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Foreign governments are losing confidence in the once-mighty U.S. dollar—understandably—because of America’s ailing economy and mountainous debt. But there is another reason the dollar’s value is taking a hit. The greenback also suffers from direct actions by enemy nations that are bent on bringing down the United States. A secret war, Oliver North wrote in Sunday’s Washington Times, is being waged against the dollar.
“[C]orrupt officials in other capitals are … hard at work undermining what’s left of the U.S. dollar—by printing and distributing their own versions of American currency,” North wrote (emphasis ours throughout).
He’s not talking about U.S. dollars being forged by foreign gangs or Mafia bosses. This counterfeiting is part of a state-sponsored strategy designed to undermine and ruin the American economy.
“Counterfeiting another nation’s legal tender is not only a crime,” wrote North,
it is also an act of aggression. During World War ii, Adolf Hitler produced British bank notes to destabilize England. Mao Tse-tung used phony money to undermine Chiang Ka-shek’s Nationalist government through inflation. The Soviets created passable replicas of African, European and other monetary instruments to damage local economies. But no one has ever engaged in this kind of economic warfare against the United States on a scale—or as effectively—as is now being waged by the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran.
For more than five years remarkably accurate duplicates of U.S. $100 bills have been circulating overseas. Called “Supernotes” by our Treasury Department, Secret Service and fbi, they are printed on cotton-fiber paper using intaglio printing presses, the same type used by the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving. The source of these nearly flawless notes is hardly a secret.
On Jan. 26, 2006, in a White House press conference, President Bush asserted: “We are aggressively saying to the North Koreans … don’t counterfeit our money.” A Congressional Research Service Report two months later concluded that “at least $45 million in such Supernotes of North Korean origin have been detected in circulation, and estimates are that the country earns from $15 million to $25 million per year from counterfeiting.” Later that year, Hezbollah—a wholly owned subsidiary of the repressive regime in Tehran—began flooding Lebanon with Supernotes. Thanks to Iran and North Korea, there may be billions in “phony Franklins” floating around the world. The bills have also turned up here at home.
Just how some of them arrived on our shores was revealed a few days ago—when former undercover fbi Agent Bob Hamer took the witness stand in the Las Vegas courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge James Mahan. While the so-called mainstream media were preoccupied with presidential politics, the Wall Street meltdown and the O.J. Simpson trial across the street, Mr. Hamer—using audio and video recordings—revealed how two Chinese nationals and others plotted to smuggle anti-aircraft missiles, narcotics and counterfeit Supernotes into the United States. On the tapes, the Chinese conspirators describe how the false bills are manufactured in North Korea and distributed through the Russian Embassy in Beijing to Chinese organized-crime figures. One of them boasts of his ties to North Korea.
For some years, a dangerous trend has been accelerating: Many nations, organizations and individuals are working to pull America from its superpower perch—any way they can. Iran and North Korea’s undermining of the value of the U.S. dollar is typical of what is occurring in many arenas. Countries or groups that cannot overpower the U.S. militarily are using any levers at their disposal to weaken America.
Read “America in the Middle of the Pack” for more on the challenges the U.S. is increasingly facing as the post-American world takes shape and “War on America” to find out where this will lead. •
