. President Bush ordered those flights grounded. Id. The Chapter also recounts that "[o]ne 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," a conversation that included a "brief but serious discussion about whether to shoot down commercial airliners over the Atlantic based on the intelligence." Id. at 45.

Eventually, French officials apparently demanded answers from the United States, and the CIA "was finally forced to reveal to French intelligence the source of the threat information." Id. at 46. French officials arranged for a French technology firm to "reverse-engineer" the technology. Id. The firm concluded that the broadcasts contained too few pixels to contain hidden bar...