CIA Numbers Stations- Do they still exist? |
The CIA ran numbers stations throughout the Cold War era, and probably still do. Shortwave radio stations continue to broadcast arranged numbers to intelligence officers and spies operating in foreign countries. They broadcast mostly at fixed time schedules, although some may occur randomly.
Numbers stations are shortwave radio
transmitters that operate between 3,000 and 30,000 kilohertz, transmitting cryptic
strings of numbers or numbers uttered by a creepy computerized-sounding
voice. Some may send broadcasts via Morse code or by various types of
weird noises.
Their use began during the Cold War era,
and a well-known numbers station was the E03 "Lincolnshire Poacher", which
was run by the British Secret Intelligence Service. It broadcast from a clandestine location in Bletchley Park in the mid-1970s. Ironically, the “Lincolnshire Poacher”
was given this nickname because its transmissions have been traced to Royal Air
Force base Akrotiri on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and it played the
first two bars of the folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher” before it
transmitted each string of numbers!
In the
MISSION OF VENGEANCE spy thriller, the CIA tries to avoid the vulnerabilities of digital world
communications over long distances, since foreign adversaries have advanced
their digital tracking and surveillance capabilities to an art form. This snippet from MISSION
OF VENGEANCE shows how the NSA uses Brute Force computer hardware to crack
enemy encrypted communications. Interesting to note- numbers stations make Brute Force
useless:
The whirring sound intensified as her
supercomputer continued hunting down the password. Stacey’s Brute Force
hardware searched through every number combination from one to nine, then
rifled through the top ten million most frequently-used passwords. She
programmed it to search every possible upper and lower-case letter combo in both
Russian and English. After a while, the results came back. Unavailable.
Next, she began exploring all possible
letter, number and special character sequences while entering additional search
recommendations, including top Russian first, last and middle household names,
the names of Russian military and intelligence heroes, popular Russian bands,
songs, sports figures, artists, movie actors and even common Russian names for
pets.
No other NSA employees were near her, as
agreed upon by General Morrison and the NSA director. She often spoke to
herself in her isolated cubicle. “I’ll start with eight-character
combinations.” She entered the instructions into Brute Force. Moments later, it
came back with the number of guesstimates it would generate:
6,634,498,321,890,647.
“Shit! Over six quadrillion. I’m going to
be here for a while.” End of snippet.
BTW,
Stacie eventually unlocks the password, but this example from the spy thriller
novel demonstrates why many numbers stations continue to broadcast today. They haven’t
“evolved” much and the format remains the same. The transmissions of numbers
begin on the hour or half-hour with a brief identifier at the start in the form
of radio-alphabet “code names” – such as Alpha Bravo Oscar, followed by some
short phrase, like “Attention!”.
The
numbers are spoken in a clear, monotone male or female voice with no emotion,
then it signs off with an “end of message.” During the Cold War, such broadcast
messages sent from the Soviet Union ended in a string of zeros.
There may
be fake, or decoy, numbers stations that do not transmit to undercover agents
at all. Such decoy stations were common during the Cold War and may be in
existence today. Instead of broadcasting genuine messages, they transmit meaningless
text, possibly for training purposes, but most likely to trick opponents into
wasting resources to monitor and find out what they mean, and to spend valuable
time hunting for non-existent spies.
For
spies in the field, low-tech spoken number transmissions continue to have
advantages in the 21st century. High-tech data-receiving equipment is difficult
to obtain, and being caught with just a shortwave radio has a degree
of plausible deniability that no spying
is being conducted. After all, what’s illegal about being a ham radio operator?
There are ham radio operator clubs throughout the world.
I
enjoyed the movie “The Numbers Station” with John Cusack, a black ops agent
with the CIA, who is assigned to a remote numbers broadcast station with orders
to protect the station and the code operator, Katherine (Malin Akerman). When
the station comes under attack, the pair work together to defend it, save themselves
and stop their attackers from sending out a deadly code that could change the
world as we know it.
Lastly, enjoy this excellent video: Whatever Happened to the Numbers Stations?- Spying by the Numbers. Stacie's "Brute Force" NSA program is mentioned in it. Enjoy!
Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), enjoys writing about the U.S. Intelligence Community, and relishes traveling to the Florida Keys and Key West, the Bahamas and Caribbean. He combines both passions in his Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series. Check out his latest spy thriller: MISSION OF VENGEANCE.
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