A few days ago I wrote about the cause of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the American journalists detained in Pyongyang, and noted the dirty tricks the North Koreans continually play on South Korea and America. Recently, another strange “trick” against this country has begun to make the news: the smuggling into Italy of $134 billion in U.S. bonds by two supposed Japanese businessmen.

Gregory Dail summarizes the twists and turns of the mystery in the www.Examiner.com. Dail may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist—he’s puzzled by the Feds’ dismissal of the incident as irrelevant. But the fact is that this is the stuff that mystery novels are made of: incompetent counterfeiters and smugglers, international financial fraud, political finger-pointing.

I have a suggestion. If I were a thriller writer, I would plot the mystery in this way: maybe the Japanese smugglers are agents of the North Koreans. Japanese Communists immigrated into North Korea after World War II.  (See The Aquariums of Pyongyang, which begins with a concise history of the relationship between Japan and North Korea. I hope the Feds have read this book. Japan is no longer our enemy, although I’m not sure Mr. Dail knows this.)

A Reuters story hints that my idea isn’t entirely absurd, the idle speculations of a fiction-writer’s mind.