In an April 2025 interview Kiriakou was put a long-circulating story about Saddam Hussein: that Iraq had used the Shah’s offset presses to print vast quantities of American currency, intending to flood the market and undermine the dollar. Kiriakou answered that the parallel stories about Iraq were both true, and described the American counter-measure to the currency problem in Iraq — the United States printed billions and billions of Iraqi dinars and simply dropped them out of airplanes, so that people would scoop them up and the Iraqi economy would crash.[1]
The paper, not the printing
Put to him that Iraqi forgeries had never matched the quality of North Korean or Hezbollah product, Kiriakou agreed and explained why. It is all about the paper. The paper is produced in Switzerland, and if a forger can either obtain the Swiss paper or match it, then the printing is the easy part.[2]
How much is out there
Asked what share of American currency in circulation is high-quality counterfeit, Kiriakou said he had heard figures as high as five or ten percent, a number he called astronomical even as he repeated it. He did not claim the estimate as his own and did not source it further.[3]
He added a detail he described as a quiet but real policy of the second Trump administration: paying thirty cents on the dollar for caches of counterfeit currency found around the world, and incinerating what it buys, simply to take the notes off the street.[3]
The interviewer offered a competing British estimate of nearly fourteen percent attributed to an MI6 acquaintance; Kiriakou did not endorse that number, and the account of a deliberate Iraqi plan to announce a flood of counterfeit dollars belongs to the interviewer rather than to him.[3]