Atomic Express

At the start of the Cold War video game “Call of Duty: Black Ops” a mysterious shapely women of vaugue ethnic backgroud approaches a 1950’s era microphone and intones a seemingly random series of numbers into it. Throughout the game, number appear and flash in a psychedlic haze for the brainwashed operative as he struggles to comprehend the paranoid reality of covert operations during the Cold War.

What you are seeing when you play the game in this instance is the operation of a “One Way Voice Link” using a “Number Station.” During the Cold War, mysterious radio stations spewing an endless serious of numbers with mechanical female voices appeared on the air. Short-wave radio enthusiasists have tried for decades to figure out what they were for and who was using them. You can take a look for yourself HERE at the CONET Project.

The problems of communicating with covert agents in the field were exposed with sometimes deadly effects during the Second World War, particularly agents from the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) (see Leo Marks’ excellent memoir, “Between Silk and Cyanide” for what happened…..). The invention of the “One Time Pad”, a relatively secure cipher system, permitted an agent in the field to receive instructions-all he or she had to do was listen for the sequence of numbers at a given time, record them, and decipher them. For a hostile counter-intelligence organization, all they would hear if they were listening was a stream of numbers that had no apparent meaning.

The most famous ones for the shortwave crowd were shut down at the end of the Cold War, but Number Stations are still in use today. M-12 is Russian, E-10 is Israeli, V-2 is Cuba.

And then there was The Buzzer better known as UVB-76 at 4625 kHz from somewhere in Russia since 1982-it puts out a monotnous buzz tone 24 hours a day in bursts of 25 per minute. For no apparent reason. Some believe that if the Buzzer stops buzzing a Soviet-era Doomsday Device will go off. (I expect to find Desmond from “Lost” peddling away in some bunker somewhere in Siberia).

Though it wasn’t a number station, there was The Russian Woodpecker.  In 1976, an extremely powerful signal coming from the Soviet Union interfered with transmissions irregularly. The Hams were able to track it back to the Ukraine near Chernobyl. NATO, of course, had been watching the site and as it turned out it was an Anti-Ballistic Missile warning radar. It was shut down in 1989. HERE is an excellent site on STEEL YARD. (Oh, by the way, for the “Call of Duty Black Ops” afficinados: The Russian Woodpecker is the basis for the map “Grid.” You can see the array in the background).

There’s now a little app for your iPhone that lets you try and decipher a pseudo-Soviet numbers station when you’re waiting for the bus/train/passing through Homeland Security.