Admiral Raymond was regarded in the community as a real-deal SEAL who still went out and did PT with his SEAL platoons. He’d picked up flag rank by accomplishing the missions during the Gulf War and not killing any SEALs in the process, something his predecessors hadn’t managed to do in either Panama or Grenada. He greeted Murdock with a warm handshake. “A hell of a job in Port Sudan, Blake. And you make sure you tell all your boys I said so.”
Murdock had never met the man before, but he immediately felt like going out and killing someone for him. “Thank you, sir, I’ll be sure to.”
Commodore Harkins, on the other hand, was widely regarded as just another staff pony. He gave Murdock a stiff handshake, and said, “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant.”
“Good to meet you, sir,” Murdock replied formally.
Commander Masciarelli, a little unhinged by the unusual circumstances and the presence of all the brass, shot Murdock a somewhat frantic look that said sit the fuck down and keep quiet.
The admiral gave the CIA men a nod that he was ready. Don Stroh, who had worked with Murdock on Port Sudan, stood up and moved to the podium at the front of the room.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m Don Stroh from the Central Intelligence Agency Covert Action Staff. This briefing is classified Top Secret Cable Crane. Need to know does not extend beyond this room without the personal authorization of the Director of Central Intelligence.”
Jeez, Murdock thought. He knew the code word classification didn’t mean anything in itself — some computer had vomited it up at random. What was important was that he was sitting in on it in the midst of all the brass.
Then Stroh froze him in place with his next words. “For the benefit of Lieutenant Murdock, who missed the preliminary meeting, I’ll introduce everyone.” He gestured to his CIA cohorts. “Mr. Hamilton Whitbread is the Director of Covert Action Staff. Mr. Gene Berlinger is the Director of Special Activities Operations. You know Paul Kohler.”
The first two were big boys, thought Murdock, almost deputy director level — Special Operations and Covert Action, the people he’d been working for lately. Kohler had worked with Stroh on Port Sudan.
“And from the Secret Service, Deputy Director Jim Capezzi and Special Agent Dennis Flaherty.”
The Secret Service? Murdock couldn’t figure it out. Unless maybe some bad guys were planning to kill the President and needed to be taken out. His palms started itching again.
Then Stroh said, “Since this briefing is directly related to Operation Granite Ghost, Lieutenant Murdock’s raid on Port Sudan, I’d like to begin by extending him the Agency’s congratulations on a job well done. Video and document analysis, along with communications intercepts, confirmed that the target four-man cell was accounted for in the villa, along with a number of significant high-level personnel of the group involved. The adversary has no idea what happened, or even if any non-Sudanese external force was responsible. From other documents recovered, preliminary indications are that the raid derailed at least five other future terrorist operations. Well done, Blake.”
To Murdock’s utter embarrassment, Stroh began clapping, and everyone else in the room must have felt they had to join in.
Stroh continued. “Since our main focus today is the money recovered by Lieutenant Murdock in the Sudan, I’ll let Denny Flaherty give us the background.”
Murdock knew it. He just knew that damned three million was going to come back and bite him in the ass one day. That was why he kept the receipt in his safety deposit box. Let them try what they wanted. He was covered. He’d tell the admiral that himself.
This small-scale internal emotional episode was cut off by Special Agent Flaherty, a beefy Irishman with a pronounced Boston accent. Boston College, Boston College Law School, Murdock thought.
Flaherty wasn’t much for bullshitting around. He clicked on a slide projector to display a blowup of a one-hundred-dollar bill. “Gentlemen,” he stated, “the entire three million dollars discovered in Port Sudan was counterfeit.”
That stunned Blake Murdock, since he’d personally counted the money at least three times and it had all seemed genuine to him.
“Are you familiar with the Supernote?” Flaherty asked.
Murdock looked around. Everyone else was looking at him, so he shook his head no.
“In 1992,” said Flaherty, “two Lebanese-born drug traffickers got caught trying to bring three tons of hashish from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon through Boston Harbor. They were looking at thirty years mandatory, so they asked the federal prosecutor if he’d be interested in high-quality hundred-dollar counterfeits being printed in Lebanon. He was. They turned the bills over, and the U.S. Attorney passed them on to Secret Service.
“These bills,” said Flaherty, “were close to perfect. Our top technical analyst, who had examined every counterfeit ever produced, called them genuine. On a second viewing, he picked out three tiny imperfections which are now our only way of identifying this note, which we named the Supernote. It’s also been called the Super 100.”
Murdock checked around the room. Everyone else was just listening dispassionately.
Flaherty continued. “The Federal Reserve uses some extremely sensitive scanners to screen all the currency that comes through each of the twelve Fed Banks. The black ink on our notes is magnetic, and the scanners read the magnetic field down the center line of the portrait. The scanners are so precise that a thousand genuine hundred-dollar bills are rejected for every one that’s later found to be a counterfeit. Gentlemen, the Supernote passes right through the scanners.
“The vast majority of counterfeits we run into are printed on offset presses, the same way books and magazines are produced. They feel flat, wrong. To get around the problem of the paper, counterfeiters bleach one-dollar bills and use them to print counterfeit hundreds. That’s very big in Colombia and Thailand right now.
“But the Supernote is printed using the intaglio process, exactly the same way the U.S. Mint makes legitimate currency. An engraved plate is slammed onto paper, which gives the bills their distinctive feel. The Supernotes have sequential serial numbers, just like the real thing. The paper used in the Supernote is an almost exact duplicate of the paper produced for the U.S. Government.”
Then Flaherty went on to answer the question that had just popped into Murdock’s mind. “None of our paper is missing,” he said. “Crane & Company have been making it for the government since 1879, and none of it has gotten away from them. The Supernote paper is a perfectly manufactured copy. And incidentally, we’re not missing any printing plates either.
“We subsequently discovered that these bills had been circulating in Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, and Russia since the early 1990’s, but with very few showing up here.”
“I’ll take it now,” said a smoother voice from around the table.
Flaherty paused. “Gentlemen, Director Capezzi.”
This was the first briefing that Murdock had ever been to where none of the higher-ups asked a bunch of dumb-ass questions just to show everyone how well informed they were. Then he realized, to his horror, that they had all heard this before. That the briefing was for him. Oh, shit, where was this heading?
Capezzi was a little smoother than Flaherty, but just as blunt. “There are now nearly four hundred billion dollars worth of U.S. paper money in existence,” Capezzi told them. “Of that, around two hundred and fifty billion is in foreign hands. If their own currency is unstable or inflationary, people like to have dollars. And every hundred-dollar bill that a Russian sticks in his mattress is an interest-free loan to the U.S. Treasury, an amount of money that we would otherwise have to obtain by issuing interest-bearing bonds. It saves us twenty-five billion dollars a year in interest, based on what’s out there right now. And if these loans in the form of currency stay in the mattress and are never called in, that’s even more money in the bank for the U.S. Treasury.
“Ironically enough, in the past few years in which we’ve become aware
of the Supernote, our main obstacle in combating it has been our superiors in the Treasury Department. The total money supply consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in currency, the amount in wire, check, and credit card transactions runs into the tens of trillions. So Treasury doesn’t bother itself much with cash. And the bottom line is that for the last five years Treasury has felt that any public acknowledgment of the problem of the Supernote would risk a loss of confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency overseas.”
In his devious SEAL brain, Murdock was starting to figure out why there were no high-level officials from the Treasury in the room. Had the Secret Service gone over the heads of their bosses, or just around them to the CIA?
“Unfortunately,” said Capezzi, “we are now beginning to see just such a loss of confidence. The Russian Central Bank estimates that Russians hold twenty billion dollars of U.S. currency, and that up to twenty percent of that may be Supernotes. In Germany banks will not accept one-hundred-dollar bills from Russian citizens. British, Irish, Greek, and Hong Kong banks are increasingly reluctant to exchange hundred-dollar bills from anyone, period.
“The Secret Service has always been aware that the hundred-dollar bill is most commonly under attack by counterfeiters. We also feel that the unchanging design of our currency has been advantageous to counterfeiters. On the other hand,” Capezzi said wryly, “Treasury feels that the consistent appearance of the currency symbolizes its stability. In the 1980’s Secret Service became concerned about the threat posed by color copying machines and laser printers. But by 1986, all we could get Treasury to agree to was the addition of a polymer thread in the paper and microprinting around the portrait of the hundred-dollar bill. It took Crane & Company until 1990 to master the polymer thread. By then the Supernote also contained the polymer thread and microprinting.”
The implication blew Murdock away. Someone was better at counterfeiting U.S. currency than the U.S. Government was at producing it.
“I’m sure you’re all aware of the recent decision to redesign the hundred-dollar bill,” said Capezzi. “I can tell you that this was in direct response to the Supernote. Secret Service wanted holograms, chemical markers, and multiple colors. Australia has a note made of flexible plastic, which is both durable and counterfeit resistant. What we’re getting is a larger portrait moved off from the center of the bill, a section of ink that changes color from green to black as the bill is moved, and a watermark. The colors will still be green and black. Our perspective is that this may buy us a little time. However, Treasury refuses to recall the old hundreds, feeling that market preference will cause rapid exchange of the old bills. We estimate that replacement will take years. During that time production of the Supernote will continue, and they will continue to be passed.”
Capezzi sat down, and Don Stroh of the CIA replaced him at the podium.
“According to our information,” said Stroh, “this counterfeiting operation began in Lebanon in the 1970’s, during the civil war. The Christian Phalangists hired professional engravers to make hundred-dollar-bill plates. They printed them on bleached one-dollar bills. The notes weren’t very good, but were successfully used to buy small arms in the Warsaw Pact countries. When Syria occupied Lebanon, which they continue to do to this day, they took over the counterfeiting operation. The Supernote plates have been continually refined and updated, year after year, until they have reached their present level of excellence. We have reports that expert engravers formerly employed by the East German Stasi were brought in to perform the work.
“After Syria allied itself with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s, we believe they invited the Iranians into the counterfeiting operation. With this the scale and sophistication increased, since Iran’s oil money was able to buy a great deal more expertise.
“According to our information, Iranian industry has been responsible for reverse-engineering an almost exact duplicate of our currency paper.
“We believe that at one time the printing component of the operation was located within a secure building at the Iranian national mint complex in Teheran. They utilized two intaglio presses, functionally identical to the ones our own mint uses, purchased from a Swiss company.
“When this information came to light, the U.S. government approached the Iranian government through back channels and demanded that the counterfeiting operation cease. We informed the Iranians that we regarded it as an act of war.
“The Iranians publicly called the allegation, quote, wild hallucinations of the American extreme right, unquote. Our information now is that the entire counterfeiting operation has been consolidated within Lebanon. This allows both Iran and Syria to deny all responsibility for it.
“Our Secretary of State has brought the problem of the Supernote to the Syrian President directly.” Stroh smirked. “As we might have expected, he knows nothing about it. We weren’t too surprised, since the President’s brother and Syrian Air Force intelligence also run opium, heroin, and hashish production in the Bekaa Valley and use the money to finance their operations. The Supernote moves out of Lebanon along the drug routes.
“These counterfeits,” said Stroh, “are not the result of a simple and limited criminal enterprise. Rather, they are our worst nightmare — the products of a large-scale, concerted industrial effort by hostile governments. We are convinced that Syria and Iran’s long-term objective in producing the Supernote is economic terrorism — a direct attack on the monetary system of the United States.
“We believe the following are Syria and Iran’s immediate but secondary objectives.
“To compensate for the cutoff of economic and military aid which followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.
“To compensate for the failings of the Syrian and Iranian national economies.
“As demonstrated by Port Sudan, to provide a source of funding for Islamic terrorist groups.
“But we believe that Iran and Syria’s primary goal, as demonstrated by the huge numbers of Supernotes in the Russian Republic and former Soviet Republics, is to obtain nuclear weapons technology, nuclear materials, and most likely nuclear weapons themselves. In a development that we view as highly alarming, several North Korean intelligence operatives were recently apprehended in Hong Kong attempting to pass half a million dollars in Supernotes.”
The room fell silent, and Murdock felt it was time for him to ask a question. “Do we have any idea how many Supernotes have been produced?”
“Perhaps two billion dollars a year,” said Stroh. “Perhaps more.”
If you couldn’t buy a nuke with that, Murdock thought, you couldn’t buy a nuke. And the North Koreans and Iranians were among those known to be hard at work trying to make them.
Stroh clicked the slide projector. It displayed an aerial photograph, overhead imagery of a town. The detail was such that it had to have come from either a KH11 or KH12 spy satellite.
“Baalbek, Lebanon,” said Stroh. He flicked out a high-speed laser pointer and threw a red dot on the screen. “This is the warehouse where the Supernote is now produced. It is right in the middle of town. As you know, gentlemen, Baalbek is the headquarters for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard presence in Lebanon. We estimate a minimum of four hundred combat-ready Revolutionary Guards and perhaps the same number of Hezbollah militia in Baalbek at any one time. The warehouse is also guarded by elements of a commando battalion from Syrian Army Special Forces Division Number 14.”
Stroh paused. “We would like Lieutenant Murdock and his platoon to go in and take out that warehouse.”
Just like the E.F. Hutton commercial, all eyes in the room were locked onto Blake Murdock. For his part, he had a quick mental picture of himself turning slowly on a spit over a cheery fire. With an apple in his mouth.
7
Monday, September 4
1550 hours Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, California
Everyone seemed to be waiting for him to say something, so Murdock decided to take the bull by the h
orns. “I appreciate your confidence in my platoon,” he said. “But I think first of all I need to know just exactly what you want me to do.”
“Fair enough,” said Stroh. “That warehouse has to be completely destroyed. The presses, the chemicals, whatever stockpiles of paper and finished bills are there. And the plates for the Supernotes. The plates absolutely have to be destroyed.”
“Then it seems to me,” said Murdock, “that the easiest way to go about that would be with one or two F117 Stealth fighters and several laser-guided bombs.”
“That would be our first choice also,” said Stroh. “But with every country in the Middle East currently engaged in peace talks, the U.S. can’t precipitate an act of war with Syria. The Syrians know that perfectly well, of course, and have been using it to get away with murder for years. It’s also why we have to hit them right now, because once they sign a peace treaty they’ll be untouchable. And for all those reasons, the guidance we’ve received for this mission requires that it be entirely covert.”
Murdock was well used to such typical governmental hypocrisy. When the Israelis had dumped the intelligence about the terrorist cell in Port Sudan into the CIA’s lap, the Agency had had trouble deciding what to do.
There were no photos of the terrorists, just physical descriptions, and if the terrorists got out of the Sudan they could change identities and modes of transport a dozen times, and it would be only too easy for the intelligence community to lose track of them.
The solution was clear, but the sticking point was Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4th, 1981. It stated, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
As an example of classic American naivete, the executive order was unsurpassed. The assumption was that it was better to launch multimillion dollar air strikes against Libya, dropping thousands of tons of bombs and killing perhaps hundreds of innocent people, than it was to blow Colonel Khadaffi’s head off his shoulders with one well-aimed round. The invasion of Panama and the post-Gulf War Tomahawk missile strikes against Iraq were further examples of the order’s consequences.
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