526: DEEP DIVE: Cryptic Broadcasts | Numbers Stations Mysteries Revealed
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Get to Smoothie King today and try the new blueberry, raspberry, or watermelon lemonade smoothies. They're all made with real fruit, real juice, and no bad stuff. Just check out the no-no list at SmoothieKing.com. Try the new lemonade smoothies at Smoothie King today. Since World War I, number stations have been used to transmit coded messages to spies worldwide. These stations use shortwave radio, which is tech you might expect to see in a World War II movie.

But even with the advancements in modern-day technology, you may be surprised to learn that these number stations are still used today. They're actively transmitting messages around the world right now. At the height of the Cold War, shortwave radio listeners 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, or the creepy voice of a child reciting letters in English.

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. ♪

Even though we're in the age of satellites, artificial intelligence, 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, military organizations, governments or the ruling elites, and your goal is to communicate a plan to oppress the masses, you don't want to leave a digital trail.

So, to help facilitate your quest for world domination, you broadcast the 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. We'll listen to a few of the transmissions in this podcast. But before we do, let's take a step back and discuss the history of hidden messages and their importance in global espionage.

To better understand number stations, we first need to go back in time to well before the invention of the radio. We need to go back 4,000 years. Because believe it or not, number stations have their roots in ancient Egypt.

Cryptography is the science of encrypting text and data. Some of the earliest uses of cryptographic symbols date to the old kingdom of Egypt in a town called Menet Khufu. While excavating the tomb of Khnumatep II, researchers found something unusual. Many inscriptions within the tomb were written with unusual symbols instead of the standard symbols they expected to find.

Many claim this was done simply to embellish the tomb. However, some theorize these unusual hieroglyphics were placed in the tomb to conceal the true meaning of the writings.

The tomb of Ramses VI also contains examples of these strange symbols. The central tableau has an image of a standing mummy. Normally hieroglyphics are written top down or right to left. The symbols on either side of the mummy were written from the center out. And inside the tomb of one of the most well-known pharaohs, there may be clues to finding one of Egypt's lost queens.

Oval tablets found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun contain encrypted hieroglyphics that suggest the location of the tomb of his mother, Queen Nefertiti. The location of Queen Nefertiti's tomb remains one of the great mysteries of Egyptian archaeology. Nefertiti was a queen of the 18th dynasty of Egypt and the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Ancient Egypt isn't the only place where we find early evidence of cryptography and hidden messages.

Clay tablets dated to around 1500 BC in Mesopotamia appear to encrypt the recipe for pottery glaze. Recipes for glaze varied from craftsman to craftsman, and an individual's formula would have been a tightly held secret. The tablets appear to use code to conceal the ingredients and measurements.

Around 500 BC, Hebrew scholars used substitution ciphers such as the at-bash cipher. The at-bash cipher is mono-alphabetic. It's formed by taking the alphabet and mapping it to its reverse. The first letter becomes the last letter, the second letter becomes the second to last letter, and so on. This method of concealment was used to encode many texts, including books found in the Bible.

Julius Caesar used a cipher around 58 BC. This cipher, named the Caesar cipher, was a substitution cipher sometimes referred to as a shift cipher or a skip code cipher.

Caesar shifted letters of a message to letters found three places after the original. A becomes D, B becomes E, and so on. To decode the message, the receiver needed to shift the message three letters back in the alphabet. The Spartans developed a device called the skydily. This device was first mentioned by Greek poets in the 7th century BC. In 120 AD, more detailed information on how to use the device was described by the Greek historian Plutarch.

The Skydaily consisted of a cylinder in which strips of parchment could be wound around it to find the message. To decrypt, the recipient wrapped the parchment around the same diameter cylinder and was then able to read the code. Wrapping the parchment around a cylinder of a different diameter would fail to decode the message.

When the Spartans sent soldiers into battle, they would create two sections of wood that were identical in length and diameter. Either party would wrap parchment around the wood to communicate and record a message. Once unraveled, the message would be unreadable unless you had a matching cylinder.

In 1466, Leon Battista Alberti, commonly known as the father of Western cryptography, founded the concept of a polyalphabetic cipher. A polyalphabetic cipher uses multiple alphabetic substitutions instead of one. This means that the letter A could be substituted for C in one sentence, and in the next sentence, A might be mapped to T.

Alberti used this mixed alphabet to encrypt messages and would include an uppercase letter or number in the cryptogram to identify a switch in the key. To achieve this, Alberti used a decoder disk he called a formula. This device used two concentric disks that were attached by a common pin. When one disk was rotated, the second disk would rotate and provide the decryption needed.

Now, this is just a small list of ciphers found throughout early history. As time and technology changed, so did the methods used for concealing communications. The First World War brought a need for covert communications across vast distances. This is where radio waves and the use of number stations comes into play. Let's look at these number stations and discuss their use in various parts of the globe.

The earliest number stations used Morse code in combination with radio transmissions and was referred to as wireless telegraphy. This method emerged as an alternative to telephone and telegraph lines.

In 1918, a German firm patented an idea for a cipher machine. The military and governments across the globe were using this device by 1923. The name of the device might be familiar to you. It was called Enigma. Enigma was a combination of electrical and mechanical systems. It used plug boards and rotating rotor disks along a spindle. Traditional methods of telegraph and telephone lines were too easily tapped and damaged in areas where there was active combat.

Military operatives needed a way to send messages that couldn't be interrupted by damaged phone lines that ran underground. This is when radio was introduced and number stations were born.

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One of the best-known number stations was the Lincolnshire Poacher, named after the folk song. It used this song as its on-air identifier. 3, 9, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1, 5, 3, 9, 7, 1,

The song used was mentioned as early as 1776 and was said to be a favorite of King George IV. It was used as a regimental quick march in the British Army and is the principal quick march theme of the British Intelligence Corps. The song is authorized for use by the Canadian forces. It was used during the American Civil War by the New York Regiment. In short, the song has a long history of being used by the British military as a call sign. The

The Lincolnshire Poacher Station first appeared during the Cold War era in the mid-1970s. It was thought to be operated by the British Secret Service. The exact date of its creation is unknown because the British government has never confirmed nor denied its existence.

Broadcasts happened multiple times per day and on several frequencies. The transmission format was always the same. The identifier song, followed by a pre-recorded female voice with an English accent, reading groups of five numbers.

Each transmission contains 200 sets of numbers and lasted 45 minutes. The final two numbers in each set were spoken in a higher pitch. A few radio nerds slash heroes used direction-finding equipment to triangulate the station's location. The transmission was coming from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus. The station is believed to have been operated by MI6 from the mid-1970s all the way to 2008.

But Lincolnshire Poacher wasn't the only station used by the British government. It had a sister station on the other side of the globe. Like Lincolnshire, the Cherry Ripe station began operations in the mid-1970s. The station's interval signal was also taken from a folk song with its namesake.

This station broadcast first from Guam and later from Australia. Like Lincolnshire Poacher, Cherry Ripe also featured a female voice with a British accent reading 200 groups of five numbers. The final two numbers in each set were spoken in a higher pitch. Cherry Ripe's station ceased broadcasting in 2009.

Now, if you're a little unsettled listening to these broadcasts, you're not alone. There's something inherently creepy about them. But there are some number stations whose broadcasts sound like they're straight out of a horror movie. One of the creepiest stations ever was called Swedish Rhapsody. It used a child's music box. A child's voice read the numbers in German. One, two, three, four, five.

The station appeared in the late 1950s. It was operated by the Polish Ministry of Public Security, or the MBP. The MBP was responsible for intelligence and counterintelligence, internal security, and secret police functions. It was known for its role in suppressing political opposition to the communist regime, and it conducted surveillance, censorship, and the detention and interrogation of dissidents.

Documents released by the Polish government in 2014 confirmed the station was operated until 1998. It also revealed the child's voice heard during the transmissions was accomplished by manipulating the pitch of a German machine known as the Sprachmors generator. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

The memo revealed the song was created by changing the pitch of a music box to sound like an ice cream truck. It wasn't a Swedish Rhapsody, but Luxembourg Polka by Emil Reisdorf. Whether it was Luxembourg Polka or Swedish Rhapsody, it was creepy. But here's something even more unsettling. The station broadcast until 1998. The MVP was disbanded in 1954. So who are they talking to?

By the 1960s, almost every major power on Earth was using number stations. A number station in Western Russia broadcasts constant buzzing at 465 kilohertz. Actly named the buzzer, this station sends out about 24 buzzes per minute, 24 hours a day. Occasionally, the buzzing stops.

and a voice message is relayed. The format of the messages is always the same. "File sign 58151, code word 39516578."

The call sign and the code word are spelled out in the Russian phonetic alphabet. They're known as monolith messages, meaning the message is relayed between other radio communications. The Russians operated quite a few number stations. The PIP, a station operating in the southern part of Russia, began in the mid-1980s and is still active today. Squeaky Wheel was on air from 2000 until 2008. ...

The Goose started transmissions in 2018. And the Alarm started broadcasting in 2019, but stopped in the middle of 2020. You might be wondering why number stations continued to operate after the end of the Cold War. But as you've heard me say several times, the Cold War never ended.

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. Ten seconds later, it's repeated on the next higher frequency and so on for two minutes. The entire pattern takes exactly two minutes and always begins seven seconds after the top of the hour. Each broadcast starts with a data burst lasting 0.8 seconds, followed by the voice of Yosemite Sam.

Two amateur radio operators tracked down the source of the Yosemite Sand broadcasts in February 2005. The tower was located at the Mobility Assessment Test and Integration Center, also known as MATIC. This was part of a factory owned by Laguna Industries, located near Laguna, New Mexico.

The pair 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. Three hours later, the broadcast stopped and have not been heard since. Luguna Industries removed all references to Matic from their website. Now that website is gone. But so many questions remain.

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We can't talk about Cold War era number stations without mentioning stations coming from Cuba. Several number stations have broadcast from the island nation, some of which began in late 2012, and many are still in use today. The first of these Cuban stations is the V-02 station, more commonly known as Atención, or the Spanish Lady. Atención. Tres, ocho, nueve, cinco, nueve, cero.

The Spanish Lady began broadcasting in the mid-1960s and was active until 1997. It was then replaced by a variant station known as V02A. It started with the word "atención" repeated several times, followed by a five-digit message header, the number 150, and finally single groups of five-digit numbers.

In 2012, some Spanish lady stations were replaced by the HM01 station, Voce de la Chica, the voice of the girl. The station continued to broadcast until 2019. On December 26, 2006, a new station became active in Cuba, the SK01 station, nicknamed RDFT.

RDFT stands for Redundant Digital File Transfer. This station, operating from a location close to the Spanish Lady Station, is thought to be operated by Dirección General de Inteligencia . It became inactive in 2012 when the Voce de la Chica station replaced it. So what is Voce de la Chica? I mentioned it took over a portion of the Spanish Lady Station and that it also replaced the RDFT station. But these stations were very different.

7 7 2 3 6 6 1 7 2 4 0 1 3 0

The Voce de la Chica station began transmission in 2012 and is considered a hybrid station. It sends five-figure call-ups like the V02A, but the message is sent in the RDFT mode that was used by SK01 on an AM frequency. This combination allowed the other stations to cease operations. The Voce de la Chica station is still on the air in Cuba and transmits every day.

Okay, so we've talked about the individual number stations found across the globe and their creepy interval signals.

But what are number stations? Well, number stations are shortwave radio transmitters generally operating between 3,000 and 30,000 kilohertz. 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 others broadcast Morse code, compressed data bursts, or beloved cartoon characters.

Some stations have been broadcasting for decades, maybe have gone quiet since the fall of the Soviet Union. Countless number stations are on the air right now, for what purpose few really know, and the people that do know, they aren't talking.

An intelligence agent from the UK, speaking off the record, said, "...number stations are exactly what you think they are, and that's all I'll say about it. 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."

Amateur detectives, radio buffs, and investigative journalists have studied number stations for years. There's enough information out there to assume these transmissions have a single purpose, espionage.

Shortwave radio is old technology. In the late 1920s, it was a popular way to communicate over long distances because of how the waves travel. The Earth's ionosphere is a region of space between 50 to 370 miles above the surface. Shortwave radio energy can bounce high off the Earth's ionosphere and return to Earth, sometimes over and over again. This allows the signal to travel great distances. 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 a secret message to agents and assets in the field. Also, computerized messages can be hacked, tracked, and traced. But no one can trace who is receiving a shortwave radio signal. And while it is possible to triangulate the transmission source, it's not easy.

Anyone can eavesdrop on an international spy network if you know the right frequency, including you. You can find tons of frequencies online. What you'll hear depends on the station. Some stations, like the buzzer in Russia, broadcast constantly. Others power up at scheduled times so agents in the field know when to tune in. You'll hear a lot of Spanish, Czech, Chinese, Hebrew. But you know where most of the spy stations are? Yep, Russia.

The broadcast you'll hear on number stations vary. They'll generally begin with an alert signal. This alert may be a simple tone or fragments of a song, such as with the famous Lincolnshire Poacher and Cherry Ripe stations. This indicates to listeners that a message is about to begin, and also gives a few seconds to tune 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.

The speaker is often mechanically or digitally created or edited and is typically female. This is because higher pitch tones are easier to hear and understand. 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, Attencion, Yosemite Sam and Swedish Rhapsody.

Sometimes broadcasts are really clear. Other times atmospheric conditions can degrade the signals. Sometimes intentional jamming from other countries creates enough interference in the frequency that makes transmission difficult to understand. Many stations like Yosemite SAM will hop around to different frequencies to compensate for jamming. The coded structure of the broadcast indicates they are indeed secret and intended to avoid detection.

The question then is, how do spies understand these messages when no one else can? Even though they're very low-tech, number stations are still in use because, unlike computer code, these transmissions are virtually unbreakable. So what's so hard about deciphering a few numbers? Actually, it's nearly impossible.

This is because of an encryption technique called a one-time pad. With a one-time pad system, the sender and receiver have a piece of paper, or an entire notebook, filled with random digits. Using a key given during transmission corresponding to the pad, the recipient can figure out what letters the incoming characters or digits stand for. Each key is used only once and then discarded. The sender and receiver immediately destroy the key at the end of the transmission.

So even if someone else intercepts the numbers without the key, they can't decode the hidden message. This also means there's no relationship between past and 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 a truly random sequence is actually very difficult, even for computers.

When a computer generates a random number, it's not really random. Computers generate random numbers through processes known as pseudo-random number generation, or PRNG. And here's how it works.

The computer will take a starting number, usually a time code, and then run that number through a series of programs. Each program uses a different algorithm to change the number. Computer programmers are familiar with the concept of seeding random numbers. A seed is the starting point for a random number generation. If you ask a computer for a random number but give it the same seed, guess what? You get the same number as a result. So, not truly random.

Some cryptography tries to make guessing the seed difficult, so the seed is run through other programs first, using different sets of variables. If these variables can be discovered, the sequence can be predicted, often by other computers. And quantum computers? They can crack this without breaking a sweat.

Quantum computers are also the future of random number generation. Quantum processes are inherently random, right? Remember our episodes on quantum mechanics? To keep it simple, quantum particles have various attributes like how fast they spin and what direction they spin. But it's impossible to know these numbers until we measure them. That's called collapsing of the wave function. Now, I don't want to get too much into the weeds on this, but quantum computing is the future of cryptography.

Number stations are usually operated by governments and their intelligence agencies, but not all stations. Some number stations are operated by organized crime. Number stations are designed to transmit secrets and avoid detection. Drug lords and other criminals use shortwave to avoid international authorities. This is especially true in the US, where many intercepted signals are broadcast in Spanish.

Since they don't have government oversight, the execution is pretty sloppy. Once in a while, the broadcasts are less than professional. The person reading the code may make mistakes or there could be talking or laughing in the background. Cuban stations are particularly known for their hilarious missteps.

Sometimes the broadcasts are impossible to hear, or they accidentally bring in music from Radio Havana. Parody stations have popped up on the radio. In 1987, a station known as Mexican Food aired on Halloween night. It started with a poorly accented voice repeating, followed by five sets of Mexican Food.

A station called Attention 69 aired in the 1990s. It was a spoof of the Cuban Spanish lady station. Instead of numbers, the station aired profanities. Attention 69!

Even with all these different types of number stations out there, espionage is the most common use. There are even some very public and very recent examples of this. In 1983, the KGB discovered a CIA agent posing as a Soviet diplomat who was receiving orders from American number broadcasts. A well-known case is the 2001 Cuban Five case, where Cuban spies were caught,

Shortwave broadcasts were used in the case against them. The numbers were sent to the spies via radio and entered into a laptop. Then it was decoded by a special floppy disk that contained the key.

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 and a code sheet used to encrypt radio transmissions. 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. In 2011, German authorities arrested Russian spies Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag for feeding military secrets to Russia. The married couple moved to Germany in 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and remained undercover there until their arrests.

When authorities burst into their home, Hydron was right in the middle of receiving a shortwave transmission. And to this day, and despite this mountain of evidence, no government or intelligence agency has ever officially admitted to using number stations. But that doesn't surprise me. Does it surprise you?

You don't need a radio to listen to spy communications. You can listen to the entire shortwave band online. Because these receivers are operated by software, they can be operated remotely by people across the world. If you want to binge station broadcasts, you can go down a rabbit hole with the Conette Project.

The Connett Project was an independent initiative to record, catalog, and inform the public about the secret transmissions around us in the air every day. A series of CDs released in the 90s had hundreds of recordings. Now the project is online and has been updated. You can even download the files as MP3s for later analysis.

The quantity of number stations peaked during the Cold War and 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? 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 diesel generator, and they can be on the air around the world.

But as communication technology continues evolving 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.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learn anything, do me a favor, leave the podcast a nice review. That lets me know to keep making these things for you. And like most topics I cover on the Y-Files, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to learn more about, go to the Y-Files.com slash tips. And special thanks to our patrons who make the Y-Files possible. I dedicate every episode to you and I couldn't do this without your support.

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