Additional background on the March 11 "7910 kHz Numbers Station" post: An amateur sleuth thinks ghostly broadcasts are a revival of Cold War ‘numbers stations’
Rushing back from work to his home in Milan on Tuesday, Roberto turned on his shortwave radio set, tuned it to 7910 kHz and heard a ghostly voice reciting a stream of numbers in Farsi.
“A fellow shortwave enthusiast had told me about the signal, which started the same day the US attacked Iran,” Roberto, who posts news of his radio scanning under the name “Shortwave Observer”, said. “It did not exist before and it looked to me like someone, possibly the CIA, was transmitting coded messages to agents inside Iran.”
Roberto, who declined to give his surname, is one of thousands of amateur radio operators searching for so-called numbers stations used by state spy agencies to send sequences to agents, ready with code books to jot down instructions.
In an era of high-tech, cyberespionage and burner phones, coded radio signals may seem a relic of the Cold War but they still have one outstanding advantage — while computers and phones leave traces, code books can be burnt. “There is no way of tracing the recipient of a signal, they could be anyone with a radio, anywhere in the world,” Roberto, 47, said.
While the content of the messages may be top secret, that does not stop thousands listening in. “We know the Farsi transmission comes from the Middle East and has been broadcasting daily at 6pm and 2am London time, with messages lasting from a few minutes up to an hour,” he said. “There has been a lively debate about whether it is being sent into Iran to agents whose phones may be intercepted, or even being broadcast by Iran to its own agents around the world.”
Pioneered in the First World War, numbers stations hit their stride during the Cold War when intelligence agencies would introduce number sequences with phrases like “Ready? Ready?”, electronic noises, or music. The “Lincolnshire Poacher” station, thought to be run by British intelligence, played the first bars of the folk song The Lincolnshire Poacher before numbers were read out. It broadcast until 2008, two years after a jamming by the North Korean foreign language service Voice of Korea.
Since the end of the Cold War, the US has alleged that Cuban spies it has caught relied on numbers stations broadcast from Havana.
Roberto said that before the Farsi station appeared on February 28, the main stations still operating were Russian, Taiwanese and Polish. “They broadcast groups of numbers and change frequencies regularly,” he said. “You need a large antenna to broadcast, meaning government. Polish radio enthusiasts have triangulated the signal coming from Poland and it possibly originates from a military facility.”
Roberto, an employee of a paint company in Milan, said the shortwave community came from all walks of life. “There are doctors, lawyers, pilots, builders — we use it to chat,” he said.
On Thursday, as interest in the Farsi station grew, it was jammed by a pulsing, electronic noise. “It was jammed at 2am on Thursday by a very powerful signal, which is identical to the jamming that has long been disrupting ‘Radio Farda’, an anti-Iranian regime shortwave station,” Roberto said.
“That proves the jamming is of Iranian origin. What happens now is the numbers station may go silent for a few days, then return to the same frequency, or change frequency and its time of transmission to confuse the jammers.”
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