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Two years ago, as he was ratcheting up a campaign to isolate and cripple North Korea's dictatorship financially, President Bush accused the communist regime there of printing phony U.S. currency."When someone is counterfeiting our money, we want them to stop doing that. We are aggressively saying to the North Koreans just that — don't counterfeit our money," Bush said on Jan. 26, 2006.
However, a 10-month McClatchy investigation on three continents has found that the evidence to support Bush's charges against North Korea is uncertain at best and that the claims of the North Korean defectors cited in news accounts are dubious and perhaps bogus. One key law enforcement agency, the Swiss federal criminal police, has publicly questioned whether North Korea is even capable of producing "supernotes," counterfeit $100 bills that are nearly perfect except for some practically invisible additions.
Many of the administration's public allegations about North Korean counterfeiting trace to North Korea "experts" in South Korea who arranged interviews with North Korean defectors for U.S. and foreign newspapers. The resulting news reports were quoted by members of Congress, researchers and Bush administration officials who were seeking to pressure North Korea.
The defectors' accounts, for example, were cited prominently in a lengthy July 23, 2006, New York Times magazine story that charged North Korea with producing the sophisticated supernotes.
The McClatchy investigation, however, found reason to question those sources. One major source for several stories, a self-described chemist named Kim Dong-shik, has gone into hiding, and a former roommate, Moon Kook-han, said Kim is a liar out for cash who knew so little about American currency that he didn't know whose image is printed on the $100 bill. (It's Benjamin Franklin.)
The Secret Service, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department all declined repeated requests for interviews for this story.
The first international test of the U.S. charge occurred in July 2006, when at the request of the Bush administration, the international police agency Interpol assembled central bankers, police agencies and banknote industry officials to make the U.S. case against North Korea.
The conference in Lyon, France, followed Interpol's issuance in March 2005 of an orange alert — at America's request — calling on member nations to prohibit the sale of banknote equipment, paper or ink to North Korea.
But after calling together more than 60 experts, the Secret Service — the lead U.S. agency in combating counterfeiting — never provided any details of the evidence it said it had, instead citing "intelligence" and asking those assembled to accept the administration's claims on faith alone.
"I can't remember if I was laughing or asleep," said one person who was in the room and discussed the meeting with McClatchy on the condition of anonymity because of active contact with the Secret Service.
Another key piece of evidence, the alleged role that a tiny bank in the Chinese enclave of Macau played in helping North Korea launder counterfeit notes, also appears dubious. The U.S. Treasury blacklisted the Banco Delta Asia and issued a ruling in March 2007 that effectively shut the bank down.
But an audit by the international accounting firm Ernst & Young on behalf of the Macanese government and obtained by McClatchy found only a single case of counterfeit notes found at Banco Delta Asia. It occurred in 1994, and the fakes didn't originate in North Korea. The bank found these notes itself and alerted authorities.
Macau has lifted its sanctions against the bank, but the Treasury Department, citing "intelligence," maintains its blacklisting, although it did allow the bank to transfer $25 million back to North Korea.
Klaus Bender, the author of a book on the subject, "Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing," said that the phony $100 bill is "not a fake anymore. It's an illegal parallel print of a genuine note."
"It goes way beyond what normal counterfeiters are able to do," said Bender, whose book first spotlighted the improbability of North Korean supernotes. "And it is so elaborate (and expensive) it doesn't pay for the counterfeiting anymore."
Bender claims that the supernotes are of such high quality and are updated so frequently that they could be produced only by a U.S. government agency such as the CIA.
As unsubstantiated as the allegation is, there is a precedent. In his new book on the history of the CIA, journalist Tim Weiner detailed how the agency tried to undermine the Soviet Union's economy by counterfeiting its currency.
Making limited quantities of sophisticated counterfeit notes also could help intelligence and law enforcement agencies follow payments or illicit activities or track the movement of funds among unsavory regimes, terrorist groups and others.
"As a matter of course, we don't comment on such claims, regardless of how ridiculous they might be," said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield.
Its only a matter of time before Cuba, Venezuela and any new "evil" nations are smeared as well.