I'm surprised that WBNY gets no mention here from Chris.
As noted in the Spooks mailing list:
Secrets in the Static
Around the world, a group of people are broadcasting encoded numbers to persons unknown. The question is why? How a small group of shortwave enthusiasts is trying to unravel the secrets of global espionage.
By: Julianne Pepitone Esquire Magazine 7/31/8
Around the world, a group of people are broadcasting encoded numbers to persons unknown. The question is why? How a small group of shortwave enthusiasts is seeking to unravel the secrets of global espionage.
In a clammy basement three decades ago, 12-year-old Chris Smolinski fiddled with the tuner on his shortwave radio, hoping to catch the end of his favorite weekly rock show. Instead, amid the static, he heard the sound of a glockenspiel, followed by a girl’s voice reciting numbers in monotone: "250. 47. 92. 905. 58. 46..."
Smolinski had stumbled across a so-called "number station:" a shortwave radio station of unknown origin that broadcasts nothing but number recitations, in dozens of languages. Smolinski did not know the stations had existed since World War I. He didn’t know that no one is sure about the stations’ origins or purposes.
Popular speculation is that stations transmit messages from government spies; and yet, all governments deny the existence of these stations, which are coded, but not at all hidden, within the static on public airwaves.
The teenage Smolinski could not know any of these things about the robotic voices on the radio. But now, decades later, he does. Each day he trades information with others like him across the globe -- those devoted to the world of espionage, mystery and radio stations so secret that the government denies their existence... But Smolinski knows they’re out there. He knows someone’s not talking. What is he doesn’t know is why.
Number stations were introduced most widely to pop culture on Wilco’s 2002 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album, at the end of the song "Poor Places." The monotone girl whose creepy voice was recorded from a number station is enough to make even the Goth-iest music aficionado hit "forward." (To hear more, check out British label Irdial Discs’ four-CD set of number-station clips, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations). More recently, the pilot of the television show "Lost" featured a number station (the mysterious transmission that drew Rousseau to the island) with a message that is central to the series’ mythology.
The eerie intrigue of the stations is that no one can determine for whom the message is intended. Phone calls, email and text messages can all be intercepted; but the ability for everyone to access number stations makes it impossible to catch whomever is transmitting. And it is equally impossible to decode the messages, which use a "one-time pad" -- a fresh code -- each time.
By the end of the Cold War, several hundred number stations had dwindled to several dozen; but fanatics continue to fiddle with the shortwave dials and log station schedules. They adjust the antennae and flip through notebooks filled with number strings, locked in a seemingly endless quest. They’re chasing something they will likely never catch.
For Chris Smolinski, now 41, the quest began on Christmas 1978, when he received a shortwave radio as a gift. He began reading everything he could about shortwave: newsletters, magazine articles and club bulletins.
Smolinski found dozens of number stations, like Swedish Rhapsody. On that one, a girl recites numbers over a glockenspiel that plays a chilling ditty you might hear coming out of an ice cream truck – in hell. Then there’s the Bored Man, who repeats his numerical message dispassionately. And Smolinski’s favorite operator: The Mad Violinist, which features incantations over a Romanian folk song that’s often played at weddings in that country.
Smolinski realized most of the stations operate on extremely rigid schedules. Though voices vary in intonation, many speakers are women or children. Most begin transmissions on the hour; exceptions are the Russian station, at 20 and 40 minutes after the hour, and the Israeli station, at 15, 30, and 45 minutes after. But it seemed the more he found out, the less he knew.
Spooks, Unite!
Smolinski kept a shortwave radio in his room at the University of Maryland, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1988. Three years later, the first book about number stations appeared: Secret Signals: The Euronumbers Mystery. It was written by the British chemist Simon Mason, who had been quietly monitoring the stations in northeast England since the 1960s.
Secret Signals explained the science behind shortwave and the number stations. (Mason, who is considered an expert in the field and one of the most experienced listeners, made his book available on his Web site, simonmason.karoo.net). In 1999, Smolinski created a listserv called Spooks for station enthusiasts.
The Internet advanced knowledge considerably by allowing users to interact in real time as they listened. They trade messages about new or recently defunct stations, the number strings they hear on the stations and the evidence that governments are responsible for running the stations. Listeners' speculations are as close to an answer as Smolinski may ever get. "In the spy numbers field, very little is concrete," Smolinski says. "It’s impossible to truly pin down any of this."
But that doesn’t mean he’ll stop trying.
Cuban Spies: Live From the Chicken Coop
Smolinski's home in rural Maryland is adorned with half a dozen wires attached to large antennae, which help him pick up stations. He and his wife, Mina, have four children. He’s owned his own software company since 2000. He eats lunch with Mina every day, and she knows little about the stations except that her husband "listens to weird sounds on the radio," he says. He takes the afternoon to email, send out orders for Black Cat software, maintain the Spooks listserv, and update his Web site at spynumbers.com, where people can submit loggings.
He listens to number stations for a few hours a week, usually when he's programming. His favorite is the Cuban station, which is run by a scatterbrained operator whom listeners have nicknamed "Pedro."
"The fun in listening to the Cuban station is that you never know what you'll hear next," Smolinski says. "Once, I even heard a rooster in the background! Like many things in Cuba, that station is just not run well; they're using Soviet surplus stuff to transmit. We'll hear a mistake and say, ah, Pedro's sleeping at his desk again..."
Such glitches are tip-offs to number-station enthusiasts that the stations are government-run. "The Cuban station often runs audio from a normal station by accident," Smolinski says. "Just last week, we heard them running sound from an AM station. That tells you number stations and commercial stations share the same space." Were a renegade running the show, the government would shut it down.
The government theory gained credence in the 1980s, and the topic is covered extensively in Mason's Secret Signals book. "In the ’80s, people identified transmitter sites on Florida and Remington, Va., an hour outside of D.C.," Smolinski says. "It's possible to determine where a shortwave site is based on how well you're picking it up; the closer you are to a transmitter, the better you'll hear it. It seems unlikely that private individuals or organizations could operate these stations without licenses and use the airwaves without the government finding them."
Occasional court cases like that of the so-called "Cuban Five," a group of spies who were accused of espionage in a 1998 U.S. federal trial (and happened to work at the Cuban "Atencion" number station), also shed some light on the theory, Mason says. "It’s the possession of the one-time pads" -- or codes -- "that serve as incriminating evidence on these people. Very, very occasionally, these pads are entered as evidence in a court case."
To determine the transmitter sites’ locations, listeners use seemingly minor clues. For example, in August, one station changed its schedule by one hour; the change corresponded to the exact time when Egypt switched to their version of Daylight Saving Time. Some suggest station activity in Israel increases when there is a conflict with Syria.
Smolinski isn't so sure about such claims. "It's hard to tell if that's real, or if that's people looking for something when it doesn't exist," he says. "The human mind always wants to make a pattern out of ambiguous information."
"Not for Public Consumption"
Despite the evidence, official confirmation of theories is scant to nonexistent. On May 26, 2000, the National Public Radio show "All Things Considered" featured a story about number stations. John Winston, the Federal Communications Commission's assistant chief of the enforcement bureau, refused to comment on the possibility of American number stations.
"We don't intend to discuss these stations, if any exist at all," Winston said. "And I'm not saying there are, [even] if your scientists say there are [stations] that are transmitting in this country. We know of innumerable ones outside of this country..."
Interviews with other countries' officials have yielded similarly lukewarm results, though a 1998 article in British newspaper The Daily Telegraph included a comparatively revealing quote: "These numbers stations are what you suppose they are," said a spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry, which at that time regulated the U.K. airwaves. "People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption." This almost-admission, despite its obliqueness, was shocking -- especially in England, where media consumption is highly regulated.
Amid all of the denials, however, Mason says that one country's government as much as admitted to operating a number station. Though the Czechoslovakian number station is now defunct, the country's Ministry of the Interior sent Mason a "QSL card." The three-letter code means "I acknowledge receipt" in the shortwave world, and the card asks recipients to confirm that they heard the stations by signing the card and sending it back to the station. Mason says the Czech government sent him a QSL card "about its spy transmissions" before the station ceased operations in 1996.
Smolinski doubts U.S. officials will ever own up to shortwave spy shenanigans. "I suppose it's always possible that CIA documents will be released 30 years from now, but no one's holding their breath."
And while that’s a tad anticlimactic, many listeners don’t want official confirmation. They are chasing the very answers that would bring an end to their hobby.
So they run in place, they move sideways, they speculate. They remain a community who in some ways can share only with each other; they don’t discuss a new Egyptian schedule with their wives over dinner, nor can they pull up a chair at the bar to talk about the latest mistake on the Cuban station or joke about Pedro sleeping at his desk.
"The mystery is what makes it so attractive," Mason says. "If someone came and spelled out what the messages say and where the transmitter sites are, then it wouldn’t be interesting anymore. The thing that keeps me going is that air of mystique: Whose voice is it? Who is this message intended for? If someone came along and exposed everything…why, it’d be ruined. Just ruined."
After years of government silence, it seems unlikely that someone will answer these questions and end the quest. So for now, each turn of the radio dial is a chance for a new person to stumble upon the secret. Another chance to join the never-ending chase. Another chance to hear the sound of a glockenspiel, followed by a young girl chanting numbers like a mantra: "250. 47. 92. 905. 58. 46..."
Find this article at:
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/numbers-station-07-31-08
Topic: Esquire Magazine article on numbers stations and Chris Smolinski (Read 5657 times)
