Pyongyang: 'CIA is Printing Supernotes; America Blames Us'

Is it the Central Intelligence Agency rather that the Kim Jong-il regime, that is counterfeiting American currency? According to this commentary from North Korea's tightly controlled Korean Central News Agency, a recent article from one of Germany's leading newspapers proves Pyongyang's innocence, and shows that the United States is the one doing most of the world's counterfeiting.

January 17, 2007

North Korea - Korean News - Home Page (English)    

Pyongyang: A recent report suggesting that the United States is a center for the global counterfeiting problem has sparked a great furor. Based on the results of a multi-year study by counterfeit note experts in Europe and Asia and the testimony of people familiar with printing press manufacturers, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reports that the CIA is responsible for issuing counterfeit notes produced in a secret facility in the suburbs of Washington D.C. The newspaper asserts that North Korea is incapable of counterfeiting the so-called "Supernotes," and that the production of these notes - which the U.S. holds the DPRK responsible for - may well have been issued in massive quantities, by a U.S. intelligence agency to fund its clandestine operations.

[Editor's Note: The article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, which has made a tremendous splash around the world, reports that for many years, there has been a "rumor" in the high-security printing industry and amongst counterfeiting investigators that, "it is the American CIA that prints the Supernotes at a secret printing facility "].

The international community is responding to this assertion with discretion, since the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung is widely known as a serious and impartial newspaper, and the author of the article [Klaus W. Bender] is well versed in this particular field.

So it seems the problems of "forged notes" and "illicit dealings" originate from the U.S. The much-touted official U.S. story about these "counterfeit notes" is therefore nothing but a fabrication, which is aimed at implementing America's hostile policy toward the DPRK.

As already reported, the U.S. Secret Service seized 499 counterfeit production plants and $46.5 million in counterfeit currency in just one year [2004] . The Internet Web site "Conspiracy Planet" carried an article on April 26, 2006 in which it was stated that U.S. banks launder illicit funds amounting to $500 billion every year - and that without this injection of illicit funds, the U.S. economy would have gone bankrupt long ago. In the United States, financial deficits amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars are believed to have been offset by the "laundered" circulation of such "dirty" money.

This being a solid fact, it is preposterous for the United States to bandy about accusations that Supernote counterfeiting is taking place in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The U.S. raised the counterfeiting issue as talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula reached the stage of "words for words and action for action," and in the wake of the adoption of the September 19 [2005] joint statement ." It was against this backdrop that Washington was compelled to retreat on its hostile policy toward the DPRK.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate on April 6, 2006 , Stuart Levey (Under Secretary of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence) indicated that the authority of the U.S. Treasury Department provides one of the few means of leverage - aside from military power - that the United States can use to confront foreign "threats" that refuse to yield to diplomatic pressure. This admission reveals that the story about "forged notes" is merely a way to pressure the DPRK.

The U.S. has failed to produce even a shred of scientific evidence to prove DPRK counterfeiting. This is why the U.S. was censured and jeered by the international community at a meeting of the International Criminal Police Organization in Washington last July.

[Editor's Note: According to a report from the Dusseldorf Institute for Foreign and Security Policy, "at the end of the one-day conference, to which even specialists from the United States had been flown in, not one single conference participant was fully convinced of the American viewpoint ... Some were even making jokes ]."

A realistic assessment clearly demonstrates that the anti-DPRK smear campaign over the "counterfeit notes" has been created, orchestrated, and staged by the United States. The counterfeiting row is altogether of America's own making.

The U.S. had better drop the curtain on this clumsy farce.