SOUTHERN LIGHTS: Mystery lurks behind the numbers

Published: Sunday, July 26, 2009 at 3:30 a.m. Last Modified: Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 9:15 p.m.   I was a college graduate before I first learned of the pleasures of the Nashville Flea Market. Staged monthly at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, it was — and still is, by most accounts — a fabulous day's experience. Lugged in from attics and barns of Tennessee and adjoining states were treasures like a bronze art deco incense brazier, its reclining nude stretched on her stomach, cradling the oval bowl as if it were made of solid gold; a clunky Victorian stereopticon viewer, with cards depicting an impossibly rich fur showroom in Canada and a fearsome crocodile, captured on an African river; a mountain fiddle in a rough, black handmade box that looked like a child's coffin. But one of the best things I ever took home with me from the Nashville flea market was something far more prosaic — a rectangular, gun metal gray Hallicrafters radio. "Hit plays," the seller insisted. "It plays." Hit did, even though it probably was the cheapest receiver ever marketed by the Chicago shortwave radio manufacturer. The seller had it tuned to an AM station, which sounded tinny, at best, on the Top 40 tunes of the day. But I ignored the dodgy AM reception and roamed instead over the radio's four shortwave bands, letting my imagination flow across the dial. I never got into listening deeply enough to start collecting QSL cards, confirming receipt of a particular transmission. But I spent an inordinate amount of time in front of my flea market receiver. It seemed as mysterious as it was marvelous that you could tune in voices from halfway around the globe as clearly as the garden-variety AM deejay in Alabama. In the mornings you could hear Australia and Japan — or perhaps the BBC, broadcasting chiming soukous guitar music on its African Service. If you rose early enough, you could hear Radio Tahiti — a truly exotic catch — or a station in Nairobi, broadcasting in English but conjuring up images of the African veldt. After sundown, however, was when the shortwave came alive. Mad-dog announcers went wild over South American soccer games; you could almost feel the spray of their saliva as they screamed out the action. West German radio read the news in English as precise as a Mercedes door fitting; to Radio Havana Cuba — territorio libre de America! — it was clear that ours was a second language. Radio Tirana in Albania clung coldly to the hardcore Communist Party line; a station in Beijing offered the otherworldly sounds of traditional Chinese opera, its syllables and cadences juggled with dazzling quickness by acrobatic artists. There were other strange sounds on the shortwave bands — wooly whoops and swirls that dipped low, then rose in frequency like a rocket, quickly fading from earshot; sustained electronic noises like an old refrigerator with a bad motor ("that's Russian jamming," a friend told me); the monotonous ticking of a clock in Fort Collins, Colo., that gave out the minutes and hours in Coordinated Universal Time. Strangest of all, perhaps, were the broadcasts of a series of numbers, usually in sets of four or five. A typical broadcast might go like this: " ... 03932 42175 72964 ... " on and on and on. I always passed on the "number stations", searching for more interesting fare. I didn't understand what they were — some kind of navigation beacon was what I conjectured — and catches like New Zealand and Johannesburg beckoned. By contrast, the numbers were small, dull fish. It turns out that I wasn't alone. For decades, number stations were ignored by most shortwave enthusiasts. You couldn't even get a QSL card from those broadcasters. By and large, they seemed to ignore the listening community. Recently, however, hobbyists focused their attention to numbers stations. What were they, where did they broadcast, why did they never identify themselves? The hobbyists' conclusions are unsettling. The number stations, they theorized, are used to send messages from governments to spies. In an age of communications so sophisticated that we can speak to spaceships millions of miles away, it seems anachronistic that shortwave radio would still figure into spycraft. But the arguments of the number stations obsessionists, led by Akin Fernandez of London, are compelling. Many believe that governments and the people who spy for them use something they call a "one-time pad" — a code sheet with numbers representing letters or words — for the shortwave transmissions. Both the government and the spy have the same code. The broadcast comes at a specified time; the spy copies and decodes the numbers; then both parties dispose of the one-time pad. Some of the one-time pads were even said to be edible. In 1988, three of the pads were discovered in a hollowed-out soap bar that a Czech spy used in London. It gets deeper. A few years back, Fernandez issued a 4-CD set of recordings of number stations collected by similar-minded shortwave listeners from all over the globe. Dubbed "The Conet Project" ("conet" is a Czech word for "end"; Fernandez said he heard it on the shortwave), the recordings came with a 74-page booklet fully explaining the number stations theory. For anyone willing to shell out more than $60 to hear the evidence — series of numbers in Russian, German, Polish, English, Spanish, what-have-you, often recited in the automated voices that most of us associated with The Weather Channel on TV — the booklet offers some heavy food for thought. One of the essayists, for example, says the code could come down to a single letter — "A," for example might trigger an assassination or "F" might be a cue for the spy to flee the country. Evidence suggests something much less dramatic. In 1998, in a case in U.S. federal court, some Cubans were put on trial for espionage. U.S. government agents said they found a program to decode shortwave number station messages from Cuba on the defendants' computer. One of the decoded messages read, "Prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis." Another said, "Congratulate all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman." But again — who knows what those words really meant? Adding to the mystery of the number stations is that no government will publicly acknowledge that it operates one. They are, in effect, pirate stations, violating all sorts of international laws. Some broadcast regular transmissions on set frequencies; others appear and disappear in the shortwave ether. Some have been heard only once; others, like "The Lincolnshire Poacher", are well-known to shortwave listeners. The latter station got its name from a calliope-sounding introduction in which the first strains of "Lincolnshire Poacher," a British folksong, is repeated until the numbers recitation begins. Hobbyists with directional antennas have traced the location of the Lincolnshire Poacher station to the island of Cyprus. But that means nothing. A number of Spanish-language numbers stations have been traced to Florida. Who they really represent is anyone's guess. In fact, according to some of the theorists, a gentleman's agreement may exist among world governments not to interfere with each other's number stations. Though an occasional bit of jamming goes on, most of the stations have operated with impunity. No such gentleman's agreement existed between Fernandez and the popular American band Wilco, however. In 2002, the band released an album titled "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," with those words sampled in one of its songs. Fernandez sued, claiming the band had taken the sample from the number station recordings that he released on his independent label. Wilco had to pay $30,000 plus royalty fees. If the conspiracy theorists are right about number stations, exposure in undertakings like "The Conet Project," recent articles in national newspapers or even a segment of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" apparently have done little to dampen the enthusiasm of the spymasters. Just last June, the U.S. government charged that a man named Walter Kendall Myers decoded messages broadcast from a number station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Service. (He pleaded not guilty.) My own enthusiasm remains high. There's a high geek factor to all of this of course, but there's also a kind of creepy fascination in hearing the voices of the number readers — most of them female, and at least one, shockingly, a child — intone their sets of ciphers. It's the kind of thing that drew me to shortwave in the first place — the mystery and marvel of it all. Ben Windham is retired editorial editor of The Tuscaloosa News. His e-mail address is Swind15443@aol.com   Source: http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20090726/NEWS/907259972/1005?Title=SOUTHERN-LIGHTS-Mystery-lurks-behind-the-numbers   via Yimber Gaviria, Noticias de la Radio