Police were alarmed by the quantity and quality of the cash. American hundred-dollar bills are the currency of choice in many commercial centers outside the United States, especially those where the law is lax or the local money is threatened by rampant inflation. Unlike most counterfeits, these bills were eerily good copies of the real thing – engraved almost perfectly on the same paper used by the United States (chart). When police followed the chain of evidence, they made another shocking discovery. They said the ringleader of the money-passing operation was Yoshimi Tanaka, 47, a former Japanese Red Army terrorist. Tanaka’s whereabouts had been a mystery since 1970, when he and eight other radicals hijacked a Japanese airliner and sought asylum in North Korea.
Tanaka was run to earth in Cambodia last March, after a car chase worthy of O. J. Simpson. Extradited to Thailand, he is scheduled to go on trial next week, charged with ““possession and use of counterfeit dollars.’’ According to Cambodian, Thai and South Korean investigators, Tanaka was part of an elaborate counterfeiting and money-laundering racket sponsored by the North Korean government in an effort to transfuse some cash into the foundering economy of the world’s last Stalinist state.
High-quality counterfeit supernotes are thought to be produced in several countries; Iran, Syria and Russia are frequently named as suspected (though not proven) sources. But there was something different about the bills Tanaka is accused of passing. ““These supernotes do not show any of the characteristics of the ones that were made in Iran and Russia,’’ says a Japanese currency expert named Yoshihide Matsumura, who manufactures a machine that detects counterfeit bills. ““Judging by all the supporting evidence, they are most likely made in North Korea.''
Tanaka denies any wrongdoing. ““The charge is a total frame-up, an American conspiracy,’’ a supporter quoted him as saying. North Korea says it is not in the counterfeiting business. Even the U.S. government denies, for the record, that it can pin a counterfeiting charge on North Korea. ““We have no hard evidence that a counterfeiting plant of high-quality U.S. currency is in North Korea,’’ says Dennis Lynch of the U.S. Secret Service, which investigates funny money. In fact, with the credibility of its currency at stake, Washington insists that counterfeiting by anyone is not a major problem. But the fact that it is introducing a redesigned $100 bill – with new paper, ink and engraving techniques to foil forgers – suggests that Washington is more worried about counterfeiting than it lets on.
According to investigative sources and North Korean defectors, the forgeries – known in Japan as ““Super K’’ bills – are produced at a secret plant in downtown Pyongyang, and some are shipped abroad in diplomatic bags. When Cambodian police and Secret Service agents began to close inon him last March, Tanaka took refuge at the North Korean Embassy in Phnom Penh. Then he made a break for it, riding in an embassy Mercedes toward the Vietnamese border. A frontier guard, who had been warned about Tanaka by Cambodian and U.S. officials only the day before, stopped the car and turned down a $10,000 bribe to let it through. After a long standoff, the Mercedes went back to Phnom Penh, surrounded by Cambodian troops and vehicles, and Tanaka was arrested.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury continues to roll out its new $100 bill. In less than three years, 70 percent of the C-notes in circulation should be new ones. But the new bills are not counterfeit-proof. Matsumura says he expects to see good copies in Asia within a few months. U.S. currency is easy to copy, he contends, and is made so sloppily that the best counterfeiters have to ““lower their quality’’ in order to duplicate it. Where the world’s most popular currency is concerned, something worth doing is worth doing badly.
In this counterfeit bill, allegedly printed in North Korea and seized by investigators in Asia, the defects are so minuscule that only an expert, or an ultra-sensitive scanning machine, can spot them.
The new bill contains a buried polymer thread, a watermark that is visible when held to the light and a number that looks green from one angle and black from another. Tiny words are microprinted onto Franklin’s coat and the “100” at lower left.
