Album Names and Cold War Games: A History of the Numbers Station

By Michael Saba on June 30, 2009 9:15 AM Just about anyone who's heard Wilco's magnum opus Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can remember the song "Poor Places," but not necessarily for the melody, lyrics or Jeff Tweedy's inimitable crooning. No, what sticks out most is the the bone-chilling final 45 seconds of the song, where a woman's voice robotically repeats the words "Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot." The true nature of those three words is far more eerie and mysterious than a mere disembodied voice repeating a sequence of the NATO alphabet. It's a recording of a numbers station: a broadcast of indeterminate location that transmits coded shortwave radio messages for top-secret purposes. But where did these numbers stations come from, and what's the purpose of their clandestine messages? The recordings are always repeating shortwave transmissions of sequences numbers and letters of a phonetic alphabet, broadcasting on the high and low ends of the frequency dial. Sometimes they delve into even spookier territory: alternating sound tones, recordings of instruments playing, or people speaking seemingly nonsensical word combinations. One transmission was famously bookended by an old-timey rendition of Lincolnshire, UK's unofficial county anthem, "The Lincolnshire Poacher."  Numbers stations likely were a response to the advances in code-breaking that forced the participants of the first and second World Wars to figure out new ways of sending coded messages. The World War I-era German magazine Kurzwellenpanorama made mention of an Austrian spy radio station, the earliest known reference to these coded broadcasts. The U.S. and USSR intensified numbers station activity during the Cold War, and they've been in heavy use ever since. Most governments that employ spies are purported to have their own version of a numbers station, and it's theorized they've become a useful tool for drug smugglers, terrorists, and resistance movements around the world. They bear on recent history as well: the high-profile conviction of Walter Kendall Myers for treason involved numbers station transmissions from the Cuban Intelligence Services. These cloak-and-dagger communiqués are still an unacknowledged apparatus of the world's major spy agencies. The closest anyone has ever come to an official acknowledgment of was a 1998 article in the UK's Daily Telegraph, where a representative of Britain's Department of Trade and Treasury was quoted as saying "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption." The truth really is out there, even if the general public may never get a satisfactory answer. Of course, aspiring cryptographers can easily try their hands at decoding these missives: The Conet Project has compiled four CDs worth of numbers stations recordings, available free of charge on their website. And if you have a shortwave radio, you can be DIY about it and scan the airwaves yourself; these numbers stations aren't hidden, just virtually impossible to decode without the corresponding cryptographic cipher key. Since they're such an effective means of sending encoded messages, it's likely the true nature of numbers stations will remain hidden until they've been out of use for a while. In the meantime, we can take comfort that military-industrial complexes the world over helped inspire Jeff Tweedy to make one of the best albums of the last decade. disc 1   tcp_d1_10_bugle_irdial.mp3                       09-Feb-2003 20:03   470k  tcp_d1_11_5_note_version_czech_lady_irdial.mp3   09-Feb-2003 20:04   766k  tcp_d1_12_three_note_odditiy_irdial.mp3          09-Feb-2003 20:06   1.1M  tcp_d1_13_new_star_broadcasting_irdial.mp3       09-Feb-2003 20:09   3.0M  tcp_d1_14_counting_station_spanish_irdial.mp3    09-Feb-2003 20:12   2.1M  tcp_d1_15_english_lady_00000_ending_irdial.mp3   09-Feb-2003 20:14   1.6M  tcp_d1_16_attencion_3_finals_irdial.mp3          09-Feb-2003 20:16   1.6M  tcp_d1_17_4_note_rising_scale_irdial.mp3         09-Feb-2003 20:17   1.5M  tcp_d1_18_ciocirlia_irdial.mp3                   09-Feb-2003 20:20   2.4M  tcp_d1_19_czech_lady_irdial.mp3                  09-Feb-2003 20:22   1.5M  tcp_d1_1_the_swedish_rhapsody_irdial.mp3         09-Feb-2003 20:25   2.0M  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Directory                                                09-Feb-2003 21:34      -  tcp_d2_10_spanish_lady_irdial_.mp3                              09-Feb-2003 20:46   522k  tcp_d2_11_strich_english_irdial.mp3                             09-Feb-2003 20:46   238k  tcp_d2_12_2_letter_nu_irdial.mp3                                09-Feb-2003 20:47   558k  tcp_d2_13_g3_strich_irdial.mp3                                  09-Feb-2003 20:48   300k  tcp_d2_14_yt_irdial.mp3                                         09-Feb-2003 20:49   1.6M  tcp_d2_15_5_dashes_irdial.mp3                                   09-Feb-2003 20:50   776k  tcp_d2_16_german_man_irdial.mp3                                 09-Feb-2003 20:51   820k  tcp_d2_17_english_man_irdial.mp3                                09-Feb-2003 20:54   2.3M  tcp_d2_18_english_man_german_and_german_lady_irdial.mp3  09-Feb-2003 20:55   750k  tcp_d2_19_german_lady_irdial.mp3                                09-Feb-2003 20:56   800k  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the_conet_project_cd_2.m3u                                   09-Feb-2003 21:13     4k  disc 3 tcp_d3_10_oblique_irdial.mp3                            09-Feb-2003 21:14   654k  tcp_d3_11_nnn_old_incarnation_irdial.mp3                09-Feb-2003 21:14   272k  tcp_d3_12_5_dashes_i_say_again_irdial.mp3               09-Feb-2003 21:15   2.0M  tcp_d3_13_2_letter_kg_irdial.mp3                        09-Feb-2003 21:16   852k  tcp_d3_14_4_figure_counting_10_rough_tones_irdial.mp3   09-Feb-2003 21:16   1.2M  tcp_d3_15_2_voices_in_one_transmission_irdial.mp3       09-Feb-2003 21:17   1.6M  tcp_d3_16_tyrolean_music_station_irdial.mp3             09-Feb-2003 21:19   3.3M  tcp_d3_17_3_note_interval_signal_irdial.mp3             09-Feb-2003 21:20   358k  tcp_d3_18_10_rough_tones_irdial.mp3                     09-Feb-2003 21:20   726k  tcp_d3_19_achtung_irdial.mp3                            09-Feb-2003 21:20   224k  tcp_d3_1_ready_ready_irdial.mp3                         09-Feb-2003 21:21   958k  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tcp_d4_25_nnn_hungarian_irdial.mp3                             09-Feb-2003 21:43   460k  tcp_d4_26_wiskey_tango_viente_y_uno_irdial.mp3          09-Feb-2003 21:45   2.8M  tcp_d4_27_the_crackle_irdial.mp3                               09-Feb-2003 21:45   1.2M  tcp_d4_28_the_backwards_music_station_irdial.mp3       09-Feb-2003 21:46   1.1M  tcp_d4_29_faders_irdial.mp3                                    09-Feb-2003 21:46   574k  tcp_d4_2_yt_irdial.mp3                                         09-Feb-2003 21:47   1.3M  tcp_d4_30_workshop_irdial.mp3                                  09-Feb-2003 21:48   1.3M  tcp_d4_31_the_pip_irdial.mp3                                   09-Feb-2003 21:48   390k  tcp_d4_32_the_buzzer_irdial.mp3                                09-Feb-2003 21:49   1.2M  tcp_d4_33_m1_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:49   406k  tcp_d4_34_m1b_irdial.mp3                                       09-Feb-2003 21:51   2.2M  tcp_d4_35_m2_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:51   1.4M  tcp_d4_36_m3_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:52   256k  tcp_d4_37_m3_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:52   156k  tcp_d4_38_m3_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:52   214k  tcp_d4_39_m3_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:52   134k  tcp_d4_3_555_konec_irdial.mp3                                  09-Feb-2003 21:52   262k  tcp_d4_40_m3_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:52   120k  tcp_d4_41_m3_irdial.mp3                                        09-Feb-2003 21:52   120k  tcp_d4_42_m3a_irdial.mp3                                       09-Feb-2003 21:52   174k  tcp_d4_43_m3b_irdial.mp3                                       09-Feb-2003 21:53   390k  tcp_d4_4_preska_irdial.mp3                                     09-Feb-2003 21:53   192k  tcp_d4_5_cherta_irdial.mp3                                     09-Feb-2003 21:53   204k  tcp_d4_6_count_in_russian_irdial.mp3                           09-Feb-2003 21:53   308k  tcp_d4_7_count_in_russian_different_voice_irdial.mp3      09-Feb-2003 21:54   960k  tcp_d4_8_1-10_announcement_irdial.mp3                       09-Feb-2003 21:54   488k  tcp_d4_9_1-10_announcement_female_irdial.mp3            09-Feb-2003 21:54   388k  the_conet_project_cd_4.m3u                                     09-Feb-2003 21:54     3k  Source: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/06/album-names-and-cold-war-games---a-history-of-the.html   Via Yimber Gaviria, Noticias de la Radio http://yimber-gaviria.blogspot.com