Norks try to print as much US currency as Obama

Independent:

In October of 1997, a white-haired 63-year old Irishman named Sean Garland paid a visit to Moscow in the company of an acquaintance subsequently identified only by the initials "JM". Garland was a self-proclaimed Marxist who dressed like a professor and served as head of a far-left faction called the Irish Workers Party that had never elected a single one of its members to any mainstream political body. Garland's first visit to Moscow was followed by three return trips in the first half of 1998, made in the company of known criminals from Dublin and Birmingham.

Garland's pilgrimage to Moscow made little ideological sense, since Boris Yeltsin had turned the former Soviet Union from a communist state into heaven on earth for gangsters of all nationalities - and the company that Garland kept made observers wonder about the true purpose of his visits. In addition to his career in leftist fringe politics, Garland was a lifelong terrorist who had personally engaged in deadly attacks on British soldiers and police in Northern Ireland since the 1950s, and whose exploits were said to have inspired Tom Clancy's novel Patriot Games. As the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) entered into fitful negotiations with Protestant groups in the 1990s, Garland served as chief of staff for "the Official IRA" or OIRA, which rejected the idea of a peace deal in favour of the continuation of bombings, bank robberies and other politically-motivated crimes.

Garland's odd itinerary in Moscow, which included several visits to the North Korean embassy, held the key to a mystery that had baffled British criminal investigators and the US Secret Service since the early 1990s, when counterfeit US $100 bills of exceptional quality had flooded Dublin. The fakes were so good as to be undetectable by the advanced bill-checking machines used by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, and local businesses and banks in Dublin stopped accepting $100 bills as legal tender. An Irish counterfeit dealer named Hugh Todd was arrested in 1994 with a large bundle of fakes, and more arrests followed as the bills continued to circulate throughout Europe and the Middle East in the most sustained, deliberate destructive attack on the US currency on record. The source of the near-perfect fakes, which soon became known as the "supernote", remained a mystery.

The existence of the supernote came to the notice of Western governments just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in December 1989, when a money handler at Central Bank of the Philippines became suspicious of a banknote that passed all the usual tests but still felt odd. The note, a $100 bill supposedly printed in the year 1988, made its way to Yoshihide Matsumura, a Japanese currency expert whose machines for detecting fake bills are among the most advanced in the business. The bill was an astoundingly accurate fake, Matsumura decided, the best that he had ever seen - yet it did not show any of the characteristics of the advanced fakes that he had encountered from Japan and Russia.

Like the real $100 bills, the fake was printed on paper that was made of three-quarters cotton and one-quarter linen fibres, which is manufactured for the US government using specialised machinery by Crane & Co, the stationary company. The images are then stamped on the paper using an intaglio press - a piece of specialised printing machinery so heavy and expensive that only governments normally own them. The fake made its way to the headquarters of the Secret Service in Washington, D C, where it was compared to the agency's master file of 20,000 examples of forged US currency. The bill was assigned the identifying numeric C-14342, the letter "C" indicating that it was a circular, or the first in what was expected to be a series of high-quality forgeries from a single source.

Bills from the same series turned up a year later in Lebanon's Bekka Valley, leading to suspicion that the supernote was being printed in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which needed foreign currency to fund an estimated $100 million a year in donations to Hezbollah and other terrorist organisations - who, as it happened, were being trained in bomb-making in Lebanon by Sean Garland. Intelligence analysts noted that Iran had taken delivery of two intaglio printing presses shortly before the fall of the Shah, who had sent a team of 20 master engravers to be trained by the Federal Bureau of Engraving in the US.

...

Where circumstantial evidence about the source of the supernote had originally pointed towards the Shah's intaglio presses and US-trained engravers now under the control of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Secret Service was eventually forced to start looking elsewhere. In 1994, executives of a North Korean trading company carrying diplomatic passports were arrested for depositing $250,000 in supernotes in a bank in Macao. Similar incidents involving a weird assortment of diplomats, terrorists and criminals with ties to North Korea followed. In January 1996, a middle-aged Japanese man approached a money changer in the beach resort of Pattaya, Thailand and gave him 90 crisp US $100 bills in exchange for 225,000 baht. The bills were fake, and were soon traced to Yoshimi Tan-aka - a Japanese Red Army terrorist who had disappeared inside North Korea in 1970. Tanaka fled to Cambodia and took refuge in the North Korean embassy in Phnom Penh. He was later apprehended at the Vietnamese border in an embassy Mercedes after trying to bribe a border guard with $10,000 in $100 bills, which the guard wisely refused - they were probably counterfeit.

The revamped $100 bill, unveiled in 1996, featured a new engraving by the artist Tom Hipschen, who gave Franklin an enigmatic look that recalled the half-smile on the face of the Mona Lisa, and drew attention to the portrait. Microprinted in Franklin's lapel were the words "United States of America", a phrase that was also microprinted inside one of the numbers on the bill, which were printed in colour-shifting OVI ink. Concentric lines in the oval surrounding the portrait were designed to create interference when scanned by a laser. Red and blue fibres were embedded in the paper, along with other safety features designed to protect the banknote from forgers. Tiny security threads that repeated the denomination of each bill were embedded in the paper to prevent counterfeiters from washing off the ink and turning dollar bills into hundreds - a favourite trick of Columbian counterfeiters. Within two years, all of these features would be successfully copied in the "big head" incarnation of the supernote, which turned up in London first and was called C-21555 by the Secret Service.

By the late 1990s, nearly all available evidence pointed to North Korea as the source of the supernote: Sean Garland's trips to Moscow were made for the purpose of picking up a new supernote that precisely replicated the safety features of the redesigned US currency. By the time Garland was arrested on 7 October 2005, in a hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland, it was estimated that he and his associates had passed $28m in redesigned supernotes produced inside North Korea. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Garland's network, while sizeable, distributed only a tiny fraction of the supernotes still in circulation. At least $45m in North Korean supernotes have been detected in circulation, out of an estimated production of bills with a face value of $45-$75m per year.

According to people who regularly handled the bills, the North Korean fakes are so good and are updated with such regularity that the best way to tell that they are fakes is their superior quality....

...

There is much more.

It is interesting to find that the North Koreans are good at something besides abusing their own people and threatening the rest of the world with annihilation. Adding this to their drug smuggling and sale of weapons to terror states and you should be able to make a good RICO case against the North Korean government. Perhaps someone should suggest that to the Justice Department.