“Did he give them a reason?”
“Yes. According to them, McHanna said that his management didn’t appreciate him and was about to fire him, which could lead to Saida’s losing her job as well. Therefore he thought that an attempt on his life would make it difficult for the company’s owners to get rid of him.”
“Did you buy that story? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?” grunted Hodson. “We’ve leads suggesting that Nikoukar Jafarzadeh was the Atashbon’s local muscle, and the shooting came as a warning to McHanna.”
“Why didn’t he take McHanna out?”
“We’ll investigate that. But personally I think that McHanna misread the Iranians. He was too valuable to them, his stealing notwithstanding. Money was not their problem at that point-you’ll soon hear why. McHanna was the only non-Iranian in the operation, and they didn’t trust him completely, but still needed a Yankee in the operation.”
“I guess they were right.” I scratched my head. “What about Reza Nazeri? He was pushed from the platform of a train to his death. Was McHanna involved?”
“McHanna confessed that he ordered his death as self-defense. Reza discovered that McHanna was stealing and threatened to turn him in.”
I wondered why Reza hadn’t just had McHanna quietly eliminated. Had he tried and failed?
“What about Nazeri’s apartment? I found it too clean.”
“We haven’t gotten to it yet, but I’m sure McHanna went there personally or sent Jafarzadeh.”
“So if we have sufficient evidence, why strike a deal?”
“McHanna told us these details in a proffer, with the understanding that there will be a plea bargain. Life without the possibility of parole. That’s a worse punishment than death.”
“What about the remaining members of Atashbon?”
“He said he has details on only six members.”
“Did he name them?”
“Yes. Kourosh, our Chameleon; Reza, aka Gonda, now deceased; and Arthur Jenkins, Timothy Williamson, Alec Simmons, Kevin DiAngelo, and Frank Gonzales. These names match the names of American men who went missing in the eighties. These six suspects changed these names to other American-sounding names immediately after they completed the first round of the scam operations. They simply used the good old throwaway cover: one alias was layered on top of another alias. That’s why we couldn’t find them- the string of aliases was abandoned, but the operatives remained here. They are all in custody. They claimed that they had severed their relationship with Iran a long time ago, and are now law-abiding citizens.”
“Though not, of course, of the U.S.” I said. “Do you believe them?”
He chuckled. “They’ll be indicted, and tried. If convicted, they’ll be deported after serving their sentences-that is, if they’re still living forty to sixty years from now. Oddly, or not so oddly, some of them claimed to be employees of a legitimate printing-press company. When we checked their story an interesting thing happened. In addition to their racketeering activity in defrauding banks and being covert operatives of Iran, they were operating a much bigger operation, which dwarfed the $300 million stolen from U.S. banks. We’re talking billions of dollars here. Three hundred million is a lot of money, but it cannot collapse the U.S. economy. But hundreds of billions could cause serious damage.”
“Billions? I saw no reference to it in the files.”
“There was no reference there,” said Hodson. “Together with U.S. Secret Ser vice we discovered that Atashbon members in the United States were running a printing press of counterfeit U.S. dollars. Iranian agents bought the printing machines from Germany and smuggled them to the U.S. in several shipments, using a front company run by Atashbon members. The sad thing is that Americans trained the Iranians to use these high-end printing presses.”
“You mean we trained them to print dollars?” asked Bob Holliday.
“Of course not,” said Hodson. “In the early 1970s the Shah of Iran asked the U.S. to help solve counterfeiting problems that threatened to undermine Iran’s currency. So we sent technical people from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to Tehran to improve the safety of the Iranian currency.”
“The balls on them!” said Casey Bauer. “We trained them. Now we discover that they had an incredible audacity. Years later these motherfuckers were intending to collapse the U.S. economy.”
“Good thing the hundred-dollar bill was redesigned,” I said.
“There are three types of forged dollars,” explained Hodson. “Two are rather primitive and easy to detect, but the third is a real piece of art. Common forgers use offset lithography, which prints dollars that lack the feel of real currency because the ink is flat, unlike the raised ink of genuine bills. Digital forgeries are very common because anyone with a scanner and high-quality printer or a copier can become a forger. But again, unless you use the fabric of genuine dollars, the notes printed are in fact Monopoly money, particularly when they all have the same serial number. But the Iranians managed to produce high-quality notes, using the same intaglio printing presses that the Bureau of Engraving does.”
“What’s intaglio?” asked Bob.
“A press that creates miniscule ridges on cotton-linen paper by forcing it at high pressure into the ink-filled grooves of an engraved plate. Now the outcome looks-and better yet, feels-like real currency,” answered Hodson, looking at his notes.
“How did they get over the biggest obstacle, the material used for U.S. currency?” asked Holliday.
“It’s difficult but not impossible,” said Hodson. “Currency paper is composed of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. Red and blue synthetic fibers of various lengths are distributed evenly throughout the paper. Governments can buy it freely, and we assume Iran had no problem acquiring it. We think they decided to print the currency in the U.S. because it’d be much easier to smuggle the fabric into the U.S. than the final product-bales of billions of forged U.S. dollars. Nonetheless, the Secret Ser vice is still investigating how the fabric entered the U.S. for the Iranians’ local printing needs.”
“The printing operation here was seized, and that’s what’s important,” concluded Casey.
Hodson nodded. “I must concede that we knew about the Iranian effort, but never made the connection to the Chameleon cases until we cracked them. As early as 1996 the General Accounting Office reported that a foreign government was sponsoring production of the ‘Superdollar’-a high-quality bill.”
“How did they distribute that volume?” asked Holliday. “You can get away with a few millions, not billions.”
“The operative word is slowly. We have evidence that bills printed in the U.S. were introduced into the circulation through their bogus charities and using criminal enterprises that usually launder drug money, to launder much bigger amounts. Some of the money printed in Iran was given to Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad to finance their operations, and they distributed it from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Soon enough, the money turned up in Hong Kong, Macao, South Korea, Russia, and Latin America.”
“Has anyone assessed the actual or potential damage to the U.S. economy?” I asked.
“There are only estimates,” said Hodson. “We have no numbers to mea sure the impact, but this counterfeiting is a clear form of economic warfare that could cause serious inflation in the U.S., and undermine the world market’s confidence in U.S. currency. Now we put the lid on it.”
I was curious to hear more about the ploy we used to infiltrate me into Iran. “Did the alumni hold the reunion after all?”
“Yes, we sent Erikka back to complete the arrangements. If the reunion plans were scrapped, a suspicion could arise about whether the plan was just a cover for your activities. We wanted to keep that part of your mission clean.”