Spying by Numbers

It’s inherently delightful when the intelligence community breaks the fragile surface tension of its ancient and dishonourable underworld, and emerges willy-nilly into daylight. The Profumo Affair, the Turkish Susurluk scandal, the Aldrich Ames fiasco… But who knew that giant spy antennas lurk all over the planet, blasting hugely powerful broadcasts of coded, numerical gibberish? And yet it’s true. A simple twist of the shortwave dial is enough to bring honest-to-goodness spy radio out of the mysterious ether and right into one’s own living room.
‘Numbers stations’ have been logged and recorded for decades, broadcasting in American English, British English, Cuban Spanish, Polish, Russian, German, Chinese, Swedish, Czech, Arabic, et al. In ham radio circles the numbers stations are common knowledge, powerful presences difficult to miss. But no one has ever been known to publicly admit to the broadcasting. This is because Numbers stations are illegal. The largest and most elaborate pirate radio operation on earth, they blandly defy world-wide radio-spectrum allocation treaties. The practice dates back at least to the days of the Special Operations Executive in World War II, and it may well have begun earlier, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the heyday of Mata Hari.
The tactical reasons for using short wave radio are simple. As electronic intelligence professionals know only too well, breaking enemy codes is only half the story. The other half is ‘traffic analysis’ – not what the adversary says, but where he is, who he is, when he says it, and to whom. Shortwave radio defeats traffic analysis because it can be heard by everyone on the planet. It makes everyone on earth a potential spy.
The ‘numbers’ recited on these stations are classic five-digit code groupings, generally repeated for 10 to 15 minutes, usually by women. These are deciphered by means of a ‘one-time pad’, a coded sheet that is used a single time only, and then scrapped. One-time pad codes are mathematically unbreakable, so as long as the spy isn’t actually caught with the guilty pad on his person, he can listen securely to broadcasts from home base.
For The Conet Project, Irdial Discs has assembled a 4-CD audio portrait of the better-known Numbers rackets, such as Britain’s ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’, the CIA’s ‘Counting Station’, China’s ‘New Star’, the Romanian ‘Skylark’, and other aptly named troublemakers. On the face of it, it’s hard to imagine anything more monotonous than a middle-aged Polish cryptographerette stonily reciting an endless string of alien numbers into the global wavebands. But these tedious recordings have a certain sinister panache thanks to poor reception, occasional enemy jamming, and their very obvious use of wowing, fluttering, Cold-War-era, analogue equipment.
The project is an excellent prank recording to play on a combined CD/radio when one plans to leave the office. It’s radio all right, but it sounds as if it’s emerging half-dead from the frozen edge of the universe. It has a leaden air of deadly seriousness while also being totally inexplicable. When one tires of the scratching, whirring, and narcotised chanting (this process takes maybe five minutes), there’s always the multi-page Conet Project booklet, handily included with the CD. While Irdial Discs generally traffics in niche oddities such as live cosmic recordings of the ‘sound’ of the Aurora Borealis and MIDI-free vintage synthesiser noodlings, they’ve struck a real subcultural lode with the Numbers Station fan crowd. These are blokes – they’re doubtless all male – who combine in one elite cadre the 20th century subcultures of 50s ham radio geeks, 60s James Bond spy fandom, and 90s Internet cypherpunks. As a social phenomenon, they seem to me far more interesting than the people they track. The booklet has a lot of heavy-breathing spooky speculation and very little in the way of solid fact; not surprising, as that is just the way that people like NSA and GCHQ prefer to be regarded by the rest of us.
It’s hard to imagine any form of human communication more intensely mind-numbing than encrypted shortwave. Anyone who considers this stuff ‘romantic’ or ‘fascinating’ should be sentenced to read Peter Wright’s Spycatcher ten times in a row. It’s top-secret, it’s illegal, and it’s probably up to no good, but that doesn’t make it wonderful. For one thing, it’s a dead certainty that 90% of these seemingly meaningless transmissions are, in fact, actually meaningless. Defeating traffic analysis requires the broadcaster to emit constant gibberish in all directions. Once this tradition is established, you never want to break the routine – this would cause enemy fox-ears to prick up beneath their headphones all around the planet.
The Conet people point out that East German numbers broadcasts, clearly a dead letter since 1989, have nevertheless been churning on steadily ever since. They cannily deduce the existence of a massive undercover network of STASI moles in the employ of new patrons. I deduce something else entirely – that it’s cheaper to keep an antenna farm running, than to have a crowd of German spook technicians sell their skills and life stories to Rupert Murdoch.
The apparent romance of espionage conceals its human squalor and its screw-up factor. Certain numbers stations have been known to automate their broadcasts, but still use a live numbers DJ, both of them on the air at the same time, so that their own transmissions are garbled and useless. That is the authentic world of spookdom – enormous budgets, huge technical resources, no constitutional constraints, no effective oversight, no clear goals, no institutional feedback, and no way out. My personal suspicion is that Numbers traffic consists mostly of random garbage, cut with spooky subcultural in-jokes. Even moles in deep cover need a little levity. If one has a giant antenna farm buried in Eastern Europe with enough raw power to fry pigeons on fences 50 miles away, it must be very difficult indeed not to abuse that opportunity. I deduce a Numbers underworld much like the early days of ARPANET – myopic radio techies and their office girls, filling the dead air with dirty jokes, hey-good-buddy CB ribbing and water-cooler gossip.
The ‘security’ aspect of such low-bandwidth jabber seems particularly absurd nowadays. In the 90s, nobody catches spies with secret shortwave radios; people catch you because you’re a divorced, bankrupt alcoholic who suddenly acquires a Ferrari. My strong suspicion is that the Numbers station crowd carries on their activities mostly for the sake of one another. The Arabs and Chinese blast out numerical gibberish merely so that the Group of 7 will believe that they are global players. The very active Czech station, now under the sinister Vaclav Havel regime, probably broadcasts absurdist theatre. And, like anyone who plays this album, the spooks are doubtless fascinated by the sheer unlikeliness of it all, while secretly hoping for an early chance to stop.