If you tune an amateur radio station to short wavelengths, you can stumble upon very strange programs almost anywhere in the world. On the air, they say numbers, without interruption, one by one. So far - officially - no one has been able to decipher these strange messages. What actually stands behind them is in the Life material.
If you take a good shortwave radio and tune it carefully, then besides news, talk shows and modern pop music, you may stumble upon another rather strange thing. These are radio stations broadcasting a hum or a simple looping melody. If you find yourself very persistent and listen to them for a long time, at some point the hum will be replaced by a very strange and frightening transmission.
Breaking through the interference, a female, but as if belonging to a robot, voice will dictate one after one hundred and thousand numbers and letters, as if telling you some eerie secret on the air. These are numbered radio stations, secret broadcasting sources. Their identity is not known to anyone, and no one has been able to figure out the code for the entire time of its existence. They regularly get in touch and, broadcasting encrypted information on the air, carry a code consisting of letters and numbers over the radio waves: seven, eight, one, two, five.
One hundred years on the air
Invented at the end of the nineteenth century, radio was used almost immediately by the military to transmit information. Where the military, there is secrecy. And already in 1915, during the First World War, the first radio stations appeared, transmitting coded information. There was no point in hiding the broadcast itself, but decrypting the transmitted information without having a key was an almost insoluble task.
Most likely, numbered radios were already working as a simple and reliable way of communicating with government agencies and undercover spies. It has long been known from numerous documentary books and memoirs of retired intelligence officers that the Vernam cipher is used to decipher such messages, a kind of "one-time notebooks" - a cryptosystem that is absolutely unbreakable when used correctly. It was invented in 1917 by AT&T employee Gilbert Vernam and serves as an example of a system with absolute cryptographic strength.
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After the First World War, they subside, only to reappear on the air during the Second - and not subside for a second. Numbered radios use a range of radio waves with a frequency of 3 megahertz (wavelength 100 meters) to 30 megahertz (wavelength 10 meters). This range was not chosen by chance. On the one hand, short waves can propagate over long distances through multiple reflections from the ionosphere and the Earth's surface. All that is required is sufficient transmitter power, and then the signal can be caught thousands of kilometers away. On the other hand, multiple reflection of the signal from the same ionosphere on the way to the user serves as a reliable protection against direction finding of the transmission site.
In the 1980s, several radio amateurs using a portable direction finder managed to locate the transmitting antenna of a number radio station in Florida (USA). The exciting adventure ended at the most interesting place. The signal came from the territory of the military base, from where radio amateurs, young and not so, were driven by a nasty broom.
Transmission technology
The transmission technology of most numbered radios is very simple. You need a shortwave transmitter with a power of 10 to 100 kilowatts. This is enough to carry encrypted information on the air and transmit it over considerable distances. For comparison, most amateur radio stations, with which you can reach very far, are most often satisfied with a power of 1 to 100 watts.
There is one drawback. Short waves are quite sensitive to weather conditions. At the same time, the quality of reception depends on various processes in the ionosphere associated with the level of solar activity, the season and the time of day. On the other hand, only a good shortwave radio is enough to receive a message; you can carry it with you without arousing suspicion.
In Europe in the seventies, there were rumors that numbered radio stations from the USSR had increased power, as much as 500 kilowatts, but they broadcast from the very heart of the terrible Soviets, from somewhere beyond the Ural Mountains. However, this will never be verified. Nobody seriously engaged in bearing, besides, everything was complicated by a stormy love of radio amateurism. The shortwave range in Europe was at that time overcrowded, which also made it very difficult to try bearing.
The only way to learn anything interesting about numbered radio stations is through the use of "indirect data" or the so-called metainformation. However, more on that later.
Radio process
Numbered radio stations do not broadcast around the clock. There is no need for this, and, most likely, there is no such amount of transmitted information. With a certain frequency, they go on the air, conduct a short program in order to hide behind the veil of silence again.
Immediately before the transmission, which most often begins at an equal time (at the beginning of an hour or half an hour), a sound saver is set - an identifier for the station, and possibly for the addressee of the message. It is for these screensavers that radio amateurs most often distinguish numbered radio stations in a conversation. For example, the station Lincolnshire Poacher ("Lincolnshire Poacher") is called so because before the transmission of each number series, two bars of the folk song of the same name are played on the air. On the air of the Magnetic Fields station, before and after the dialing of numbers, the music of the Frenchman Jean Michel Jarre sounds. Atención starts the show with a Spanish phrase: ¡Atención! ¡Atención! ("Attention attention!").
Subsequently, a group of enthusiasts and radio amateurs ENIGMA 2000 proposed another version of the naming of numbered radio stations, which became the de facto standard. The name is given according to the following scheme: for example: E03a Cherry Ripe. The language is coded with the letter E - English; G - German; S - almost all Eastern European languages, including Russian; V - other languages, most often Spanish, Chinese or Hebrew. M means that the radio station is broadcasting in Morse code, and X is a noise station, on which tones of different frequencies are transmitted, more like a buzz.
Chasing a ghost
Of course, radio amateurs could not ignore this phenomenon, and they began to closely monitor the numbered radio stations. It is believed that around the nineties, many numbered radio stations switched to synthesized voices to further reduce the ability to locate broadcasting. After all, trained people can determine the place where a live speaker grew up or studied, simply on the basis of his accent.
Human operators can also make mistakes, by which one can "calculate" the roots of their numbered radio station. For example, Atención once broadcast a few seconds of a popular Cuban radio station. Most likely, the operator made a mistake when turning on the tape recorder (previously numbered radio stations used the voices of living people, simply recorded on tape). And now most radio amateurs are already transmitting this information to each other. By the way, apart from this case, Atención was not able to find its way, so it will not be possible to check the correctness of the data received.
Under the "Os" network
This information was indirectly confirmed in 1988, when the Cuban radio station Atención became the first numbered radio station officially declared a spy station. This statement was central to the espionage case following the exposure of the Cuban spy network, WASP (Wasp). It is better known in our country as the case of the "Cuban Five", which was also part of the WASP Network.
The United States accused Os of espionage, conspiracy to kill and other crimes. The members of the "five" infiltrated the American-Cuban organizations aiming to overthrow the Cuban government, and passed information about them to Havana. According to the Cuban version, the members of the "five" collected information about the upcoming anti-Cuban terrorist attacks, which helped to prevent their commission.
In 1988, American prosecutors claimed that the suspects entered the numbers they heard on Atención into a computer with a program to decrypt spy instructions. FBI officers in 1995 were able to copy this program and deciphered some messages. The witness statement used three examples of decoded Atención messages. The language of the original messages is not specified. Most likely, this is Spanish, but what we see here is only a version prepared for the general public.
- "Prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis."
[68 characters]
- “Under no circumstances should [agents] German nor Castor fly with BTTR or another organization on days 24, 25, 26 and 27).
[112 characters]
(BTTR is a resistance group to the Castro regime that used aircraft to rescue raft fugitives from Cuba.)
- "Congratulate all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman."
[71 characters]
There is information that messages were transmitted at a rate of 1 character (or number) per second. Therefore, the transmission of the whole message took a minute or more. Unfortunately, it is not possible to check whether this is true or not. In the same way, it will not be possible to understand whether the cipher itself was broken or the only way to disclose information received from the numbered radio was the capture of the encryption program. However, the numbered radio station Atención continues to broadcast numbers that every evening someone greedily catches.
True, the American side still has very, very little success in catching its Cuban comrades. Traces of the introduction of people from Havana into the US state apparatus surface much more often. Apparently, the old way of communication through number stations is still quite safe today, despite the rapid development of technology. It would seem - what could be easier than creating an encrypted channel in Telegram and exchanging messages there as much as you like. Non-professionals, for example, from ISIS, do just that. Despite this, they are regularly caught. This is because the presence of at least one superfluous link in the agent-control chain immediately sharply reduces the reliability of the entire chain. Stations and modern versions of "disposable notebooks" are good precisely because they contain only a signal, a "notebook" (book) and a recipient. Not finding the third or second element,You cannot get access to the transmitted data - this is not Telegram with a fire-chat.
By the way, it is easy to see that some of the Atención messages have a double bottom, as once in similar cipher messages of the corresponding Soviet services. For example, it is rather doubtful that the air of a spy radio station was actually used to transmit such innocent information as congratulations on March 8th. Something similar to these "congratulations" in a fictionalized form has long been described in well-known examples of Soviet mass culture.
With a Russian accent
One of the most famous numbered radio stations is the Russian Buzzer, the UVB-76 radio station (S28 according to ENIGMA2000 classification). It is so named because most of the time, when no transmissions are in progress, it carries the channel marker in the form of repeated buzzes. It turns off during transmissions. The Buzzbox has been in use since the early 1980s.
At first, the radio station operated at the communications center of the General Staff near Povarovo, 40 kilometers north-west of Moscow. Now at least two transmitters are used: one in Naro-Fominsk, the second in the Leningrad region in the village of Kerro on the Karelian Isthmus.
The "buzzer" does not get in touch often. Sometimes periods of silence last more than a year. All signals recorded by radio amateurs are saved. However, the chance to decipher them tends to zero.
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Shadow of the century
Numbered radio stations did not stop working after the advent of the Internet. This is understandable: the agent to whom the information is intended can be under surveillance or in conditions where the Internet is absent or tightly controlled - for example, in a military unit or on a ship. The radio signal does not leave any traces, and the code for its decryption is most often some innocent book (now the situation has become a little more complicated, but not fundamentally), so as not to arouse suspicion.
However, recently something similar appears on the Internet. For example, on the YouTube channel WebDriver Torso, short videos consisting of multi-colored rectangles and pure-tone signals are published with enviable regularity. For a long time it was not known for whom this is being done and whether it carries any information. Then Google explained: the purpose of this channel is pretty harmless.
Amateur radio in the 21st century has become much easier. There are many services that provide online access to radio stations, where you can enter the exact frequency and hear the received signal. And if you have the time and desire, you can look at the lists of numbered radio stations and spend the evening searching to hear these incomprehensible and a little frightening sounds yourself: seven, eight, one, two, five …
Author: Mikhail Kotov. Co-author: Alexander Berezin