Spies On Your Radio!

This weekend NPR talked about one of the most bizarre and intriguing radio signals you’ll likely ever hear: numbers stations.

Numbers stations, as radio enthusiasts call them, usually consist of a person reciting a group of numbers, saying them over and over, possibly playing a short tune, and shutting down the transmitter.

Officially, no one knows what they are for and who is doing them. Unofficially, the story gets a lot more interesting:

The voices are coming from what are known as “numbers stations,” and they’ve long been thought to be part of international espionage operations. In fact, the Russian spies recently captured here in the U.S. may have been getting orders from Moscow via a shortwave numbers station

And the mystery only deepens: No government has ever officially admitted to using numbers stations. No one’s really sure when the stations began broadcasting, though they’re most likely a Cold War-era invention.

Here’s an example of one:

They’re found in numerous languages and inflections. Sometimes they’re in Morse Code, sometimes with an inhuman-sounding computer voice, and sometimes they go for hours. The way the codes are created is a system called One Time Pad, and it’s a near-uncrackable system. Read more about it; it’s quite ingenious.

It’s widely assumed that numbers stations started during the Cold War as a way to get messages to spies and other subversives hiding in foreign countries. I remember listening around 1989 or 1990 to these stations, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear a few Spanish numbers stations broadcasting all night. The prevalence of the stations seemed to drop after the fall of the USSR, but they have never completely disappeared.

There’s a great story about West German spies hiding in East Germany, and their attempts to decode a message from their allies in the 60s:

Mother and I hunted up and down the dial in an attempt to isolate the correct station. If we missed the first couple of sentences in the transmission we would not know if it was addressed to us or someone else, and hence we might miss the entire thing along with the indicator of when the next message is to come. Talk about stress. Finally we thought we found it and just as we were getting ready to relax I noticed how the lady announcer pronounced the number five. In German it sounds something like “Fuenf.” Short and to the point. However, this particular announcer called it “Fuennef” – drawing out the word and almost adding its own ending to it. This pronunciation was distinct to a dialect found in East Germany. Quickly in great panic we switched to the other German language station next to it – just in time to hear the announcer say “The next message is for our friend 8754. It consists of 35 groups of type Z. The message starts now: 87,34,12,13,30 ,12 break …”

Still today — these stations pop up, play a little music, send some cryptic messages, and disappear.

Sometimes old geekery is even more effective than new geekery — and sometimes old geekery inspires new geekery, as we can see in this classic scene from the first season of LOST.