Islands in the Storm
The peculiar world of Number Stations
⚠️ WARNING: The recordings embedded in this article can be rather loud, make sure your volume is turned down before pressing play! It’s on you if you batter your eardrums. ⚠️
Carla pushed her eggs around the plate. Sam’s recounting of his week at work blended with the din of the TV. She eyed the notepad sat next to her glass, attempting to tune out Sam and the chatter of the Saturday morning programming. Having breakfast so late in the day felt strange; Sam kept calling it a ‘brunch.’
“…invited us to theirs for dinner next week, won’t that be nice! Car? Are you listening to me?”
She looked up from her plate, and smiled meekly. “Sorry darling,” she said, “just distracted, y’know? Dinner next week sounds fine.”
Sam raised an eyebrow, aware of her playing with the pages of her notebook, the constant reorienting of the black pen that sat atop its blue cover. He took a sip of coffee. “Bit early, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, you’re right, sorry honey. I was just thinking tha—” she was interrupted by the sudden ringing of a bell from her room upstairs. It startled them both, almost causing Sam to drop his cup.
Carla withdrew her hand to flick through the pages of the notebook. “I’ll be back down soon, promise.” She scribbled the date and time on a fresh page: November 3rd 2001, 1040 UTC. She gave Sam a peck on the cheek, then scrambled up the stairs.
Strange Transmissions
You’ve probably heard of Number Stations (or Numbers Stations) before, they have a habit of cropping up in all sorts of media, such as the episode of Fringe titled 6955 kHz, where the team investigate a mysterious radio station that leaves its listeners with amnesia. Or, possibly, on Wilco’s 2001 song Poor Places, that uses samples of an Israeli numbers station, E10.
But, what even is a number station?
‘Number stations’ are, generally, short-wave radio stations broadcasting mysterious coded messages. There are some particularly famous examples such as The Buzzer, or the Lincolnshire Poacher, that we’ll look into a bit more later, but the list of discovered stations is truly extensive.
These stations first started appearing during WWI, transmitting messages in Morse code. Over the 20th century, their activity has ebbed and flowed with major world events, becoming most prolific during the Cold War Era. Many continue to broadcast right up to this day.
From the 1970s, it became a popular hobby among Ham radio enthusiasts to catalogue and monitor these stations, as well as conducting investigations, attempting to uncover their origins and purposes, and in some cases actually figuring out their true uses.
You might hear stations referred to by their ENIGMA id, like E22. ENIGMA 2000 are a group that maintain a list of active stations, the most recent of which was published in September 20171.
Carla pushed through the door and landed into her brown leather chair with a heavy thump. She shut off the bell connected to her simple homemade squelch circuit, donned her headphones, and frowned. The characteristic buzzing blasts for which the station — The Buzzer — was named, were present, but permeated by unusual background noises. Some sounded like the shuffling of feet, or the murmuring of voices.
She opened her notebook, and realised that she’d left her pen downstairs. Her desk was covered in cables, stacks of QSL cards, spools of solder, and yet somehow, no pens. Stretching the headphone cable as far as it would go, she rifled through a cabinet near the door, eventually locating a pencil. As she slid back to the desk, she heard the sound of someone clearing their throat, then a man’s voice crackled over the channel.
Frequencies
Ominous clicking, disembodied voices, where does this stuff come from? What is it all for?
Well, much of the appeal of these stations is that those answers are often tantalisingly out of reach. In some cases the mystery arises from a case of mistaken identity; peculiar transmissions that turn out to be nothing more than the test broadcasts of a radio station. It reminds me of Webdriver Torso, which is fascinating in its obscurity, but the truth is rarely so fantastical. The mystery of the box itself can be more exciting than its contents.
Sometimes, we do find out the answers, such as with station E22, which transpired to be repeating tests broadcasts by All India Radio. But, there are plenty that still remain elusive to this day, such as the Russian station UZB-76, nicknamed The Buzzer.
The Buzzer
Broadcasting on the frequency of 4625 kHz, and active since at least the late 1970s, The Buzzer (S28) gets its name from a distinctive buzzing noise that it employs as a channel marker, resembling a synthesised fog-horn2…
The method by which this buzzing is broadcast appears to be surprisingly low-tech. The sound we are hearing is being played by an external device of some kind, and then picked up with a microphone. There’s plenty of evidence for this, like background chatter often being audible in the broadcasts, which wouldn’t be the case if the sound was being produced directly over the air.
The purpose of the marker is not officially known, but there’s some well-founded ideas for its purpose: to reserve the channel and make it less desirable to other parties, to aid listeners who trying to find the station when it is off-air. Whatever its real reason, the dull repetition is really quite spooky. Occasionally, the buzzing will be interrupted by a voice, reading out a message in Russian3…
Imagine you’re a radio enthusiast tuning in and out of different frequencies, hearing little but static or maybe the occasional weather-stations, when suddenly you come across something like this. The strange, ethereally monotonic voice, prickling out from between the buzzing horn-blasts. It’s no wonder that these stations inspire so much attention, why they have captivated the imaginations of so many. It feels like seeing something you weren’t supposed to know about.
There have been many theories as to The Buzzer’s purpose, the most commonly accepted one being that it is part of a larger military control and relay system. Another, slightly more terrifying theory — which is fortunately one of the least credible — is that The Buzzer is what’s known as a ‘dead hand’ signal.
You’ve almost certainly seen that action movie finale, where the villain is holding on to a detonator, shouting: “you kill me, I let go, the building explodes!” Well, imagine that, but on the scale of a whole city, or country. Should another country decide to blow up Moscow (for example) then The Buzzer’s physical station would be destroyed, and the signal would stop. Elsewhere, at a listening station in some other secret location, the signature buzzing stops, causing the detonation of nuclear weapons around the world. A kind of, ‘if you’re going to take us down, we’re taking you with us,’ counter-measure.
A terrifying prospect, certainly, but fortunately one that we can be fairly sure isn’t true, largely due to The Buzzer’s unreliability. Numerous times throughout its recorded operation, The Buzzer has changed (in tone, duration, etc), has gone out completely, or has been interrupted by various unscheduled mishaps (as our friend Clara is about to discover for herself). If this ‘dead-hand’ signal were real, then it probably would have triggered long ago.
The Buzzer isn’t really a “numbers” station, as such, it doesn’t transmit coded messages like many others. It is a somewhat mysterious part of a military relay and control system, working in concert with its sister stations: ‘The Pip’ and ‘The Squeaky Wheel’, both of which are also named for their distinctive channel markers. The Squeaky Wheel and The Pip often broadcast messages directly after one another, and The Pip’s characteristic beeping was once heard in the background of a Squeaky Wheel transmission, suggesting they may even be broadcast from the same location.4
“Ya - 143. Nepoluchayu generatora.” Said a gruff Russian voice. Carla tried her best to transcribe the foreign words, fighting against the almost totally worn-down pencil nib.
Another speaker responded, maybe a woman’s voice, “idyot takaya rabota ot apparatnoy.” Carla scribbled it down. As she checked that the tape recorder was still running, there was a scrambling sound, like someone looking for something in a drawer, followed by the metallic clunk of a door closing. The Buzzer’s usual blaring resumed.
She listened intently, anticipation only building with each successive buzz. She gripped her pencil, checked the tape recorder again (good for another twenty minutes or so). But there was nothing. She slumped back in her chair, chewing on the top of the pencil, and thinking the words over and over to herself like a mantra, rooting them in her memory.
A Musical Interlude
As me and my companions were setting up a snare,
The gamekeeper was watching us – for him we did not care,
For we can wrestle and fight, my boys, and jump o'er anywhere.
Oh, 'tis my delight on a shining night, in the season of the year.
Before diving into all this, my idea of a numbers station much more closely resembled the aforementioned Russian stations: crackly static interspersed with repetitive messages in a serious, Slavic accent. However, one of the strangest number stations I looked at turned out to be one from my own country: British station E03, The Lincolnshire Poacher.
Now inactive, The Poacher used to make 10 broadcasts a day, from the mid 1970s to July 2008. It gets its nickname from an English folk song of the same name, of which it uses the first two bars to begin and end each broadcast (called an interval signal). The song itself does have some ties to British military culture, serving as the quick mark of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment, amongst others.
The Poacher’s broadcasts would follow a very standardised structure, where each would begin with the musical notes, and then a female voice would recite 5-digit groups of numbers ten times, followed by six chimes of alternating pitch, then 200 5-digit pairs of numbers, 6 chimes again, then concluding with the bars from the song. Take a listen to the recording below5…
Something about the voice feels especially strange, like the way the final number in each group is spoken with a higher pitch. It sounds so…jolly, so upbeat.
Amateur location-finding places the source of transmission to be likely originating from a British military base in Cyprus. Station E03 ceased broadcasting in July 2008, but E03a — the Asia-Pacific counterpart to E03 — continued broadcasting for another year. E03a followed exactly the same format, but was nicknamed Cherry Ripe, for the song that it uses as its interval signal instead of The Lincolnshire Poacher.
So, we have these mysterious stations that are broadcasting sets of numbers from secret locations, but what (I hear you ask) are the numbers for?
The numbers are most likely messages encoded via a functionally unbreakable encryption method known as a One-Time Pad. Let’s demonstrate with an example6:
Locked away in our super-secret base, we need to send the message “save the cheerleader” to our spy out in the field.
Both we in the secret base, and the spy, have each been issued a “one-time pad,” a usually disguised piece of paper, covered in lines of numbers, arranged in groups of five. For this example, let’s say both we and the agent have the following numbers on our pads: “80451 92031 73140 27012 62548 54223 48390 47623”.
We take our message, drop the spaces, and convert the letters into numerical values, where A=01, B=02, C=03, etc. This would give us 18 01 22 05 19 08 05 03 08 05 05 17 11 05 01 04 05 17.
Next, we would take the numbers on the pad (80451 920…), and group them in to pairs “80 45 19 20 …”.
We line those pairs up with our numerical message, and add each column together. So, for the first four letters (SAVE) we would end up with: 18 + 80, 01 + 45, 22 + 19, 05 + 20.
We do this for the whole message, and then group that result into groups of five. This is our transmission. We’ve encoded “SAVE THE CHEERLEADER” into “98464 12550 81190 57817 67719 64724 52442 17698” (the last four digits are random extra numbers so that we get a nice and neat group of five, I assume a proper spy would pick a message with a length divisible by five, but I’m too far into this example to change it now).
We transmit our message. Then, holed up with a radio, our agent jots down the numbers as they hear them on our numbers station. They perform the same process in reverse, using their matching pad, this time taking the numbers away from the transmission. So, if they received “98464 12550 …”, they line it up with the first two groups on their pad “80451 92031 …”, and subtract the groups of two from eachother: 98 - 80, 46 - 45, 41 - 19, 25 - 20, …. The result, which when converted back to letters (as in Step 3), reads “SAVETHECHEERLEADER”.
What makes this unbreakable? Well, it relies on both parties having access to the pad, and the pad is the only way to go from the transmission to the message. It withstands normal decryption methods such as examining letter frequency, because the numbers in the message aren’t dependent on the letters, they are dependent on the pad (i.e. our example with the double-e wouldn’t have the same number pairs twice for e, so a casual listener wouldn’t know that it is meant to be a double-letter).
Of course, nothing is perfect: should the numbers in the pad not be truly random, then a pattern could be discerned; the spy could lose their copy of the pad; the pad may not get destroyed before falling in to enemy hands.
A lot of the One-Time Pad’s reliability rests on the spy handling it with the appropriate caution, and as we will shortly see, no matter how clever your hiding place, you can’t guarantee those pads will stay secret forever.
“Colin? Are you there?” Carla drummed her long nails on the desk in a clattering roll. “Colin?”
“Yes,” a loud thump over the phone, followed by the flipping of pages, “sorry, took me a bit longer to find the dictionary than I thought, can you repeat that last part again for me?”
“‘…rabota ot apparatnoy’, I think?”
“Hold on, it was the ‘apparatnoy’ I was struggling with, I think it might be ‘Apparatnaya’? Maybe?” More pages flipping, the sound of his own radio hissing, Colin sucked at his teeth. “It’s a place, I think, I definitely remember the word from someplace…anyway, I think that’s what you heard.”
Carla took a deep breath in through her nose. “Alright, so the first voice, the guy, you think he said ‘I’m 143rd, I don’t receive the oscillator’, and the second voice, the woman, she said ‘That’s what the Apparatnaya….’.”
“‘…Apparatnaya is sending’. Yeah, I think so. If I’m following the dictionary right, it could also be something about a room? A hardware room? And ‘oscillator’ could be ‘generator’, perhaps?” Colin exhaled, his chair squeaked loudly down the phone as he shifted his weight around, another voice sounded like it was calling his name in the background.
“So, it could be basically anything that we heard?”
“Ha! Yeah I suppose so, but it does really make me think The Buzzer is just a microphone pointed at something making that noise, as if we needed any more proof. Listen, I gotta go, give me a bell if you hear anything else though, yeah?”
“Yeah, of course. Thanks, Colin.”
He hung up. Carla put the receiver back on its cradle. Sam made a noise downstairs, the loud clattering of a fork on a plate. Carla looked at the time — she’d been up there for nearly twenty minutes.
“Shit,” she hissed.
Taking one last look at her notebook, she went back downstairs, The Buzzer’s monotonous rattling still audible through the headphones that lay on her desk.
The Art Dealer
In June 1975, a man named Erwin van Haarlem arrived by train in London. He took a job at the Park Lane Hilton’s restaurant as a waiter, just down the road from Buckingham Palace. Left at an orphanage in Holešovice, Prague, not long after being born, he’d never met his birth parents.
Erwin would go on to become a self-employed art dealer, living in Friern Barnet, holidaying with beautiful women, and paying visits to his long-lost family in Holland. I think most would agree that his life seemed to be going pretty well, and it was…right up until the day the world found out that he wasn’t, in fact, Erwin van Haarlem.
Erwin van Haarlem was left at an Orphanage in Czechoslovakia in 1944, but the man who arrived in London that day in June was not really Erwin van Haarlem. He was a Czechoslovak spy named Václav Jelínek, who had adopted Erwin’s identity to spy for the Soviet Union in London.
Before assuming the identity of Erwin, Václav was a sergeant in the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior. He was singled out for the dangerous and exciting life of a spy after being reprimanded for studying German vocabulary instead of paying attention to his watch. The Statni Bezpecnost — Czechoslovak secret police, or StB — singled him out for being an intelligent risk-taker, prone to violence, and a bit of a womaniser. The most apt description of a spy that I’ve ever heard.
After his training was complete, Václav was assigned to a posting in London, his assignment was to gather information on the Refuseniks, Jewish prisoners of the Soviet Union. As spies go, Jelínek did rather well: he was able to gain access to numerous secret British naval facilities, as well as providing information to the Soviets on NATO’s underwater sonar chains which were used to track the movements of Soviet submarines. He was decorated by the KGB for these achievements; a private party was held in his honour in Prague.
Václav obtained Erwin’s passport ‘legitimately’ from the Netherlands, even though he had never been there, and entered the UK as a Dutch national in 1975. Two years after his arrival, Erwin received an alarming communication from his superiors:
YOUR MOTHER IS TRYING TO FIND YOU IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA WITH THE HELP OF THE RED CROSS. SHOULD THE RED CROSS FIND YOU, A MEETING IS TO BE AGREED WITH.
Of course, they weren’t talking about the mother of Soviet spy Václav Jelínek, they were referring to the mother of Dutch orphan Erwin van Haarlem. And contact him she did. Václav obeyed his orders, and developed a relationship with Johanna van Haarlem, under the guise of her long-lost son, Erwin.
Johanna visited ‘Erwin’ in January 1978, and told the man she believed to be her son her story, explaining to him why it was he had been abandoned all those years ago.
Johanna was 18 when she was was raped by Nazi soldier Gregor Kulig at a party, four weeks after meeting him on a train in 1943. Ashamed of Johanna’s resulting pregnancy, calling her a ‘sinner’, he ordered her to give the child away. Johanna did just that, leaving baby Erwin at an orphanage in 1944 (only a year before Václav Jelínek was born), by which time Gregor had been killed in combat.
Johanna and the faux-Erwin grew close, with Václav even travelling to Holland to meet the rest of the van Haarlem family, who also seemed to have been duped by his cover.
He eventually grew tired of being a waiter, and with funding from the StB, he became a self-employed art dealer, moving to the North London suburb of Friern Barnet.
While living there, Václav became suspicious: new postmen started delivering mail on his street, window cleaners would show up with increasing frequency, and a technician appeared one day to fix his working telephone. He was convinced that he was being followed. Others in the neighbourhood were also starting to notice that something odd was going on. One of his neighbours, Mrs Saint, called the police in 1987, saying that she was receiving Morse code as interference through her television set.
Václav Jelínek was finally arrested 22nd April 1988, sat in his flat, listening to a Czech numbers station in his pyjamas. Messages from this station were decoded by British authorities after they were able to locate codes — that we can presume were One-Time Pads — written on microfilm, and hidden in bars of soap around his home. Once decoded, those messages were used as evidence against him at trial (the first British trial for espionage since 1961), along with secret messages written in invisible ink in car magazines, and the testimony from a heartbroken Johanna van Haarlem7.
Václav was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was freed in 1993, 5 years into his sentence, after a failed escape, a hunger-strike, and lobbying by Czech diplomats. He was deported to the newly formed Czech Republic, where he lives to this day.
Sam was still sat at the table when Carla came downstairs. As she nervously re-entered the dining room he welcomed her with a meek smile, placing the paperback detective novel he was reading down on the table, a page folded to keep his place. “Anything interesting?” He said. Carla could tell he was annoyed.
She sat in the seat opposite him, spreading her arms out to either side, caressing the wooden table’s edge. “Actually,” she said, slowly, “there was something interesting.”
Sam raised his eyebrows.
“I think,” she began, watching Sam’s expression carefully, “I just overheard two Russian agents talking. They didn’t seem to know they were being listened to, either. Sounded like they got out of there in a hurry.”
“Is that right? Should I be worried about men-in-black rocking up at the front door?”
Carla rolled her eyes. “No darling, I don’t think we need to be worried about that. It didn’t seem like a very interesting conversation anyway, and there are probably a hundred other people that heard it just the same as me.”
She got up from the table to retrieve her food that Sam had wrapped in foil for her and placed in the fridge. Just before she got to the door, Sam spoke again. “Say, Car? Why is it that you’re so into this stuff? You know it’s just spies talking, military orders and stuff, right? You’re never gonna know what it really means, are you?”
“Well, isn’t that just what’s so amazing about it?” She said, stopping at the doorway, steadying herself against the frame. “We all know that world is out there, all those secrets. These strange people infiltrating and spying and all that, but you can’t see it, can you? It’s all darkness. This is a window in to that world, this is us normal folks seeing behind the curtain. Yeah, I’ve got no idea what the numbers, or the stuff those Russians said, means, but I saw it happen! We got to see something that they didn’t want us to see, because they’re so confident us little folk have no idea what it is they’re up to. Don’t you think that’s amazing? ‘Just spies talking,’ come on!”
Sam stroked the cover of his book on the table, considering Carla’s words for a moment. He looked at her, and smiled. “Yeah,” he said eventually, “yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
Not for Public Consumption
When I first began researching number stations, I was slightly taken-aback by how many people thought the whole pursuit was a fruitless endeavour. “Oh, but we all know they’re just spy stations.” Or something like, “come on, they’re just coded military stuff, you’re never going to know what any of it means.”
I couldn’t believe that this wasn’t fascinating! We really are seeing behind the curtain, and not only that, seeing how bizarre things can get. Be it British stations that use folk-songs as musical intervals, lo-tech and unreliable Russian military signals, or Václav Jelínek’s bars of soap, these stations are a window in to a world that most will only ever imagine. As a former spokesperson for the British Department of Trade and Industry said8:
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 air around us is full of stuff, be it TV, radio, the internet, whatever. If you really try and listen, if you’re anything like Carla, you’re met with a storm of furious sound. Broadcasts from all over the world, that range from the beautifully mundane to the dazzlingly bizarre. It’s an ocean of noise populated by disparate islands, some of which are so fascinating that you can’t help but explore further.
Thank you so much for reading! I didn’t intend for the first post to be quite so long, but honestly, the world of number stations is truly expansive. If you want to go out and explore them yourself (which I thoroughly recommend you do), you might find the following useful:
You don’t need to buy hardware to listen this stuff, just use this!
The escapades of Václav Jelínek are more numerous and interesting than I could fit here. In fact, a whole book has been written about it, which was summarised in this wonderful BBC article that I totally recommend you read.
The ENIGMA 2000 website has buckets of information, I particularly recommend reading about the unmasking of station E22 here.
I learned a lot from Priyom.org, as well as obtaining a few of the recordings in this article from their site.
If you do find out anything cool, share it with us in the comments:
Please do consider subscribing, and I’ll see you soon with more tales of the strange and spooky.
Take a look at ENIGMA’s website, there’s a bunch of interesting things on there, including the active stations list itself. It’s a very technical document, but if you’re interested in diving into more of this stuff, these folks seem to be the authority.
Here’s a quick rendition of the whole process without all the description:
ENCRYPT
MSG : S A V E T H E C H E E R L E A D E R
NUM(A): 18 01 22 05 19 08 05 03 08 05 05 17 11 05 01 04 05 17
OTP(B): 80 45 19 20 31 73 14 02 70 12 62 54 85 42 23 48 39 04
A + B : 98 46 41 25 50 81 19 05 78 17 67 71 96 47 24 52 44 21
SEND : 98464 12550 81190 57817 67719 64724 52442 17698
DECRYPT
RCV : 98464 12550 81190 57817 67719 64724 52442 17698
PAIR(A): 98 46 41 25 50 81 19 05 78 17 67 71 96 47 24 52 44 21 76 98
OTP(B) : 80 45 19 20 31 73 14 02 70 12 62 54 85 42 23 48 39 04
A - B : 18 01 22 05 19 08 05 03 08 05 05 17 11 05 01 04 05 17
MSG : S A V E T H E C H E E R L E A D E RAs a side note, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that Johanna was eventually reunited with the real Erwin in 1992.
Fascinating stuff! Wonder what happened to Carla…