Happened upon an article about numbers stations in the news today. This time around their use in the ongoing geopolitical situation in the Middle East.
Nice use of a Panasonic R-312, though if they wanted to be a bit more on the money that should’ve been a Sony ICF-2001D!
I liked this part of the article:
“Consider for a moment our dependence on readily available technologies. Modern societies depend on this infrastructure, yet at the same time this reliance can be pressured without firing a shot.”
Very true. Then you wonder why RTÉ demolished its LW transmitter a few years back, and that the BBC is shutting down Radio 4 LW and countless MW stations yet at the same time is broadcasting additional World Service programs on SW in Farsi and other programming in other languages and towards other areas?
There’s some good recordings on Signal Phantom that make for interesting espionage SWL and other oddities going on across the bands. Surprising not see them referenced in the article, which is one of the better ones I’ve read on numbers stations but still misses a few bits here and there (then again it’s a news article, not a book, so you can only add so much).
Interesting reading though and nice to see SWL in the news again.
Some analysts say, the new Persian-language numbers station is likely to be American rather than Iranian. Amateurs (and others) using DF triangulation show that the transmissions are coming from central Europe and not from inside Iran. What’s more the jamming of the numbers station has been been ID’d as Iran’s ‘bubble’ jammer which Iran uses to jam Persian broadcasts from BBC Persia and VOA Farsi.
Why bother to use a very-expensive, highly-visible (but not decodable) numbers station in the age of the internet when encrypted messages could easily (and secretly) be sent by apps like WhatsApp? Answer: when the internet is down (or mainly down) in the target country [‘digital blackouts’] and you need to send secret instructions to your agents in that country.
Also, agents are vulnerable should they be captured and their phones interrogated. Having a portable radio (which happens to have shortwave as well) is not suspicious nor is owning pen and paper. The One-Time-Pad is very small and either highly flammable or edible.
