Chapter 1: What are numbers stations and how do they work?
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Chapter 2: What historical events led to the rise of numbers stations?
I hope you're enjoying your year, your month. I hope you're enjoying the very hour in which you are coming across this. It is the select episode for the week. And I'm picking this one because I honestly don't remember much about it and I got to listen to it. So maybe I'll learn it all over again. It's about number stations and it's called What is a Number Station?
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Can you say it in German? You speak German. Don't even jive me. Zwei, drei, fĆ¼nf, acht, sieben. Now, can you do that in a little girl voice? You're just toying with me. Come on, do it. No, you always make me play St. Polly Girl. I'm tired of it. St. Polly Girl.
No, this is apparently even younger than the St. Polly Girl. It's like a little girl. And it was a live little girl. Who? In the Swedish Rhapsody number station. It was a little girl reading out numbers and letters in German.
Chapter 3: How have numbers stations evolved since World War I?
Which makes it even creepier. Yeah. This is a very neat subject, so kudos to you for tossing this one out there. Well, I've been waiting for it to publish. I'd seen it in the calendar coming up and coming up. I'm like, come on and publish. And I think it published on Friday. This is brand new. Right out of the oven. Yes. And we're talking about it just as they are completing their decline.
So we are on top of this. Well, I think that, well, we'll get into it. I think that's what makes it even more interesting is that it's still happening. All right. Numbers stations. Numbers stations. Numbers stations. Yeah, like you said, both words are pluralized. It's a little clumsy.
And number stations are, we should just come out and say, they're shortwave radio transmissions or transmitters making really weird, baffling is the best word for it, transmissions. Yeah. And have been doing so apparently since at least World War I. Oh, really? Yeah.
Supposedly the first mention of a numbers station came from a German magazine in World War I. In World War II, they were in full swing. Sure. But apparently they somehow popped up first around World War I, which makes them some of the earliest shortwave transmissions in the world. Because shortwave radio didn't come around, at least in the commercial use, until about 1920. Yeah.
Chapter 4: What types of messages are transmitted via numbers stations?
World War I was a few years before that, if you'll remember correctly. Yeah, that's why I didn't even think that that was possible. But like you said, World War II was when they were in full swing. They really peaked in the Cold War. And they've been dying out slowly ever since.
But I think one of the neatest things is they are still... If you have a shortwave radio, you can tune into a frequency and hear...
beep one two seven five eight you know it's it's usually like some sort of tone we should mention to jerry of the future yeah you're supposed to leave that beep in because it's part of the number station yeah we beep jerry to signal when we want something edited but yeah number station it's not always a beep it'll just have some sort of sometimes it's a bit of a song
Yeah, like the Swedish Rhapsody or the Lincolnshire Poacher, a British, English, UK-ish folk song. Yeah. I'm so scared of them whenever I say stuff like that. And the reason that the transmission starts off with a tone or a beep or a song is so you can...
It alerts, like, here comes a transmission, tune your station, hone in, make sure you get some good reception, because the secret code is about to be revealed. And that's exactly what everyone is pretty much in consensus on, that what comes after this and what is broadcast over these numbers stations are secret codes. Yeah.
Again, like for the Swedish Rhapsody Station, it is a little girl speaking in German reading numbers and letters, seemingly random numbers and letters, and then the transmission is over. And that happens like ā or it used to happen. That's a defunct ā
numbers station now but it happened on a fairly regular schedule there's other ones the attention station is a woman saying attention and then reading Spanish numbers and then repeating them over and over again and then going on to the next set and everybody no one can say for certain but virtually everyone in the world from Cecil Adams at Straight Dope to the head of the UK's trade and industry agency
Say these are secret transmissions for spies. The whole basis of them was for espionage. Yeah, and the reason why everyone is speculating that that is absolutely the case, which it almost certainly is, like we said, is because no government to this day has come forward and admitted this or owned this. It is all still technically speculation because you cannot point to a factual statement.
The closest we've ever come is they finally got ā Someone from the United Kingdom, a spokesperson. That was the dude from the trade agency. Oh, really? Yeah. The exact quote is, people should not be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: Why do some believe numbers stations are still operational today?
And that's the only thing on record that any government has ever spoke about what these transmissions are. Right. So the idea that they are government transitions, or the reason we have to speculate is because the government's never claimed them. Yeah.
On the flip side, the reason everyone thinks that they are government-backed, clandestine transmissions is because these are pirate radio frequencies, pirate radio transmitters. Yeah, my first thing was like, just find one of these and look it up and find out what the deal is. Yeah, you would think so. They're totally unlicensed. Yeah. Nobody knows exactly where they are.
They're illegal, technically. Yes, they're very illegal because they transmit over air traffic control frequencies. Well, that's a big one. And no one investigates them. There's no investigation into these number stations whatsoever. So the fact that... The government won't say anything about them.
And the fact that the government isn't investigating these very blatantly out in the open weird baffling transmissions suggests that, yeah, everybody's right, that these are government-backed transmissions used to communicate anonymously and in one direction to spies embedded in foreign countries. Yeah, I was about to call it a conversation, but it's really not.
I think on the BBC documentary I saw they called it a monologue. Right. You're just sending a one-way message. Exactly. All right. Right after this break, we're going to talk a little bit about shortwave radio technology, the secret key to sending these messages.
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Chapter 6: What role do enthusiasts and organizations play in monitoring numbers stations?
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Chapter 7: How does shortwave radio technology facilitate secret communications?
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All right, the key to this whole thing is sending a short way. Like, you might think, in this day and age, why not just send a Telefax? No, why not send an email or, you know, surely there are safer ways to send espionage, this information, highly classified instructions to go kill the leader of a country perhaps. Right. Like if you want to activate Reggie Jackson to kill Queen Elizabeth.
Kill Norberg. Yeah. Yeah. How would you do it in this day and age? You'd think an email would do it. No. And you want to know who proves definitively that that is not safe or secure? um who jimmy fallon edward snowden yeah there are um if you use a computer you leave a trace yeah it's virtually impossible to erase anything on a computer yeah if you think you have then you haven't
Plus, if you are, say, emailing somebody, you're transmitting what's supposed to be highly sensitive, even encrypted information over a network. That stuff can be captured. Like, go listen to your employer spying on you episode. Yeah. You can't do it. Like, you can communicate like that, but you're leaving digital traces everywhere. Right.
The beauty of the shortwave radio transmission is that, again, it's anonymous and it's one directional. But if you get caught with a shortwave radio, at least say back in the 60s or the 70s or something, it wasn't weird. It didn't prove that you were a spy. Yeah, you're just tuning in to my stories.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of numbers stations in modern espionage?
Exactly. I'm just listening to the BBC World Service. Shortwave energy, radio energy, it's all determined by the power of your transmitter. So if you've got a humongous transmitter, you can send, and it didn't need to be that big, but you can send a message, one-way message, to the other side of the world. Right. And the reason it can travel across the planet is because it's bouncing off of...
it literally is bouncing off the ionosphere of the earth or of well yeah of the earth uh 50 to 375 miles up above our surface it's in the upper atmosphere and solar ionization creates an electrical charge and that charge reflects that signal right back down to earth it's called uh sky wave or skip i like sky wave sky wave yeah and that's why you can with a seemingly pretty simple piece of equipment
I can send a message to the South Pacific. Yeah. From my bedroom. Well, I don't know if I'd have one big enough for my... My bedroom's pretty big. I wanted to see how big these things were, actually. You know, like if they say really big ones to send them further and further, like how big do they get? They get very huge. They can cover scores of acres. Oh, okay.
A big shortwave antenna, which is why it can get very expensive. Gotcha. So that's bigger than my bedroom. You can also use ones that are the size of your bedroom. It depends not only, like you said, on the size of the transmitter. It depends on the atmospheric conditions, too. Supposedly, shortwave transmissions are received best at sunrise and sunset, and no one's 100% sure.
But it has to do with the ionosphere. Yeah. And because that's where the northern lights are happening. Yeah. That's where solar rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, and the atoms lose their electrons, I believe, so they become ions, forming the ionosphere.
And because this is constantly changing, you can't predict exactly how a shortwave radio wave will act, but you can kind of guess, well, this time the sun's least active or most active wave Whatever. It has some impact on that sky. What's it called? The sky what?
Sky wave.
The sky wave effect. So you can communicate with somebody in a foreign country, right? Yeah. And not only can it not be tracked, it's very difficult to trace who sent that, where that transmission is coming from. Yeah. It's impossible to trace who's receiving it. That's right.
So you have no idea who in your country is getting this, which means that you're broadcasting to anybody and everybody who feels like listening to this a secret code. But the fact is, if you use the right kind of secret code, no one can crack it.
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