"Numbers stations had their heyday during the Cold War, but they've never really disappeared. In the internet age, they have two major advantages: they work when everything else goes down, and they're untraceable unless you're caught red-handed with the codebook."
"The transmission begins with a warning in Farsi, the language spoken in Iran: Attention! and then two, six, nine, zero, four.... It repeats several times a day at fixed times and can be heard thousands of kilometers away. The destination could be somewhere within Iran where agents or operatives have a special codebook to convert those numbers into text."
Numbers stations are shortwave radio broadcasts transmitting sequences of numbers that can be decoded using special codebooks by authorized recipients. Following Israel and US attacks on Iran in February, Iran shut down nationwide internet access, and a numbers station designated V32 began broadcasting coded messages in Farsi. These stations originated during the Cold War for covert agent communication and remain valuable today because they function independently of internet infrastructure and leave no traceable digital footprint unless the codebook is discovered. The broadcasts can reach thousands of kilometers away, making them ideal for maintaining secure communications during internet blackouts or in hostile environments.
#numbers-stations #shortwave-radio-communication #covert-communications #iran-internet-blackout #cold-war-technology
Read at english.elpais.com
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