Colors / Green

“Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet.

I received the counterfeit hundred-dollar bill at a bookstore of all places. It was February 2009, and I was giving a reading in Washington, DC. A former student of mine came up after the event to say hello. The student, whom I’ll call Jeffrey, had two copies of Fakers, my then recently published book of essays. One copy was for him, he said. The other was a gift for his father. As I signed the books, Jeffrey mentioned that he had a good fake for me. I expressed some surprise, though I had heard this gambit a few times before and was, frankly, a bit weary.

Jeffrey was a bright enough student, not that it was hard to distinguish oneself in the introductory creative writing classes I taught at George Washington University, where the silent, sullen majority of my students paid more attention to premium denim and high-priced highlights than the literary style of whatever writer I assigned, hoping against all reason that the right book by the right author might cleave the ice of their frozen selves. In such company, Jeffrey did stand out. At least at the beginning of the semester, when he managed to turn in some good writing—honest, expressive stuff.

About halfway through the course, however, Jeffrey stopped attending class. Every now and then, he sent me emails, always in the middle of the night and always apologizing and alluding to vague personal problems. He promised to make up all missed work, but I didn’t see him again until the last day of classes, when he showed up late with “The Big Game,” his forty-seven-page masterpiece. “The Big Game” was a fictional account of a marathon poker night featuring a kid named The Kid and assorted old hands, all of whom were “rugged” or “grizzled” or “pockmarked” though otherwise interchangeable. The story proceeded card by interminable card, hand by plodding hand. The Kid’s pile of money rose and fell. He was up $500, then he was down $700, then he was up again, and so forth. Five pages in, I guessed the Kid would, against all odds, prevail and also that this Kid was, without too much imaginative nipping and tucking, none other than my student. Owing to the lateness of the story, as well as its mind-numbing lack of all style, Jeffrey earned a C-minus for the assignment and a D for his final grade, a generous estimation, I thought, of what work he completed. I handed the signed books back to Jeffrey and thanked him again for coming. He seemed about to go when he stopped and asked if I had ever done any looking into counterfeit money.

I hadn’t. Mostly, I explained, I wrote about literary fakes: journalists who invented sources and concocted details and then claimed they were real, memoirists who fashioned more colorful lives, that sort of thing.

“Reason I ask,” Jeffrey said, “is I came across this the other week.” He produced something from his pocket and carefully unfolded it, placing it on the table between us. It was a hundred-dollar bill.

I looked at it and then I looked at Jeffrey. “Okay,” I said.

“It’s fake,” he said. He spoke as if he had just performed a magic trick.

“It looks real,” I said, “not that I come across hundred-dollar bills every day.” I leaned forward to inspect it, my hands folded in front of me.

“I won it playing poker,” he said.

“Sounds like you lost then.”

Jeffrey smiled and allowed I was probably right. “The thing of it is,” he said, “this is a supernote.”

I shrugged my shoulders and looked, I imagine, confused.

Jeffrey filled me in on what he knew of supernotes—forged hundred-dollar bills so accomplished that even the experts were sometimes fooled. They had been around since the late 1980s, here and there. The Middle East, mostly. Russia. Even the best authenticating machines couldn’t dependably tell a supernote from the real McCoy. Jeffrey was grinning as he spoke, a little giddy even. “Pick it up,” he said.

With some reluctance, I did. “It definitely feels like money,” I told him.

“I’m telling you, it’s a great forgery,” Jeffrey said. “The people who made it should make actual money.”

I put the bill down and pushed it back across the table toward my student.

“Take it,” he said.

I told him I couldn’t, I shouldn’t.

“Take it for your research,” he said. “For your files or something.”

I picked the bill back up and turned it over, considering.

“I’ve got fifty-eight more at home,” he said. “I’m not going to miss this one.”

I did the math in my head. “Must have been a big night,” I said.

“Actually,” Jeffrey said, “an average night, I’m afraid.” And with that, he told me he had to be going.

At home, I sandwiched Jeffrey’s hundred between the pages of Hoaxes, a 1940 treatise by Curtis MacDougall, the battered and sentimental cornerstone of my books on fakery. For five months, I managed to forget about it.

Then, in early July, I heard from Cabinet about writing a Colors column for the magazine. I was assigned green. For a time I thought only of the color itself, in the abstract, green for the sake of its green-ness. Then, for another, shorter time, I thought of the color in my life. I looked around for it. I noted its every appearance. At some point, I thought of American money and, of course, I then recalled the counterfeit bill my student had given me.

I pinned two one-dollar bills to a bulletin board in my office so I could look at them, back and front. Beside the bills, I pinned the supernote. Periodically, I took them down and held them. I was trying to see a dollar anew, as if I had never encountered one before. Our money, I got to thinking, is anxious, stricken with unease. The real thing, actual money, seems perpetually fearful, not just of being faked but of being mistaken for something inauthentic. Every tiny engraved line, every whorl and curlicue, is there to make counterfeiting difficult. What’s more, the curlicues just keep getting smaller, and more elaborate. The front of the larger bills—the recently redesigned five, ten, twenty, and fifty—now feature microprinting. On the new fifty-dollar bill, for instance, the words “The United States of America” appear on President Ulysses S. Grant’s collar, tucked right under his beard. The tiny typeface here and elsewhere can hardly be seen without the aid of a magnifying glass, and it’s virtually impossible to reproduce by cheaper and more widely available means, such as digital scanners and color printers. Only the most expensive and painstaking intaglio printing process will do for the black fronts and green backs in which we all trust.

But what of the supernote? How had those counterfeits been done so well? Information is scant and, however intriguing, full of wild speculation. Several sources believe supernotes are produced by currency-printing facilities controlled by a foreign government. Some think Syria responsible, or North Korea, but there has never been any firm proof. Intelligence agencies worldwide have no clue where such a facility is located. The United States government has been extremely reluctant to acknowledge the existence of the supernote for fear of undermining confidence in the dollar. In 2006, however, seventeen years after the first supernote was detected, the deputy assistant director of the United States Secret Service came before the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International Security and testified that the supernote, while “unlikely to adversely impact the US economy,” could, because of its high quality, “have a significant influence” when introduced “into a micro economy.” Other sources speculate that the supernotes are in fact produced by the CIA and distributed surreptitiously to certain high-profile political actors the agency wants to track, studying the eddies and patterns their money makes as it enters the giant churning currents of all the globe’s cash.

I sent an email to Jeffrey, telling him what I was working on and asking if he had received any more of the funny money. A few minutes later, his response appeared in my inbox. “Hey professor,” he wrote. “No more bad bills, at least none that I know of. Ha! I may be able to help you, though. Are you free anytime next week?”

We met at a restaurant near campus and after the waiter took our order, Jeffrey leaned in. “The first thing you need to know,” he told me, “is that it’s not a foreign operation. It’s happening right here.” He pointed at the table.

“In the District?” I asked. I mentioned reading somewhere about possible CIA involvement but thought the details sounded sketchy.

Jeffrey waved the notion away. “It’s not CIA,” he said. “It’s just convenient for a lot of people to play this like it has geopolitical implications.”

The truth, it turned out, was both odder and, as is often the case, more banal. The counterfeiting operation, Jeffrey explained, was actually run by a small band of students at George Washington and nearby Georgetown University. A couple of students with access to the papermaking studio at GW create a mixture of cotton and linen fibers using nothing fancier than the school’s thirty-year-old Hollander beater. They then pull sheets of the paper complete with the necessary watermarks, security devices, and those wiggly red and blue silk threads that seem caught in the surface. From there, the pages are shuttled to Georgetown, where the art department owns a seldom-used intaglio press with a large print bed. The team there applies the green ink, allows the pages to cure for seventy-two hours, and then prints the black. Next, the pages come back to GW, where students in the art department complete the letterpress work, inserting the matching pair of serial numbers and the seal of the Department of the Treasury in green ink, then overprinting the Federal Reserve District seal and the denomination’s value in black.

I asked Jeffrey what part he played in the whole operation.

“I just play poker,” he said. “My job, if you can call it that, is to win real money off the other players, as much as I can. Then, sometime in the last few hands, I go all in, this time using the supernotes I brought. I go down in flames—or seem to anyway. It’s like money laundering except way more entertaining.”

I wasn’t sure I followed the ins and outs of this laundering, but I told Jeffrey I’d like to see the printing operation for myself.

Jeffrey looked doubtful. “I’m not sure that’s going to be possible,” he said. “Why not just take the tour?” he asked, referring to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. “We based everything we do off them.”

Jeffrey then described how the money gets made at the bureau’s facilities in DC and Fort Worth, Texas. They operate twenty-four hours a day, he said, Monday through Friday, with production sometimes carrying over to the weekends. In fiscal year 2009, the bureau printed about twenty-six million notes each day, a print run with a face value of approximately $907 million. The numbers, all the numbers, staggered. Much of this tornado of paper replaces existing money that has worn out: a dollar bill, for example, circulates for roughly twenty-one months before it needs replacing.

“The ink,” Jeffrey said, “is something of a secret.” The Bureau purchases all its inks from Sicpa Securink, a Swiss-based multinational with a branch in Springfield, Virginia. On average, the bureau goes through 9.7 tons of ink per day. What’s more, Sicpa supplies the ink used in eighty percent of the world’s currencies.

“What if I protected your identity?” I asked Jeffrey. “I could make it so there’s nothing telltale in the writing.”

No response.

“Come on,” I said. I didn’t like to plead, but it was too rich a story not to at least try.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, finally. “Maybe I’ll talk to people.”

After lunch, we stood out on Pennsylvania Avenue, just chatting. Apropos of nothing, Jeffrey said he had been meaning to ask me about his story and his final grade.

I thought he was joking. “Your story was terrible,” I said.

“So but what if I write you a better one?” he asked.

I sighed and looked down the street, watching cars pass. I didn’t want to read another story. My god, the semester was long over. Still, my access to Jeffrey and, in turn, to the counterfeiters now hung in the balance.

“If you write a better story,” I said, “I’ll consider changing your grade.”

Jeffrey thanked me.

“It has to be a much better story though,” I said. “That last one hurt my eyes.”

“Don’t worry, professor,” Jeffrey said. “I’ll make this one good.”

A few days later, Jeffrey emailed me his new work. Curious, I opened the document straight away and began to read. It was something of a now-familiar story, about a student and his professor and, yes, a rather byzantine counterfeiting ring. The character of the student was a voluble sort, eager to explain how he successfully ran what amounted to a green-goods scam on his old professor. In the nineteenth century, as he told it, an enterprising con artist would offer to sell finely done counterfeits to some gullible mark. When the mark asked to see a sample of this great handiwork, the con artist just showed him a real bill. What the mark actually purchased in the end, of course, was perhaps a few genuine notes bundled up with cut newspaper or strips of dyed linen. The student had done no differently. In the story’s dénouement, the professor, noting his student’s “incredible pluck and imagination,” agreed at last to change his grade. It was, I thought, an optimistic tale. I told Jeffrey I’d think about it.