Sounding a false note
William Leith
CURRENCY WARS: FORGING MONEY TO BREAK ECONOMIES by John K. Cooley Constable, £18.99, pp. 350, ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45p&p) 0870 429 6655 In this book John K. Cooley, who has spent a lifetime writing about international intrigue, investigates the subject of forgery. More specifically, he looks at the way people have tried to use forgery as a way of waging war or seizing power. It seems like a terribly dry subject at first — lots of stuff about currency and exchange rates and the gold standard. You need to concentrate. But it’s a fascinating subject, and by the end, this book really made me think.
First of all, I had the impression that counterfeit money is quite a rare thing. Not so, says Cooley. As long as currency has existed, people have been forging it. For instance, early pilgrim settlers in America traded with native Americans in their currency of seashells. Dark clamshells were worth twice as much as the white shells of periwinkles. But both sides began to cheat. The settlers made fake shells from porcelain, and the native Americans used dye made from berries. After a while, everybody lost faith in the currency, and it collapsed.
Forgery exists wherever you look in history. Whatever the currency, people will be hard at work, somewhere, trying to copy it. Ancient Greeks and Romans clipped bits out of coins and melted them down. Then came paper money, which can be easy to forge, given the right technology. Right now, says Cooley, the world is awash with ‘Supernotes’ — US dollars forged so expertly they pass muster even when banks check them. ‘No detection device is perfect,’ says a banknote inspector interviewed by Cooley. And sometimes, ‘a genuine note is given a bad reading because of dirt, tearing, or other acquired imperfections’. So the whole thing is a grey area. And when forgeries exist, neither the forgers nor the authorities want to publicise the fact. Cooley’s main focus is the use of counterfeit money as a weapon. The idea is that, if you print your enemy’s money, and release it into the system, you will destabilise his economy by causing inflation. Just about everybody does this. Hitler did it. Stalin did it. William Pitt did it, to damage both the American and French currencies. The British tried to ruin the Kaiser in the first world war. The CIA did it to Castro. A crook called Alves Reis almost seized control of Portugal as recently as the 1930s by forging money. And the North Koreans and Iranians are supposedly printing dollars, possibly millions of them, as we speak.
Probably the best known effort to use counterfeit money as a weapon was Hitler’s attempt to damage sterling in the war. Cooley tells this story well; if you’ve seen the recent movie The Counterfeiters, this account adds to the story rather nicely. The scheme was invented by an SS officer called Alfred Naujocks, a master of dirty tricks, who wanted the Luftwaffe to drop a billion fake pounds over the British Isles. He reckoned that, even if some people handed the notes they found to the authorities, plenty of others would spend them, causing food shortages and general mayhem.
The scheme never quite worked, partly because, after the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe lost control of the skies over the channel, and couldn’t spare the planes. Later, famously, the Nazis recruited Jewish printers from concentration camps, who made fake money, and then sabotaged their own efforts, in a special section of the Sachsenhausen camp. The scheme was halted in 1945 as the Allies approached.
In the end, Cooley says, counterfeiting is not as good a weapon as one might imagine. ‘Indeed,’ he says, ‘a majority of the players of false currency games have lost their wars.’ Why? There must, I think, be at least three reasons why this appears to be true. First, it is close to impossible, by stealth, to inject enough fake paper money into an economy to ruin it. Second, if you are faking your enemy’s currency, the chances are that he is faking yours. And third, the idea that counterfeiting is not a good weapon can only be a supposition — for obvious reasons, war crimes, including forgery, are always more visible on the losing side. You never really get to know what the winners did. But even if this is an impossibly murky area, full of difficult detail, it is still an impressive piece of research. I shall look out for Cooley’s other books.
In Peregrine Worsthorne’s review of Stephen Robinson’s biography of Bill Deedes last week, the reviewer asserted on his own initiative that Max Hastings was sacked as editor of the Daily Telegraph. In reality, Hastings left the Telegraph by his own choice in October 1995, without compensation, to become editor of the Evening Standard. We regret suggesting otherwise.
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