This radio station has been broadcasting its weird shortwave transmissions since 1982. Who is this buzzing and reading of meaningless numbers and words on the air in Russian for?
Somewhere in the middle of the isthmus that separates Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, among lakes and swamps, there is a rusted iron gate. Behind them are several radio towers and abandoned buildings surrounded by a stone wall.
In this rather ominous-looking place, as many believe, there was one of the transmitters of an unknown shortwave radio station with the call sign MJB (as Wikipedia notes, since December 28, 2015, the call sign of this mysterious station has changed to ZHUOZ - Translator's note).
24 hours a day, seven days a week - and so over the past 35 years, this station has been broadcasting a monotonous signal, an intermittent hum.
Once or twice a week, a male or female voice reads a meaningless set of Russian words, for example, "zhito", "textolite", "fence" … That's all. Anyone tuned in to 4625 kHz can listen to these strange radio broadcasts from almost anywhere in the world.
This station seems to be specially created for fans of conspiracy theory. Today she has fans all over the world, Wikipedia writes about her (both in Russian and in English), she has her own pages on social networks, and TV stories are shot about her.
To all her fans, she is the Buzzer. In addition, she currently has at least two more "sisters" - the Pip ("Squeaky") and the Squeaky Wheel ("Squeaky wheel"). As many of their listeners honestly admit, it is completely unclear what the meaning of the programs is.
Indeed, “the signal carries absolutely no information,” says David Stapples, an electronic intelligence expert at City University in London.
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What is it?
This frequency is believed to belong to the Russian military, although they have never confirmed this. (According to the authors of the article in the Russian-language "Wikipedia", this is a warning station reserved for the civil defense system and in case of cataclysms. - Translator's note.)
The radio broadcasts began when the communist system was on its last legs and it was already clear who was winning the Cold War. Interestingly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, radio activity only increased.
Nowadays, transmissions are conducted from several places - different sources name a different number of them. (For example, transmitters are named in Naro-Fominsk, PDRTS 69 communication center and in Kerro of the Leningrad region, PDRC 60 communication center. There is also evidence that broadcast centers are located in Voronezh, Pskov and in the village of Bugry, Leningrad Region. - Translator's note.)
Naturally, there is no shortage of different versions and theories trying to explain what the Buzzbox is for. Their scope extends from negotiations with nuclear submarines to communication with aliens.
One of the ideas is this: this is the so-called "dead man's hand" (or "dead hand"). If Russia receives a nuclear strike, the signals will cease, and this will act as a trigger for a retaliatory strike.
As a result, no one will survive on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As crazy as it sounds, there is a grain of reason behind this explanation.
This computer system was created during the Soviet era - to scan the ether and look for signs of life in emergency situations or in the event of a nuclear strike. Many experts believe that it is still valid.
(In 2011, in an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, the commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Lieutenant General Sergei Karakaev, said that the Perimeter system still exists today, “it is on alert.” The Perimeter system, or, as it was called in the West, “Dead hand - was created in the USSR to guarantee the delivery of combat orders from the highest levels of command to command posts and individual launchers of strategic missiles on alert, in the event of an emergency when communication lines may be damaged. - Approx. Translator.)
As Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year, no one will survive a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Maybe Buzzbox has something to do with this?
Some conclusions can be drawn from the signal itself. Like all international radio stations, Zhuzhzhalka broadcasts on short waves, which, unlike long and medium waves traveling in a straight line, are reflected from the ionosphere and the Earth's surface with low losses and can propagate over long distances.
It is the short waves that make it possible to listen to the BBC World Service in Africa or Singapore. But try to catch the BBC London radio somewhere in Birmingham - most likely you will not succeed, because this is FM, radio waves of a different band that do not travel that far …
And then we return to the "hand of the dead". Short waves are used by ships, aircraft, and the military to send signals across continents, oceans and mountain ranges. However, there is one "but".
The reception quality depends on various processes in the ionosphere related to the level of solar activity, the season and the time of day. For example, shorter wavelengths propagate better during the day, longer waves at night, and so on.
If you want guarantees that your radio station will be heard on the other side of the planet (or if you plan to use its signals in the event of a nuclear war!), You need to change the frequency from time to time during the day.
This is exactly what the BBC World Service does. But Buzzbox doesn't do that.
Another theory: This station sends signals to find out how far away the layer of charged particles is. “For radar systems to detect cruise missiles to work successfully, you need to know this,” stresses Stapples.
Alas, it doesn't add up here either. To analyze the height of the layer, the signal must have a well-defined sound, reminiscent of a car alarm. Nothing like Buzzbox.
Interestingly, there was another station, surprisingly similar to Buzzer. The Lincolnshire Poacher operated from the mid 1970s to 2008.
Just like the Buzzbox, it could be heard everywhere - even on the opposite side of the planet.
Just like Buzzbox, it broadcast from an unidentified place, seemingly somewhere in Cyprus.
Like Buzzbox, what the Poacher aired sounded strange and eerie.
At the start of each hour, this station played the first two bars of an English folk song called The Poacher of Lincolnshire:
Oh 'tis my delight on a shining night
In the season of the year
When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
'Twas well I served my master for nigh on seven years …"
After playing the same two-bar excerpt 12 times in a row, the radio station switched to messages that were read out in a disembodied female voice with a reprimand of the upper English class and contained groups of five numbers: "1-2-0-3-6" …
To understand at least a little what all this means, one must go back even further into the past, in the 1920s. ARCOS, the All-Russian Cooperative Joint Stock Company, was a Soviet economic organization registered in Great Britain and created to conduct trade between the RSFSR and England. At least that's what they said.
In May 1927, the British police raided the headquarters of ARCOS in London, trying to find documents confirming the espionage activities of some of the company's employees.
The basement they were searching was studded with all kinds of protective devices. As a result, they found a door without a handle, leading to a secret room, where employees in a hurry burned some documents.
It all looked impressive, but the police did not find anything that the British did not already know about the activities of ARCOS.
That search (which was called a raid in Soviet propaganda - translator's note) turned out to be more useful for Soviet intelligence, which unexpectedly discovered that MI5 had been listening to the so-called "All-Russian Cooperative Joint Stock Company" for several years.
To confirm the necessity of that search, the British Prime Minister even read out several intercepted and decrypted telegrams in the House of Commons.
The result of the high-profile story was that the Russians completely changed the method of encrypting messages. Almost immediately, they switched to a one-time table system.
In this system, the key was randomly generated by the sender and transmitted only to the receiver. With this method, the messages became practically undecipherable. The Russians did not have to fear that someone was listening to them.
And here shortwave numbered (numeric) radio stations appear on the scene, broadcasting coded messages consisting of a number of numbers, as it is believed, for intelligence officers working in foreign countries.
Britain did it too. True, it turned out to be difficult to generate an absolutely random series of numbers, so they came up with an ingenious solution in London.
They hung out a microphone outside the window and recorded the street noise of Oxford Street: the sounds of honking buses, the screams of a policeman - everything that was completely unique and was never repeated in the same order. After that, they translated what was written into a one-time code.
All this, of course, did not stop those who tried to decipher such messages. During World War II, the British realized that in order to crack the Soviet code, they had to somehow get to the disposable tables of the Russians.
“We suddenly discovered that in their military hospitals in East Germany, the Russians were using old, one-off encryption charts as toilet paper,” said Anthony Glees, director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University.
From that day on, soldiers' latrines in the GDR were among the priority targets for British agents.
Numbered radio stations, as a new way of transmitting information, have proven themselves so well that they soon broadcast all over the world. They were given cute names: "Nancy Adam Susan", "Russian Counting Man", "Ripe Cherry" …
The number station also featured in the biggest spy scandal of recent years, when the FBI arrested 11 "mothballed" illegal agents in the United States, allegedly introduced by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (among whom was Anna Chapman, if you forgot about the details of that case - Red.).
So, according to the FBI, the agents received orders from Moscow through coded messages transmitted on short waves by a number station at a frequency of 7887 kHz.
Now North Korea is doing this. On April 14, 2017, the presenter of Radio Pyongyang broadcast something tongue-tied and poorly disguised on the air: "I give survey papers in the lessons of elementary information technology at the University of Distance Education for Freight Forwarders No. 27."
After that, the numbers and pages were transmitted ("number 69 on page 823", "page 957"), which looked like a coded message.
It may surprise someone that number stations are still used in the era of the Internet and high technologies, but they have one very important advantage.
One can guess who is transmitting these messages, but it is completely impossible to understand to whom they are sent - after all, everyone can listen to them.
Probably, it would be faster and more convenient by mobile phone or via the Internet, but for special services it is easier to find out who exactly opened a particular email message.
It is tempting, of course, to conclude that Buzzbox is transmitting orders to Russian spies around the world.
There is only one problem: Buzzer never transmits long series of numbers. (In fact, "Zhuzhzhalka" conveys a mixture of numbers and Russian words - only, perhaps, not in the volume that could be mistaken for a message to an agent abroad - Ed.)
So what is the Buzzbox buzzing about? Many people think that this radio station is a kind of hybrid. The constant buzzing sound is just a marker that kind of says "this is my frequency, this is my frequency …", making it clear that the frequency is busy and not allowing anyone else to use it.
And only at the moment of the crisis (suppose, when someone attacked Russia), the Buzzbox will turn into a number station.
Then it will transmit orders - both to the spy network around the world and to military units that are on alert in remote corners of the country (the territory of Russia is about 70 times larger than the territory of Great Britain).
It seems that Buzzbox is already being tested for this purpose. “In 2013, they broadcast something special: 'MJB ANNOUNCED COMMAND 135 (training alert)', which can be viewed as a test signal for full combat readiness,” says Maris Goldmanis, a radio amateur from the Baltic States who constantly monitors the station. Perhaps this is the answer to the Buzzbox mystery. And if this is true, then we can only hope that its buzzing will never stop.
Zaraya Gorvett