18: Numbers Stations | Listen to Spy Broadcasts, Audio & Coded Messages
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

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Since World War One, number stations have been transmitting coded messages to spies around the world using shortwave radio, and they're still transmitting right now. At the height of the Cold War, radio listeners around the world started to notice strange broadcasts, starting with a weird melody or tone. These transmissions were followed by the unnerving sound of a woman's robotic voice counting in German. Where the creepy voice of a child reciting letters in English.

Now, these transmissions sound strange to casual listeners, but to the right set of ears, they contain information that could change the course of history. In fact, number stations have changed the course of history. Let's find out why.

Welcome to the Y-Files, where cool nerds laugh and learn. Hey, are we gonna talk about this? What? Hello, who's the new guy? What's he talking about? Am I new? No, Space Panda, you're fine. Shh! Anyway, even though we're in the age of satellites and broadband Wi-Fi and cyber warfare, it could be that the old-fashioned radio is the real tool of the New World Order. If you want to conspire with spies, governments, and... Illuminati. Right.

So if your plan is to oppress the masses, you don't want to leave a digital trail. So instead, you broadcast encrypted details of your evil plot over shortwave radio, also known as number stations. You may have heard that number stations are a relic of the past, but number stations are active and being used right now. And we're going to listen to a few in this episode. One of the best known number stations was the Lincolnshire Poacher, named after the folk song played as an identifying signal. ♪

Well, that's pretty creepy. It is. A couple of radio nerds slash heroes used direction-finding equipment to triangulate this station's location. The transmission was coming from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus.

This station is believed to have been operated by MI6 from the mid 1970s all the way to 2008. One of the creepiest stations ever was called Swedish Rhapsody. It used a child's music box and a child's voice to read numbers in German.

And this number station was operated for almost 50 years by the Polish secret police. Oh, that gives me chills. You can get chills underwater? Hey, do me a favor, will you? What? Don't hush my buzz.

And my favorite number station of all time is Yosemite Sam, whose voice is played as part of the transmission. The broadcast begins on one of several frequencies, then 10 seconds later, it's repeated on the next higher frequency, and so on and so on for a total of two minutes.

The entire pattern takes exactly two minutes and always begins seven seconds after the top of the hour. Spies need to be punctual. Each broadcast starts with a data burst lasting 0.8 seconds, followed by the voice of Yosemite Sam saying, You kidding me? Nope. That's a numbers station broadcasting from a government contractor in New Mexico. Don't tell me they're connected to Lockheed Martin.

Well, great. The two amateur radio operators slash heroes tracked down the source of the Yosemite Sam broadcasts in February 2005. The tower was located at the Mobility Assessment Test and Integration Center, also known as Matic. And this is part of a factory owned by Laguna Industries, located near Laguna, New Mexico. The guys went down there and took photographs of a compound containing buildings, towers and antennas.

but quickly fled when they were approached by a security guard yelling at them to not take any pictures. Just three hours later, the broadcast stopped and have not been heard since. What did Laguna Industries have to say about it? Oh, Laguna Industries removed all references to Matic from their website, and now that website is gone. Not suspicious at all.

Okay, so what are number stations? Well, number stations are simply shortwave radio transmitters generally operating between 3,000 and 30,000 kilohertz. They're

They're located in many countries all over the world, but no one really knows how many there are. The stations sometimes transmit numbers spoken by a computer-generated voice, which is how number stations got their name, but other broadcast Morse code, compressed data bursts, or beloved cartoon characters. Now, some stations have been broadcasting for decades. Many have gone quiet since the end of the Cold War. Ha!

What now? The Cold War is alive and well, my friend. Well, it's not a very enlightened point of view. Ah, wake up, Furface! I beg your pardon? If you're dumb enough to think the Cold War ended, I don't know what to tell you, because we've been in one war or another for the past hundred years, and there's no sign of a... Forgive me. Do continue. Oh, yeah. Do continue.

Anyway, countless number stations are on the air right now. For what purpose do you really know? And the people that do know they aren't talking. One anonymous intelligence agent from the UK said number stations are exactly what you think they are. And that's all I'll say about it. So in almost every country, a license is required to broadcast. But number stations aren't licensed. They're essentially pirate stations operating illegally.

But nobody shuts them down. And no government acknowledges they even exist. That's because number stations are the government. Okay, normally I'd call Heckle Fish a kook for saying that. Yay, oh! But this time he's right. I'm always right about this stuff. Amateur detectives, radio buffs, and investigative journalists have been studying number stations for years. And there's enough information out there that we can assume that these transmissions have a single purpose. Espionage.

All the messages were encrypted that they became digits. And the digits would be sent over in groups of five. Shortwave radio is old technology. In the late 1920s, it was a popular way to communicate over long distances because of the way the waves travel, which is called propagation. Space Panda? Ah, the Earth's ionosphere is a region of space between 80 and 600 kilometers above the surface.

Shortwave radio energy can bounce high off the Earth's ionosphere and come back down to the Earth, sometimes over and over again. This allows the signal to travel great distances. Oh, don't you two make quite the team.

This is called sky wave or skip propagation. With a decent radio, you can tune into a strong shortwave signal from the other side of the planet. Now that's pretty useful if you're an intelligence agency and you need to send secret messages to agents and assets in the field. Also, computerized messages can be hacked, tracked, and traced.

But no one can trace who's receiving a shortwave radio signal, and it's hard to find the source of a transmission. And if you know the right frequency, anyone can eavesdrop on an international spy network, including you. You can find tons of frequencies online, and I'll link to some websites in the description. Now, what you'll hear depends on the station. Some stations broadcast constantly. Others power up scheduled time so agents in the field know when to tune in. You're going to hear a lot of Spanish, Czech,

Chinese, Hebrew, but you know where most of the spy stations are? I know you're not going to say Russia. Yeah. Uh-oh. Yep.

Now, the broadcast you'll hear on number stations vary, but they generally begin with an alert signal. And this alert may be a simple tone or it could be fragments of a song such as the Lincolnshire Poacher, the Swedish Rhapsody, all kinds of other ones. And this alert indicates to listeners that a message is about to begin and also gives a few seconds to tune in the radio for the best reception.

After the tone is usually a set of spoken numbers or letters, often four or five at a time, which are repeated again and again before moving on to a new set. There are a lot of variations on the same structure. Many stations have received nicknames that reflect the station, depending on what's being broadcast. Names like the buzzer, Cherry Ripe, the Spanish Lady, the Russian Woodpecker was a great one. Attention, Yosemite Sam and Swedish Rhapsody. I'll have a whole bunch more in the description.

Sometimes broadcasts are really clear, but other times atmospheric conditions can degrade the signals. And sometimes intentional jamming from other countries creates enough interference on the frequency that makes transmission difficult to understand. So to compensate, many stations like Yosemite Sam will hop around to different frequencies. Tradecraft.

The coded structure of the messages indicates that these messages are indeed secret and intended to avoid detection. The question then is how do spies understand these messages when no one else can?

That was a static-filled, triple-scrambled microwave transmission between two soldiers talking in Mandarin Chinese. Well, the Chinese were only using a simple polyphonetically grouped 20-square-digit key transposed in booster-vedonic form with multiple nulls. So even though they're very low-tech, number stations are still in use because, unlike computer code, these transmissions are unbreakable. Nothing is unbreakable.

These messages might be. So what's so hard about deciphering a few numbers? Actually, it's nearly impossible. Here's how spies in the field encode and decode their messages.

First, you start with a block of randomized text. That's your one-time pad key. Then take your message. Here we're using the name Jimmy Smith. Two five-letter words. Then you have a cipher chart. This is a grid of A to Z and 0 to 9 on the X and Y axes. Now set up your message matching the first five letters, or Jimmy, with the first five letters from the pad. Then match up the word Smith with the second set of letters.

Okay, now find the first letter of your message on the x-axis, then find the letter underneath on the y-axis. Where the axes intersect, that's your coded character.

Repeat this for all your letters and your message is ready to transmit. To decrypt the message, set up the coded characters in groups of five. Match those up with the pad. Then find the first letter of the key on the Y axis, then move across until you hit the coded letter. The character at the top of the grid is your decoded character. And thanks to VHS Vlog for setting this up. Awesome. So both the sender and receiver immediately destroy the key at the end of the transmission. So even if someone else intercepts the numbers...

which I have without the key, they have no way to decode the hidden message. This also means there's no relationship between past or future messages, so there's no pattern to use in breaking the code to fool cryptographers. The numbers must be really, really random.

And creating truly random numbers is actually really difficult, even for computers. But once in a while, the broadcasts are less than professional. The person reading the code may make mistakes or there could be laughing in the background. Cuban number stations in particular are known for their hilarious missteps. Sometimes they've had such poor transmissions that they're impossible to hear or they accidentally pipe music from Radio Havana onto the airwaves. Genius.

I would hazard to guess they are more foreign intelligence officers inside the U.S. working against U.S. interests now than even at the height of the Cold War. Some number stations have illicit uses. Drug lords and other criminals use shortwave to avoid international authorities. This is especially true in the U.S., where many intercepted signals are broadcast in Spanish. Six, cinco, nueve.

Since they don't have government oversight, the execution is pretty sloppy. Right, because the government is never sloppy in its execution. The fish does make a good point. But those number stations are pretty rare. Espionage is the most common use. There are even some very public and recent examples of this. In 1983, the KGB uncovered a CIA agent posing as a Soviet diplomat who is receiving orders from American numbers broadcasts.

Another well-known case is the 2001 Cuban five case where Cuban spies were caught and shortwave broadcasts were used in the case against them as evidence. Also in 2001, Ana Montes, who worked for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, was arrested and convicted of spying for Cuba. Investigators searched her home and found a shortwave radio along with a code sheet that was used to encrypt radio transmissions.

Now, she exposed the identities of covert operators in Cuba, and her information was directly responsible for the death of at least one American soldier, maybe more. In 2016, CNN called Montez the most dangerous spy you've never heard of, although now you've heard of her. And to this day, and despite this mountain of evidence, no government or intelligence agency has ever officially admitted to using number stations.

Today we're going to be discussing a radio set. Not just any radio set, but a Russian radio set. So you don't need a radio to listen to spy communications. You can listen to the entire shortwave band online, and I'll link below. Because these receivers are operated by software, they can be used remotely by everyone in the world. And here's what one of those tuners looks like. I'm going to turn it off. I'm going to turn it on.

Now, if you're not a radio nerd, that might look a little weird, but if you want to dig in further, I'll link to a tutorial up there and down in the description. I'll also link to Priam dot org station schedule, which is super cool. It lets you tell exactly what number stations are coming on the air and what frequency you need to listen. Now, I'm thinking about doing a live stream of this. So if you want to see that, let me know in the comments.

Now if you just want to binge station broadcasts, you can go down a whole rabbit hole with the Conette Project. The Conette Project was an independent initiative to record, catalog, and inform the public about the secret transmissions that are around us in the air every day. You can even download the files as mp3s for later analysis. Ooh, I'm gonna need a pencil, my tinfoil hat, and a tall glass of whiskey. I'm sorry, but do you have any sherry? Oy vey, give me a break.

The quantity of number stations has dropped dramatically over the past few years. Still, the broadcasts continue. Are they feeding invaluable information to operatives on crucial missions? Or are they just holdovers from government agencies protecting their budgets? Both.

Probably. It could also be that governments maintain the stations for readiness purposes. If the power grid or internet goes down, a shortwave transmitter just needs an antenna and a diesel generator and they could be on the air broadcasting around the world. But as communication technology continues to evolve and digital encryption gets harder to crack, we might finally see the end of number stations. Or maybe the opposite will occur.

Maybe some catastrophic digital apocalypse will create a number station renaissance, pushing broadcasters back onto the front lines of international intelligence, where random numbers raining down from the ionosphere can once again change the course of human history.

Thanks for hanging out with us today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish, Space Panda. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learned anything today, help us out by liking, commenting, or sharing this video. The algorithm is a fearsome enemy, but with your help, we can defeat it. We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty. Okay, I gotta admit, that was pretty good. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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Instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash insights. That's oracle.com slash insights. oracle.com slash insights.