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shortwave radio signals which occupy the radio frequency band between 3 and 30 megahertz have
the unique ability to bounce or skip off the earth's ionosphere allowing them to propagate
over vast distances this has attracted a devoted international community of shortwave radio
enthusiasts to exploit the unique properties of the medium to listen to and communicate
with shortwave stations from around the globe but among the vast ecosystem of amateur broadcasters
international news services and emergency communications networks every so often shortwave
operators stumble upon something truly eerie and bizarre take the frequency 4625 kilohertz known
to radioamateurs as uvb 76 or simply the buzzer first discovered in 1985 the buzzer broadcasts
nothing but a constant monotonous buzz made up of two distinct tones repeating 25 times per minute
every few weeks or so this buzzing is interrupted by a voice which proceeds to read out a string of
random words or numbers in russian the buzzing then resumes carrying on 24 hours a day 365 days
a year while the source of uvb 76 has been traced to two sites outside of moscow and some petersburg
no agency or organization has ever admitted to operating the station this has led to
endless speculation as to the buzzer's function with some theorizing that is used to probe the
ionosphere for radio interference others that it is part of russia's infamous dead
hand system designed to automatically launch the nation's nuclear arsenal in case of attack more
likely however is that the buzzer belongs to a curious breed of radio stations whose origins lie
in the shadowy world of cold war espionage and which continue to faithfully serve the
world's intelligence services to this day welcome to the strange and mysterious world
of numbers stations number stations are nearly as old as radio itself with the first examples
appearing in europe during the first world war their numbers exploded however in the cold war
era with the phenomenon first coming to the attention of radio amateurs around the mid-1970s
number stations are so named because they typically broadcast nothing but seemingly random
strings of numbers letters or sometimes words these messages are transmitted in a variety of
formats including morse code phrase or frequency shifting and voice either real or synthesized
each string of numbers is usually preceded by a unique identifier or call sign which often forms
the basis for the colorful nicknames given to the stations by radio amateurs one of the most famous
number stations the lincolnshire poacher used as its call sign the first bars of the english folk
song of the same name synthesized to sound like a kelly oborgen and repeated 12 times this was
followed by a british accented female reading a string of numbers first heard in the 1970s the
lincolnshire poacher initially broadcasted from bletchley park in buckinghamshire but later moved
to the royal air force station at akritiri on the island of cyprus it ceased broadcasting in 2008. a
similar station called cherry ripe which also used an english folk song as its call sign broadcast
from somewhere in the south pacific until 2009. other famous number stations include ready
ready aloe hello the englishman the english woman oblique swedish rhapsody nancy adam susan cynthia
the babbler squeaky real the pip and magnetic field the latter named for use of a song by
french electronic composer jean-michel jar while many of these stations broadcast in english not
all originated in english-speaking countries for example ready ready and the babbler are thought
to have originated in bulgaria the englishman in russia the english lady in ukraine and oblique in
poland the eerie and mysterious nature of numbers stations soon attracted a devoted community of
radio amateurs who began to actively seek out classify and study these enigmatic broadcasts
the number of recorded number stations quickly grew so large that in 1993 a station tracking
group called enigma 2000 developed a designation system to keep track of them all this system
classifies stations using a letter prefix indicating the type of broadcast and a number
indicating its order of discovery for example e indicates a station broadcasting in english g in
german s in slavic v in other languages m in morse code and x in all other modes such as frequency
and phase shifting but as obsessive and meticulous as this might sound some aficionados have taken
their obsession with number stations to even more absurd heights from the moment he stumbled upon
his first number station in 1992 british radio amateur aquin fernandez was hooked explaining
in a 2004 interview you're listening and all of a sudden you come across a really strong signal
it's the most chilling thing you've ever heard in your life these signals are going everywhere
and they could be for anything there's nothing like it over the next five years fernandez
spent nearly every waking hour meticulously recording and categorizing every number station
that he could track down this work culminated in 1997 with the release of the canet project
this is one of the strangest albums in the history of recorded music named after the czech word for
end which fernandez heard often on the airwaves the connect project comprised four cds filled
with over 280 minutes of excerpts from number stations around the world along with a 74-page
booklet detailing the background and details of each broadcast while the album initially sold
only 2 000 copies it had a strangely significant impact on the world of music being sampled in
a variety of other artistic projects including the band porcupine trees 1999 album stupid dream
wilco's 2001 album yankee hotel foxtrot and the soundtrack of the 2001 cameron crow film vanilla
sky but just what are these eerie broadcasts for are they merely pranks placeholders for certain
radio frequencies or something more sinister while for decades number stations remained one of the
great unsolved mysteries of radio broadcasting starting in the 1980s a number of international
incidents finally began to shed light on their enigmatic purpose in 1988 british intelligence
detected a strong radio signal emanating from the flat of dutch national irwin van harlem
london police raided the flat and found van halen sitting in front of a shortwave radio listening to
a numbers station based in czech slovakia code books were later discovered in a hollowed-out
bar of soap and van halen was revealed to be a check agent named vatslav yelanek later that year
when the communist regime of romanian dictator nikolai chaucescu collapsed all number stations
broadcasting from romania abruptly stopped and in october 2011 when german police raided the marburg
home of andreas and hydran anschlag they caught the couple sitting at a shortwave radio receiver
receiving coded instructions from moscow when interrogated the anschlags revealed that they
always received instructions at 6 pm on tuesdays and thursdays a schedule that happened to coincide
perfectly with the russian numbers station known as xpa these another instance have led experts
to suspect that number stations are in fact a clever means of solving a classic problem
faced by nations trying to communicate with their agents abroad secure communication is one of the
key pillars of spycraft throughout history spies and their handlers have come up with increasingly
sophisticated methods of keeping secret messages safe from prying eyes from physically hiding them
in ordinary objects a craft known as steganography to obscuring them using codes and ciphers but
simply rendering a message unreadable to the enemy is no guarantee of security as merely being caught
sending or receiving a coded message can be enough to expose and condemn a suspected spy
and the steady march of technology only made matters worse for as easy as it was to intercept
a letter or telegram it was even easier to tap a phone or listen in on a radio signal this was the
dilemma facing the all-russian cooperative society or archos in the 1920s officially arcos was a
diplomatic body governing economic trade between the uk and the newly formed soviet union however
intercepts of encrypted soviet radio signals by the british secret intelligence service or sis
revealed that the organization was in fact a front for soviet espionage activities in the country
in may 1927 the british government launched a raid against arcos headquarters in london where they
discovered a secret room filled with workers hurriedly burning reams of secret documents
realizing that the british had been reading and decrypting the broadcasts for years
almost overnight the soviet ogpu intelligence service the precursor to the kgb changed the
way it communicated with its agents abroad most significantly the ogpu switched to an enciphering
system known as one-time pads randomly generated single-use cyphers whose keys are the same size
as the plain text being encoded eliminating any repeats that can be exploited by code breakers so
long as each key is only used once one time pads are considered mathematically impossible to crack
and are an absolutely secure form of encryption to prevent the keys from falling into enemy hands
one time pads often printed on water-soluble or flammable paper so they can easily be soaked
swallowed or burned the absolute security afforded by one-time pads allowed the soviets to broadcast
coded messages in the open on common civilian radio frequencies this way while anyone could
theoretically intercept the signal only those with the one-time key could decipher it and as
it was impossible to tell who the signal was intended for this system provided a
useful degree of plausible deniability for agents as akin fernandez explains quote this system is
completely secure because the messages can't be tracked the recipients could be anywhere it
is easy you just send the spies to a country and get them to buy a radio they know where to tune to
and when the system known as one-way voice link or owvl was quickly adopted by a variety of countries
including the uk which during the second world war transmitted instructions to the french resistance
and other allied agents in occupied europe via coded messages embedded in bbc radio broadcasts
later sis and other intelligence agencies established dedicated number stations to
communicate with their agents in the field using the long-range capabilities of shortwave radio
to carry their secret messages to every corner of the globe as espionage expert rupert allison
explains nobody has found a more convenient and expedient way of communicating with an
agent their sole purpose is for intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents
in denied areas a territory where it is difficult to use a consensual form of communications indeed
while number stations might seem like an outmoded relic of the cold war made obsolete by the advent
of computers the internet and other sophisticated communications technology in reality quite the
opposite is true every message sent on a computer or over the internet leaves a digital trace making
absolute security difficult to achieve without incredibly strict communications protocols and
sophisticated encryption numbers stations broadcasts on the other hand are untraceable
efficient and cost-effective meaning the system still has a place in the modern landscape of
high-tech espionage perhaps the most famous recent espionage case involving a numbers station is the
1998 attension case in which five agents in the cuban wasp network were arrested in miami
one piece of evidence later used to convict the agents of espionage was that they had received
instructions from a cuban-based number station known as attension three years earlier fbi
agents had entered the home of a network member had copied decryption software from his laptop
allowing the fbi to decode attention broadcasts these messages included instructions to recruit
local contacts and intelligence sources a greeting for international women's day on may the 8th and a
warning against accepting flights from brothers to the rescuer miami-based anti-caster organization
interestingly the only reason attension was known to be of cuban origin in the first place
is because a technical error resulted in a snippet of a radio havana broadcast becoming mixed in with
the signal more recently another cuban number station was involved in the case of anna montes
a senior defense intelligence analyst who in 2002 was convicted of spying for the cuban government
for nearly 17 years according to prosecutors montez received her instructions via shortwave
radio and decoded them using one-time pads printed on water-soluble paper north korea has also made
extensive use of number stations suddenly resuming broadcasts in july 2016 after a 16-year hiatus
this is thought to be an act of psychological warfare meant to put western intelligence analysts
on edge but what of uvb 76 the mysterious buzzer that barely seems to broadcast anything but its
signature droning tone while no government agency is yet admitted to operating the station the most
likely suspect is the russian foreign intelligence service or svr the agency to which german spies
andreas and hydrant anshlag belonged and while the buzzer and similar russian stations like the pip
and squeaky wheel do not fit the typical profile of number stations experts believe this is because
they are on standby kept in reserve for a future conflict or major deployment of russian agents the
mysterious buzz then is likely just a placeholder meant to discourage other broadcasters from using
that particular frequency evidence for this theory emerged in 2013 when after nearly 30 years of
nothing but buzzing and brief number strings uvb 76 suddenly broadcast the ominous message
command 135 issued according to radio enthusiast maris gob manus this was likely a test message
meant to bring the whole broadcast system onto a simulated war footing so as unsettling as uvb
76 endless monotonous drone might be should that drone ever stop it might be a sign that something
very very bad is about to happen so i really hope you found this video interesting if you did please
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