99% Invisible - 97- Numbers Stations

Episode Date: December 21, 2013

If you tune around on a shortwave radio, you might stumble across a voice reciting an endless stream of numbers. Just numbers, all day, everyday. These so-called “numbers stations,” say nothing about where they are transmitting from or who they … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Radio, Francis. The handle or name you adopt should be one of a kind based on something special in your life. This is 20 Chabrogan, March 4, 1973. White brand land. All you nice people living in the middle of America, they're beautiful. Everything is beautiful. We're talking about radio, radio, meaning you do not see the picture.

You hear the voice. Here's something called the box humana. Here's a human voice. The voice radio involves the audience, fire more than television, every year. This is WJK. One day in March 12, 1973. Thank you and here's some more in music. Take 20 now people. This is Big Jetter. I'm on a way to Canaan Land.

Here we go. Podcasting, we're like of a a better term has been good to me. But there's something about the transmission of radio signals that I love. For billions of years, the electromagnetic spectrum was populated only by radiation from natural objects. And then, all of a sudden, the air was filled with voices and codes and dots and dashes and music. My romance with Radio began decades ago, but one of the key stories that captured my imagination at the very beginning of my radio career was the shortwave numbers mystery.

Produced by David Goren, the kitchen cistern's lost and found sound series. It's one of my favorite stories about one of my favorite subjects of all time, so I'm going to play it for you. The shortwave numbers mystery was first broadcast in May of 2000. Here's David Goren. The first time I heard a Spanish numbers lady, I was a kid, lying in bed, tuning around on my uncle's old shortwave radio. I was baffled by the solitary voice. She's still on the air, and even though I've heard her in one form or another since the early 70s, the sound of her voice continues to haunt me.

Ever since I was 13, I've scoured the shortwave bands for exotic signals. It's hard not to stumble over a number station. When I first heard them, no one seemed to know anything about them. By the end of the 70s, they acquired a following. A hardquake group of listeners continued to obsessively tape and analyze these stations. Think of them catchy nicknames like the Boardman and Bulgarian Betty. You statement tracks the numbers for monitoring times, a journal for hardcore radio listeners. They're encrypted messages to somebody.

We think it's despised, we hope it's just despised, nothing more sinister than that. A number station is defined as any of several hundred shortwave radio broadcasters, all of which are using high-power big transmitters, large antennas, global coverage of the entire planet, which do nothing except broadcast meaningless strings of numbers. They never say why they're doing it, they never say who they are. My take on the numbers transmissions is that that the evil twin of a standard churwaeve station. They have announcers and programming of a sword. They even adhere to a vintage shortwave tradition, the interval signal.

This is a little diddy played a few minutes before the main broadcast to help the listener find and fine-tune the signal. Next comes the header. Green, nine, seven, one, five. the header. The header is followed usually by something that lets people know the header is over. The CIA likes to beep, other stations do other strange things. Then they usually go into the message, which is a series of number groups, four or five numbers. I'm revisiting myself as a lonely agent sitting in the basement in some urban area. I have no friends.

I'm far from home. I'm far from my family. And this is my communication. This is my link back to my world. So I'm very carefully recording this message. Tell me something. I say again. I ask Bushneyer a leading academic cryptographer.

Why an intelligence agency would communicate with an agent in the field in such an open way? It seems to be a relic of the Cold War. We always think of the radio as mass broadcast. You speak on the radio and everybody listens. This is an example of radio being used to talk to one particular person. You encrypt the message, which allows you to use this public broadcast medium to send a private message. That's really very pretty. The CIA does it, Russia does it, Cuba does it, the British do it, everybody does it. Hewstegman.

Okay evidence, that's a problem, there's never anything that hard. I've always assumed these are using a one-time pad or a variant, which are theoretically unbreakable given the assumptions of only having the cypher text or only having what's broadcast on the stations. A one-time pad has a page of random numbers, which is the key used to encrypt and then decrypt the message. The sender and recipient each have a copy. The pad is used once and then destroyed. It is pretty much untraceable. The operations have been compromised over and over again. People are captured, people change sides, people just get sloppy. Many many times they've seen the code pads, they've seen the receivers. The fact that the other side

knows that this is how they do it does not give them any more access to the information. It's a perfect system in that respect. Some stations get jailed. presumably by rivals who pinpointed the transmitter site using sophisticated techniques. A numbers enthusiasm has to rely on intensive listening to pick up any clues. Most of what you hear in the United States does come from Cuba. The Cuban stuff started right after Castro got in and started getting tensions in that area. It has gone on since the engineering is sloppy, tape stop and the middle tapes are played backwards. They play Radio Havana by mistake, Radio Havana plays them by mistake.

You get the idea they're just barely on top of the situation, but they keep at it. There's another Spanish-numbers lady who is widely heard in North America. Some numbers monitors claim to have traced the signal to a government transmitter site in Warrantin, Virginia. They call her Cynthia, as it starts with a C and ends with IA. Havana Moon just came out of nowhere. He just started writing one day about the shortwave numbers, and his stuff was extremely provocative, and it seemed to come from straight inside.

The only thing he would ever say about himself was that he was a retired intelligence type, a real trench coat cloaked-and-dagger spook. There is some connection between the operations and the ranking, where we can have the I-LE, and maybe the defense and the run, and the run to the end, the I.O.D. and maybe the defense of the emergency. Havana Moon was a gentleman named William Godby.

He was a retired naval personnel, and he was just a very nice gentleman enough. Havana Moon, who died in 1996, found a co-conspirator in John Fulford, an ex-police intelligence officer with an interest in radio's dark side. During the late 1980s, they roamed around Florida with the radio direction finder. He confided in me that he suspected there was one possible two transmitter sites in South Florida. He had an idea where a couple of them were. We took some equipment out. I set the direction finder up. We took some bearings over a couple of weeks, where the bearing lines crossed,

was right around a military transmitter site, located in one of the airports here in South Florida. We drove right to the airport, when the transmitters came on, the radio that we jumped out of our hands, of the signal was so loud. So we figured right there, we had it. During the day, the Navy sent standard traffic over this transmitter.

Located at West Palm Beach International Airport, its frequency was just three kilohertz away from the numbers transmission. The antennas were being down into the Caribbean. Who sent the traffic? What happened? No idea. It is an unmanned site sent over a telephone line from the parts unknown. That will have no idea. Obviously, one of the intelligence agencies. My name is John R. Winston. I'm the assistant bureau chief of the enforcement bureau federal communications commission. We do not intend to discuss these stations if any exists at all and I'm not saying there are.

If you're signed to say there are those that are transmitting in this country we know of innumerable ones outside of this country. Our only interest is if they are causing interference. We then work with the country of transmission to seek solution. Well, you can't hide a transmitter. Cryptographer Bruce Schneyer. Now, remember what a number station is doing. It's hiding the location of the recipient. The location of the transmitter is not necessarily a secret.

The person who's receiving it is somewhere, and we don't know where. Every night in the wake in Europe you could hear these weird gongs, some like some sort of church bells out of the tomb. That was part of the Starr's stations. Simon Mason discovered the numbers in much the same way I did. By the mid-80s he'd begun to seriously document the European number seen from his home in Kingston upon hall in England. There's been this spy uncovered in my home city. He seriously documented the European number seen from his home in Kingston upon hall in England.

There has been this spy uncovered in my home city. I know what he was listening to when he was under the control of the Stasley, the East German secret place. The god knows what his wife and kids thought when he had his gongers coming out of his kitchen hot. Five months after the Berlin Wall fell, the concession went off the air forever. Bayern lagged a lot of the big players in the cold water there have gone now. And there's a lot of activity now in the Far East. The strangest one of the lot has got to be the one from Taiwan.

Writer Hustegui. It's called Newstar Broadcasting, and it has this lady who they tell me even the net culture is way way to enthusiastic. And she's been computerized and she comes out of the machine. She says things like, good morning, please decode your message. This is all the Mandarin of course. She says things like, thank you very much for decoding today's message. I hope you have a nice day. I mean, she's being nice to the spies. You gotta love it. At this station is so over the top, it needs statement to think that the purpose is less

for transmitting secret messages than for spreading disinformation. Just this colossal diversion so that the mainland Chinese will think that Taiwan has put hundreds and hundreds of agents into that country, which they might or might not have done. I would say that's maybe why half these agencies do it this way. It makes two guys in a government office and some crummy building without water somewhere. Sound like you know they're on a level with the CIA. Everybody sounds the same on shortwave. Most monitors seem sure that the number stations are a part of international espionage,

but some signals remain elusive. There are a few strange stations that almost admit, like the buzzer on F625 killer hits. Maybe just keeping this frequency up in case some sort of well disaster happens and then it can take over whether they're just a simple shortwave setup after all they, the sasselite's are being blown out of the sky. Just like a note padden paper left behind in case your computer crashes. I think it's just the biggest conceptual art project unintentionally or otherwise that anybody ever made that puts Christo and those guys to shame. It's planetary. I listen to shortwave these days with a bit of a pang. It's fading out

regarded as archaic by many international broadcasters yet the number stations persist. Sometimes when I hear one, I write down some of the groups and wonder who the message is for and what it might say. Meet your contact. Blow up the bridge. Don't blow up the bridge. Maybe it's just keep listening. A tension on Seis Yette, Trace Yette Serro, the shortwave numbers mystery was produced

by David Goren in 2000. Special thanks to Hugh Stegman, Simon Mason, Chris Mullensky, Jonathan Marks, Tom Savart, a keen Fernandez of the Cognit project, and Carill Wheeler. It was produced for the Kitchen Sisters' Lost and Found Sound project on NPR in the year 2000. I caught up with David Goren in 2013 and asked him about what was going on with the number of stations today.

They're still there, they're still on the air. I still like to go out there and hunt around and invariably you can stumble across a station. What's changed is the countries involved. A lot of the action has moved to the east, China, Russia, North Korea. Cuba keeps going on too. And in a way, this sort of mirrors what's happening on shortwave in general with countries no longer using shortwave as a means of communicating their message or propaganda to other countries. So it's still being used and that's it's kind of comforting and also kind of creepy because when I tune across them, you know, it's like the world tilts a little bit You know, it's just a very odd thing to encounter.

David Gorn's current project is called Short Waveology, which I highly recommend. You can find it online at shortwaveology.net. You can also find it on Facebook and SoundCloud. Why we were putting the show together, we were reminded of an episode I produced back in 2011 episode number 23 of this radio program about one of my favorite websites. So I thought I'd just tack this on the end here for your enjoyment in case you missed it. You'll definitely at the connection. You are listening to 99% Invisible. I am Roman Mars.

My name is Eric Everhart and I'm the creator of the site you are listening to Los Angeles. And you are listening to Chicago, you are listening to New York, you are listening to Montreal, and you are listening to San Francisco. I am in the 21st, 25th Rowley North, Banshee, the North, the 80s, the White pickup truck. With the tailgate down, there's a front of the a dog in the back of the vehicle that has no leaves or color the front of the a dog will fall out or color that brings the dog will fall out.

Last year after the Giants won the World Series, I was out in the streets of San Francisco, checking out all the different celebrations going on. And when I got home, I was looking on Twitter and I saw a lot of people were posting links to what's happening in their neighborhood, people out lighting bonfires, and one thing that kept coming up was, hey, check out the San Francisco police radio on Soma FM. So I started listening to it. It was cool and got bored after a couple minutes and started putting on some of my music in the background. And something about that, there was like a synergy between the police scanner and like the

music I was playing that really sounded cool and I wanted to find a way to share that with people so that's where I came up with the idea for this site. And since it came online on March 6, 2011, I've spent what might be considered an anordinate amount of time listening to, you are listening to. Some people think it's peaceful, some people think it's creepy, I think it's mesmerizing, and it's elegance is an its simplicity. So when you load the page, there's a little JavaScript file that pulls in an audio stream from radioreference.com. They provide the police radio audio.

A playlist from SoundCloud, which is a music sharing site, which has been screened by Eberhart so that the playlist only has these dreamy ambient soundscapes that complement the police scanner audio. And it also loads the background image, which is coming from Flickr. Those are the three main parts, and they're all coming from sites other than my own. And it's all legal and free and only possible because each of the companies

provide simple web APIs. Deplication programming interface that specifically promote this kind of sharing and mashing up. You can create something new that might not be what the creator intended. The design choice being made by these sites, the thing that you are listening to is exploiting, is a relinquishing of a little bit of the control of their data in order for that data to spread across the web in ways that they never could have imagined. In this way, outside and independent developers like Everhart can act as a kind of R&D department. Radio reference and flicker and soundcloud,

and the artists offering creative commons, wealthy free music on soundcloud, did not imagine this use of their content. But they do have an API. They just created a shareable architecture that taps into a remixing culture where new ideas can flourish. Since the site is launched and it where gets around,

it's been very popular. I've been contacted by lots and lots of artists from SoundCloud and they all want to be part of it. They all think it's cool and they're asking me, can I have my music included on your site? Now they're not getting anything out of it. They're not getting paid. There's no royalties.

There's nothing like that. But they are getting exposure. I think these are people who posted their music up there because they wanted to share it with people, and now they're finding their sharing with a lot more people. So it's kind of like a virtuous cycle, I guess, where I created something, I'm not looking for anything in return, the artists are getting something out of it. Soundcloud and radio reference are getting something out of it because there are more people are becoming aware of their services. So really at zero cost to me

or to the artists, we're all building something together that kind of enhances everyone's work. Designing for openness allows others to answer the questions that you don't have the answers to, but it's greatest power maybe that it allows others to ask the questions that you don't have the answers to. But it's greatest power, maybe, that it allows others to ask the questions that you haven't even thought to ask. This is Roman again in 2013. You are listening.to has grown into dozens of pages now, including one that features the number stations actually, and probably the radio chatter of a city near you. These local radio transmissions are passing through your body right now, so you might as 99154 and be in route to Bayford, Mars. 99% invisible is Sam Greenspan, Avery Truffleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW in San Francisco

and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. We are now produced at a beautiful downtown Oakland, California, the home of radio. Thanks to our friends at the architectural firm Arxine for giving us a place to call home, a place to hang our hats, and a place to hang out with real architects. They are really talented and kind group of people, get to know them at Arxine.com. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars. Sam Greenspan tweets at SamListens,

Avery tweets at Troublemen, but we have all kinds of great stuff going on, including links to shortwaveology and you are listening to on our website, it is 999PI.org. Radio Tapio. From PRX.