Imagine that you have a radio station bought before 1990 at home. Imagine that it is lit and settled on “short waves”. The night is advanced. You go from channel to canal, helmet on the ears. In the middle of the crackling of the waves reach you radio stations around the world: the voice of America (Voice of America), The voice of Russia (formerly Radio Moscow), even Radio North Korea.
Between each station, the hertzian band should be silent, but it is not the case: it seems alive, haunted. You perceive a series of beeps, then a lullaby lullaby, before a child’s synthetic voice recites, in German, series of figures by group of five: “Eins, Sechs, Fünf, Neun, Null”… (“one, six, five, new, zero”) The scansion is repeated. Only the figures change. Then the child is silent. You have just captured what the Anglo-Saxons call a “Numbers Station”or “numbers of numbers” in French.
A global phenomenon
Night after night, while browsing the short waves, we hear numbers in different languages (German, English, French, Russian, Chinese, etc.). Sometimes these are other types of sounds, Morse signals, or even polytone, that is to say a series of random notes or sound disturbances, so confusing that an uninformed listener will confuse them with parasites.
It is these figures, these letters, these noises that form the body of messages, because these are messages. But who sends them? Who are they intended for? Generations of radio amateurs have arisen these questions. To understand, you have to go back to the supposed origins in the 1950s.
Some enthusiasts are organized, like William Thomas Godbey, alias Havana Moon, radio officer of the American navy, who captured his first station in the late 1960s. Fascinated, he wrote: “The numbers can be both messengers of adventure, rebellion, intrigue and romances. The numbers are Bogart and Bergman. They are Cagney and Lombard. They are the scene of the mind when he reasons in his highest frequencies. They are the absolute mystery. “
The pioneers
In the late 1970s and 1980s, radio amateurs in the United States and Europe discovered numbers. Simon Mason, a teenager of Sheffield (center of England), receives for Christmas a short wave receiver and plunges the first into the enigma of Numbers Stations. Overseas, Chris Smolinski also captures series of numbers in 1980 and remains prohibited by his discovery: “I can’t explain its nature and that turns to obsession.”
In France too, Alain Charret, a former soldier who passed through the Air Force and passionate about radio listening, discovers “Series of figures broadcast in German” And discuss it with his radio club which gives him no answer. These enthusiasts note frequencies, dates or figures and exchange data. The hypotheses abound. Weather bulletins? Banking transactions? Coded messages? Havana Moon even evokes German transmissions to Chile, linked to the neonazia sect colony Dignidad.
The hypothesis
Sometimes classic radios are “polluted” by these emissions. In 1991, a BBC auditor complained of interference because of a female voice stating figures. The BBC replies that these are snowls intended for the maintenance of ski lifts.
At the dawn of the 1990s, a hypothesis was necessary: these emissions are communications between intelligence services and clandestine agents. The community of listeners (“Headphones”) widens thanks to the Internet. Havana Moon questions the American authorities about transmissions in Spanish, but receives evasive responses. It follows a signal to the station of a base of the American Air Force, located in Tequesta, Florida.
Alain Charret, who was also affiliated with the Directorate General of External Security (DGSE), confirms the link with intelligence. In 1993, in the United Kingdom, Chris Midgley and Mike Gaufman created the Enigma group and an international nomenclature of numbers present around the world, with codes and nicknames: “Atención”, “Swedish Rhapsody”, “Lincolnshire Poacher”, etc.
An indecipherable code: the “one-time pad”
The secret lies in the “One-Time Pad” (OTP), a single -use key also called “disposable mask” in jargon in French. This cryptography system is supposed to make the messages inviolable, if the protocol is well respected: only one OTP for a single message. Without this “disposable key”, we cannot decode. The American authorities admit their existence, but without officially recognizing them.
In 1998, a fatal error was made by five Cuban Castrists agents, who used a radio station of numbers (“Atención”) and short waves to communicate. Infiltrated in Florida to counter the opposing groups to the Cuban diet, they simply used the same OTP to quantify several messages. The five agents are finally arrested for espionage in the United States. Note that this resounding affair, known as Cuban Fiveinspired the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who made it a film: Cuban Networkreleased in January 2020.
Obsolence and persistence
Despite the fall of the USSR, certain numbers of numbers always emit. Their simplicity and reliability ensure their survival, especially in white areas where the Internet does not cover everything. OTP notebooks, in cigarette paper, consume themselves quickly to avoid any evidence. In the event of a major digital breakdown, short waves also make it possible to bypass dependence on digital. Thus, only states with these analog channels would be ready to reactivate them.
During the USSR, short-wave-wave transmitters were embarked on trawlers. More recently, as revealed by a joint investigation by Scandinavian media, broadcast on Arte in July 2023, Russian ships in the Baltic Sea were spotted with analog radios posts, shortly before the explosion of the North Submarine 2-2-2-2. In September 2022. Stations long silent, such as “Lincolnshire Poacher” The Russian invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, a sign of a potential resumption of tensions.
The cultural imprint of “Numbers Stations”
Beyond the world of intelligence, these sounds that emanate from numbers of numbers fascinate artists, especially electronic music, such as the Scottish group Boards of Canada (for example, with the song “Gyroscope”, released on the album Geogaddi In 2002, to find below), the Franco-British training Stereolab or the Nasser group, from Marseille. These musicians integrate them into their works, evoking invisible territories and a diffuse threat.
The “buzzer”: the black star
Finally, the UVB-76 station, known as “The Buzzer”, broadcasts since 1982 an incessant buzz, near Moscow. Its function remains unknown. Dominant hypothesis: it would be a “pedal of the dead man”, a security device to ensure that the Russian capital has not been destroyed. The program was interrupted several times, during which votes and figures were transmitted, in particular in December 2024 in the middle of the Russian offensive in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
In 2011, Peter Savodnik, a journalist from the American magazine Wired entered the enclosure that broadcasts the buzzer. Noting that the military complex has been abandoned for two years, it wonders. So why do we still hear this buzz? Where does it emit now? Two more mysteries that the journalist in question summarizes by another question at the end of this report: “But who still feeds the dog who remained on the site?”
