Atencion, Atencion! The Mysterious World of Numbers Stations

above: a collage I created inspired by the numbers stations.

About 20 years ago, I came across an interesting book in my local library ("Big Secrets", by William Poundstone). The book described a secret network of radio stations around the world that would broadcast simple melodies, electonic tones, and anonymous people reading long lists of numbers. There were no station identifications on these broadcasts, and the stations would appear and disappear unpredictably. Poundstone's theory,which has been backed up by further research, was that the stations were secret espionage stations set up by different governments to transmit information to their spies in the field. I imagined a romantic scene of a spy checking into a dingy hotel in La Paz, Dar-es-Salaam, or Tangiers, smoking cigarettes and waiting till the middle of the night when he'd turn on a portable radio and hear the 2 minute radio program made just for him-and decipherable only to him. The next morning, he'd be off on a reconaissance mission, industrial espionage, or an assassination. The whole network seemed like a global subsconscious, dreaming in atonal blasts and ghostly voices, mirroring the conscious world of radio with the world of secret numberical code nonsense. I used my dad's old shortwave radio to search for the number stations, but I never found one. I never thought that I would hear a numbers station--but then the people at Irdial records put together the Conet Project, which is 4 cds worth of recordings of numbers stations, along with detailed liner notes.

Counting control (mp3)

from the Internet Archive description:

The Conet Project - Recordings of Shortwave Numers Stations [ird059]

0000

For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of "Numbers Stations".

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a "one time pad" is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and intonation; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that transmits a female child's voice!

One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official "end of the cold war", but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Why is it that in over 30 years, the phenomenon of Numbers Stations has gone almost totally unreported? What are the agencies behind the Numbers Stations, and why are the eastern European stations still on the air? Why does the Czech republic operate a Numbers Station 24 hours a day? How is it that Numbers Stations are allowed to interfere with essential radio services like air traffic control and shipping without having to answer to anybody? Why does the "Swedish Rhapsody" Numbers Station use a small girls voice?

These are just some of the questions that remain unanswered.

Now you will be able to hear this unique and extraordinary phenomenon for yourself, as Irdial-Discs releases THE CONET PROJECT: the first comprehensive collection of Numbers Stations recordings released to the public.

This Quadruple CD is an important historical reference work for research into this hitherto unreported and unknown field of espionage. The CDs contain 150 recordings spanning the last twenty years; taken from the private archives of dedicated shortwave radio listeners from around the world.

There's more information in the included PDF booklet and via the official site for this 4xCD collection.

Download the Conet 4 CD set of numbers station recordings

My man MaX in Buenos Aires (no joke) created a Flickr group devoted to the estaciones numericales