CIA Numbers Stations- do they still exist?

NUMBERS STATIONS- DO THEY STILL EXIST?

The CIA ran numbers stations throughout the Cold War era, and probably still do. Shortwave radio stations continue to broadcast arranged numbers to intelligence officers and spies operating in foreign countries. They broadcast mostly at fixed time schedules, although some may be at random times.

Numbers stations are shortwave radio transmitters that operate between 3,000 and 30,000 kilohertz, transmitting cryptic strings of numbers or numbers uttered by a creepy computerized-sounding voice. A few may broadcast via Morse code or just emit various types of weird noises.

Their use began during the Cold War era, and a well-known numbers station was known as the E03 “Lincolnshire Poacher”, which was run by the British Secret Intelligence Service. It broadcast from a clandestine location in Bletchley Park in the mid-1970s. Ironically, the “Lincolnshire Poacher” was given this nickname because its transmissions have been traced to Royal Air Force base Akrotiri on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and it played the first two bars of the folk song “The Lincolnshire Poacher” before it transmitted each string of numbers!

In the MISSION OF VENGEANCE spy thriller, the CIA tries to avoid the vulnerabilities of digital communications over long distances, since foreign adversaries have advanced their digital tracking and surveillance capabilities to an art form. This snippet from MISSION OF VENGEANCE shows how the NSA uses Brute Force computer hardware to crack enemy encrypted communications. Numbers stations communications make Brute Force useless:

The whirring sound intensified as her supercomputer continued hunting down the password. Stacey’s Brute Force hardware searched through every number combination from one to nine, then rifled through the top ten million most frequently used passwords. She programmed it to search every possible upper and lower-case letter combo in both Russian and English. After a while, the results came back. Unavailable.

Next, she began exploring all possible letter, number and special character sequences while entering additional search recommendations, including top Russian first, last, and middle household names; the names of Russian military and intelligence heroes; popular Russian bands, songs, sports figures, artists, movie actors and even common Russian names for pets.

No other NSA employees were near her, as agreed upon by General Morrison and the NSA director. She often spoke to herself in her isolated cubicle. “I’ll start with eight-character combinations.” She entered the instructions into Brute Force. Moments later, it came back with the number of guesstimates it would generate:

6,634,498,321,890,647.

“Shit! Over six quadrillion. I’m going to be here for a while.” End of snippet.

BTW, Stacie eventually unlocks the password, but this example from the spy thriller novel demonstrates why many numbers stations continue to broadcast today. They haven’t “evolved” much and the format remains the same. The transmissions of numbers begin on the hour or half-hour with a brief identifier at the start in the form of radio-alphabet “code names” — such as Alpha Bravo Oscar, followed by some short phrase, like “Attention!”.

The numbers are spoken in a clear, monotone male or female voice with no emotion, then it signs off with an “end of message.” During the Cold War, such broadcast messages sent from the Soviet Union ended in a string of zeros.

There may be fake, or decoy, numbers stations that do not transmit to undercover agents at all. Such decoy stations were common during the Cold War and may be in existence today. Instead of broadcasting genuine messages, they transmit meaningless text, possibly for training purposes, but most likely to trick opponents into wasting resources to monitor and to try to find out what they mean, thus spending much valuable time hunting for non-existent spies.

I guess it’s no surprise that clandestine intelligence services like the CIA, Britain’s MI-6, and Russia’s FSB (formerly the KGB) outright deny that numbers stations have ever existed. They deny their existence simply because the operators will be punished severely if caught. After all, they’re spying!

Here’s proof that they continued to thrive after the Cold War ended:

· In 2001, the U.S. tried the Cuban Five on the charge of spying for Cuba. That group had received and decoded messages that were broadcast from Cuban numbers stations.

· Also in 2001, a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst was arrested and charged with espionage for communicating with the Cuban Intelligence Directorate through encoded messages, with instructions being received through encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba.

· In 2006, Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, were arrested and charged with espionage after they were caught receiving assignments via shortwave radio number station transmissions.

· In June 2009, the FBI arrested Walter Kendall Myers with conspiracy to spy for Cuba after they caught him receiving and decoding messages broadcast from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.

For spies in the field, low-tech spoken number transmissions continue to have advantages in the 21st century. High-tech data-receiving equipment is difficult to obtain, and being caught with just a shortwave radio has a degree of plausible deniability that no spying is being conducted. After all, what’s illegal about being a ham radio operator? There are ham radio operator clubs throughout the world.

I enjoyed the movie “The Numbers Station” with John Cusack, a black ops agent with the CIA, who is assigned to a remote numbers broadcast station with orders to protect the station and the code operator, Katherine (Malin Akerman). When the station comes under attack, the pair work together to defend it, save themselves and stop their attackers from sending out a deadly code that could change the world as we know it.

Lastly, watch the video Whatever Happened to the Numbers Stations?- Spying by the Numbers. It discusses Stacie’s NSA Brute Force algorithm (in real life), the “Lincolnshire Poacher” numbers station, and much more.

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), enjoys writing about the U.S. Intelligence Community, and relishes traveling to the Florida Keys and Key West, the Bahamas and Caribbean. He combines both passions in his Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series. Check out his latest spy thriller: MISSION OF VENGEANCE.