Moammar Gadhafi has "tens of billions" of dollars in cash hidden in Tripoli, which allows him to battle an uprising despite an international freeze on Libyan assets, a report said Thursday.

The New York Times, citing U.S. and foreign intelligence officials, said Gadhafi's cash -- in U.S. dollars, Libyan dinars and possibly other foreign currencies -- is stored at the Libyan Central Bank and other banks around Tripoli .

Gadhafi "likely has tens of billions in cash that he can access inside Libya ," an unnamed U.S. intelligence official said.

The cash hoard is vast enough for Gadhafi to comfortably pay his troops, African mercenaries and his political supporters.

Some of the cash may have been moved into Gadhafi's Tripoli compound Bab Al Azizia, an unnamed person with ties to the Libyan government told the newspaper.

The same source told The New York Times that the Gadhafi regime had hired between 3,000 to 4,000 mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa and was paying them $1,000 a day each. United States officials, however, could not confirm the numbers of mercenaries or the amount they were paid.

The African mercenaries were coming from Mali , Niger and Sudan -- especially from the Justice and Equality Movement rebel group operating in Darfur , the source told the newspaper.

Gadhafi has likely been building up reserves since 2004, when international sanctions against his regime began to be lifted -- and apparently feared that sanctions could be re-imposed in the future. "He learned to keep cash around," the source said.

Gadhafi appears to have moved billions of dollars in assets to Libya in the days before protests erupted, Kenneth Barden, a lawyer who specializes in Middle East financing, told The Times.

Gadhafi has "surreptitious accounts and unaccounted sums that are significant enough to give him security even if the world caves in on him," David Aufhauser, a top Treasury Department official under former president George W. Bush, told the newspaper.

The U.S. has frozen at least $30 billion of Libya 's assets, U.S. officials announced in late February, while the United Nations and the European Union have also imposed sanctions and frozen assets.

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