Have you ever looked closely at one of the new 20, 50 or 100 dollar notes and wondered why it was necessary for the U.S. Treasury to redesign the venerable old “Greenback”? Well, the answer is simple.
Years before Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization took up arms against America, the governments of Syria and Iran were waging their own clandestine war against the United States. It was, and is, a war that uses high technology, diplomacy and deception to conceal a range of criminal activities intended to destabilize the U.S. financial system and wreak havoc on the American economy.
Chief among these activities is the counterfeiting of U.S. currency. According to research conducted by the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare as early as 1992, Iran and Syria together may be responsible for the printing and disseminating of billions of dollars in illegal currency, principally in high-denomination notes.
The U.S. Secret Service maintains an active investigation into this alleged counterfeiting operation, as well as a number of other state-backed operations taking place around the globe. Today, government officials suspect North Korea has joined this exclusive club, producing not only high-grade American currency, but also notes belonging to many other of the world’s richest countries as well.
These “superdollars,” as they are known, first came into circulation around 1990. They are virtually indistinguishable from authentic U.S. notes and are only detectable by the most sophisticated means. In recent years, they have flooded the world alongside the poorer quality “printer notes,” or “P-notes” for short. According to some estimates, up to one fifth of the banknotes in Russia, principally dollars and rubles, may be forged.
Congressional investigators suspect that counterfeiting has provided Iran and Syria with some of the resources needed to carry out a variety of criminal enterprises, from money laundering and drug trafficking to smuggling and the acquisition of black-market weapons.
Of immediate concern to U.S. law enforcement is the belief that rogue governments may be using counterfeit currency to equip, train and sustain anti-Western terrorist organizations around the world. Additionally, they also are believed to be using superdollars to finance imports and settle their balance of payments accounts.
The implications for U.S. national security are clear: Counterfeit currency affects the money supply and shakes public confidence in the value of the dollar. It may distort trade and facilitate criminal transactions.
And though the amount of counterfeit dollars is relatively small, it can impose a cost to the U.S. banking system as well as pose a challenge to the nation’s foreign policy. According to one government estimate, of the $200 billion in currency now in circulation, approximately .03 of 1 percent may be counterfeit.
These facts alone should disqualify Syria and Iran from participation in the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism. Sadly, however, they do not.
Instead, our country is rushing to embrace two governments that are at the center of a conspiracy to harm the very fabric of our nation.
What anthrax spores are to biological terrorism, counterfeit currency is to economic terrorism. Both are the work of the same criminal networks that stretch across the Arab-Islamic world and into the Far East. Both must be eradicated as part of the U.S.-led war against terrorism and its infrastructure.
In the words of Dan Snow, special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Service Counterfeit Division, “where you find terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activities emanating from the Middle East you often will encounter counterfeit currency as well.”
It is bad enough that the White House promised to reexamine the placement of Damascus and Tehran on the U.S. list of terrorist sponsors. But the administration has gone so far as to offer weapons and foreign aid in exchange for their cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
The White House even remained neutral as Syria was elected this month to a 2-year term as a non-permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. No doubt the regime will use this perch and its new-found international legitimacy to obstruct U.S. efforts to crack down on Syrian criminal activities.
Experts in counterfeiting trace the upsurge in the counterfeiting problem to 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The revolutionary Islamic government that seized control of the country inherited the rare intaglio offset presses used in the production of high-grade official currency. The presses had only just been imported from the U.S. by the Shah.
Until the U.S. recently revamped its currency, Tehran was able to print nearly perfect U.S. notes. The currency found its way into circulation through Syria and a network of drug traffickers and criminal syndicates operating in Lebanon. There Syrian intelligence, and the underground terrorist cells it controls, are believed to have taken advantage of the ready supply of foreign exchange.
A British parliamentary study gives credence to this view, reporting that by the mid-1990s, Lebanese authorities estimated that perhaps $2 billion in counterfeit banknotes were circulating in their country. Most of these were forged U.S. dollars, circulated by Shia Muslim fundamentalists at the behest of Iran and Syria.
In recent years, the U.S. government appears to have shown little interest in aggressively pursuing counterfeiting emanating from the Middle East. As long as the Clinton administration felt it could draw Syria into the Middle East peace process, the White House was reluctant to disturb its delicate relationship with Damascus with accusations of counterfeiting.
The Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. should have changed all of that. Apparently, it has not. For the moment, at least, government concerns over Syrian and Iranian counterfeiting seem to have been sidelined.
This is short-sighted. The massive forging of U.S. currency is both an act of war on America and its own form of terrorism. Those who have targeted our country’s economy should be dealt a similar fate to that being meted out against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
Swift and decisive punishment is the only way to address this menace and in the process strike a blow at both the illegal drug trade and the arms trade as well.
The president and his advisers would do well to ponder how much worse our nation’s problems will become if Iran and Syria are allowed to continue their covert attack on America. With time, money and a lot of effort, we can rebuild the structures destroyed on Sept. 11. It will be a far more difficult task to restore public confidence in the U.S. dollar if it is shaken by massive and unchecked counterfeiting.
As Washington peels back the onion on international terrorism, it is important that we recognize the role that banknote counterfeiting plays in building and maintaining a terrorist infrastructure. Though the U.S. has made great strides in protecting its currency in recent years, the threat remains. Look hard enough and we may discover that many of the state sponsors of international terrorism are also the manufacturers, distributors and/or beneficiaries of banknote counterfeiting. This is yet another battle they cannot be allowed to win.
Rand Fishbein, Ph.D., is president of Fishbein Associates, Inc., a public-policy consulting firm based in Potomac, Maryland. He is a former professional staff member (majority) of both the U.S. Senate Defense Appropriations and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittees. Dr. Fishbein also served as a Foreign Policy/Intelligence Analyst on the Senate Iran-Contra Investigating Committee and as special assistant for National Security Affairs to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii. Dr. Fishbein received his Ph.D. from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.
