If you know much about radios and espionage, you’ve probably encountered number stations. These are mysterious stations that read out groups of numbers or otherwise encoded messages to… well… someone. Most of the time, we don’t know who is receiving the messages. You’d be excused for thinking that this is an old technology. After all, satellite phones, the Internet, and a plethora of options now exist to allow the home base to send spies secret instructions. However, the current-day global conflict has seen at least one new number station appear, apparently associated with the United States and, presumably, targeting some recipients in Iran, according to priyom.org.
As you might expect, these stations don’t identify themselves, but the Enigma Control List names this one as V32. It broadcasts two two-hour blocks a day at 0200 UTC and a repeat at 1800 UTC. Each message starts with the Farsi word for “attention” followed by what is assumed to be some header information as two 5-digit groups. Then there is a set of 181 five-digit groups. Each message is padded out to take 20 minutes, and there are six messages in each transmission.
How Do You Know?
While this could, in theory, be from (and to) anywhere, direction finding has traced the signal to a US base near Stuttgart, Germany. In addition to using Farsi, Iran has repeatedly attempted to jam the signal, causing V32 to change frequencies a few times. There’s also a more recent, so far unidentified, jammer trying to block the signal.
In addition to direction finding, there is a surprising amount of information you can glean from the audio. The first few days of broadcasts had specific beeps in the background, which appear to be warning tones from a specific type of American military transmitter that warns the operator when encryption is not engaged. At first, a human read the numbers. Eventually, the station switched to using automated numbers.
Oops
In addition, there have been a few times when Windows 10 system sounds have leaked into the transmission. Other oddities are several cases where a word was read out in the middle of the numbers. We aren’t cryptographers, but that suggests the numbers refer to words in some sort of codebook, and that book doesn’t contain the proper words.
If you want to try your hand at decoding, you can hear the station on USB just under 8 MHz, or just listen to the recordings made by others (like the ones below or this one). You might like to read what other people say about it, too.
We are fascinated by spy stations. Even when they aren’t really number stations.