You have been identified as a Mossad asset of prime importance RM. Cease and desist or you will get electric shocks to your extremities.

Here's a thought. Even if you aren't transmitting to your agents, making your enemies think you are is also useful.

How paranoid are we all going to feel if the local ice cream van uses The Lincolnshire Poacher as his chime..?

I have to say, your series of videos on number stations has probably been the most comprehensive and interesting material on the topic that I've listened to!

There was a spy living across the street from me when I was a kid. The was arrested, stuck with me all my 77 years.

Every time I listen in on somebodies broadcast chatter I feel a bit like a spy myself 😂

I remember getting "Radio Havana Cuba" on a late 80s boombox that probably had SW AM Wide purely as an extra feature to list in the catalogues (remember them?) to people that knew very little about radio apart from FM Stereo. I knew little about Short Wave listening & amongst my local AM CB mates, years before, I was considered strange because I'd try to talk back, on 4W, to the American skip that came romping in during the peak of Solar Cycle 21. Anyway, I sent for a calendar, broadcast times & an SWL card & forgot about it. A few months later a large, taped down envelope arrived with a sheaf of third world paper (it reminded me of Indian newspaper that Jos sticks came wrapped in, same texture) and it said "Fill in this questionnaire to win a chance to inspect some Cuban collective farms in person!" The "questionnaire" asked about my employment, their name and address, times I worked, car I drove, who I voted for... and on & on for page after page! I didn't return it!

I had a physics teacher that collected a ton of messages from a station and figured out the cipher to it. The messages were street addresses in the UK apparently sent by some eastern block country. Looking up the addresses it were empty houses and flats so we concluded most likely these were places they wanted them to go to pick up letters or some other material left by other spies. We only ever managed to decipher one station, the other recordings weren't numerous enough to have the required dataset to decipher. Felt a bit like Alan Turing breaking Enigma, just with a bit more modern technology. Used excel and a vba script to do this, took weeks of leaving the teachers computer in the physics lab running 24/7, but it came back with something, which is quite surprising if you think about it 2007 didn't have that much computing power over the already pretty complex ciphers by then. It must have been not so important or meant to be deciphered more quickly, can't imagine the intelligence office in the UK didn't also have that decoded already, which made it confusing it kept broadcasting all the while we were trying to decipher it.

It sounds like that time in Hungary that Fatkenhauer was relating, that he had just been about to get his leg over. Of course he wouldn't be the first to have to choose between personal commitments and patriotic duty, but that is high dedication indeed!

It was these that got me hooked onto your channel. As well as Ham radio. For this you have my gratitude. It's almost like peering between the layers of reality?

You find the most fascinating histories! Thanks for your efforts!

The Jack Barsky/Lex Fridman interview is one of the coolest things to watch on KZfaq. It’s amazing to hear what a former Soviet spy has to say about intelligence.

This is one your best videos to date. Thank you for covering this very exciting subject.

Excellent video, loved the real-world examples. I've been a short wave listener for years and heard a few of these number stations in the cold war years. One of my current hobbies is geocaching and I have a cache in development that will use a fake number station and one-time pad to lead people thru a cold war scenario to discover the cache. Thanks to your videos (and the Conet Project) I have lots of ideas and inspiration. The geocache will be released later this year (in Melbourne, Australia) and I'm very excited to see people's reaction to it!

I've been watching for a while love the channel

Brilliant these Lewis, I'm not a radio buff, but uts stirred my interest, and you keep simplistic explanations, which leave your videos accessible to all. Much appreciated.

You never cease to amaze me dude. Great show!

Back in the eighties I used to have a short wave radio and listened to various stations on it. I also used a second radio next to the short wave radio tuned to a harmonic of the short wave radio to pull side band signals slightly so they were intelligible instead of just a wah wah noise. I also made my own aerial from copper wire running up my garden. Now we can all video chat across the planet all day 😃 Technology has moved on so far it’s amazing.

I've always wondered the actual value of information from some of these agents. Like the Russian group from around 10 years ago, a lot them seem to have very normal jobs with seemingly access to no sensitive information , i can just imagine some of the Reports "Moscow, Walmart is doing a 2 for 1 on frozen chicken"

Fascinating stuff Lewis!

Another excellent video, Lewis! I've read that the Sony ICF-2001D (ICF-2010 in the US) was the preferred receiver of spies in the 1980s/1990s. I've got one and it's brilliant. Certainly one of the best-ever shortwave portables. 73

Great vid! Lots of detail about the work that went in to decoding messages.

Very very awesome video, I love your channel, as I listened to number stations as a kid but few knew about them,so interesting. Thank you for posting❤!

Quite nice to see the other side! Thanks

Honestly, I can't get enough on numbers stations.

Great to hear this side of it

Another fascinating video. Thank you

7:00 i used to hear this on channel 22 and 23 on cb radio back in the ealry 2010 ish .. had a huge 3 element experimental Yagi made from cooper water pipes that was specifically meant for listening to directional skip .. and it was for sure was coming from straight south of the usa ..also used to hear a fire dept in new york on a super super hot day thing was unreal..once in a lifetime thing! i still have the know how i just need the motivation.

Thank you for the very interesting video 👍🙂

Fascinating ! 👍👍👍👍👍

good work buddy.

Very interesting series. You always have something new for ham radio! "A7, B2, 34, 2, 7, 9.... 73S" 😮😂

Over 40 years ago there was a bloke living in a flat opposite and chatting to him at a neighbours party I asked him what his work was. He replied that he was in advertising, end of conversation! But later another neighbour told me that he suspected that he was working for some government intelligence. This was confirmed when he moved to Cheltenham!

Great video, thanks!

Pretty cool & surprisingly why in the US Navy I went threw some training with these. Here in the States some are aware but not many. Great Work , that is if they exist.

Great vid, Lewis...👍

Great vid Lewis keep up good work 000 000 ende!

Great show.

I didn't realize there was concrete publicly available evidence, but it's not like it could have been anything else. Since the first moment I heard numbers broadcasted on mysterious frequencies, I knew that was it. I tried to come up with some other logical explanation, but there just isn't any. Nevertheless, the code will always be unbreakable and that's why they keep transmitting, even though we all know what they are.

Very interesting!

Good blog nice to see some off the faces at the other end of the numbers stations

Top notch man.

Cool stuff!

Now this was interesting - I remember reading years ago about that Czech intelligence officer who was caught posing as a Dutch national back in the late '80s.

Thanks. Amazing and fascinating. To think now any schmuck can use a burner phone, VPN and end to end encryption on thermal or signal.

This reminds me that I need to get back to my Morse code practice...

" karli" the educator from fätkenheuer was from hainburg austria...but we lost trace somehow in hainburg .....karli one of the austrians working for CIA ....the messages came from fleckendorf from the CIA portion of the messages sent from there (9

We are all deffo on ‘the list’ now We’ve watched this 😅

i once discovered one of the number stations as a child i was gobsmacked couldnt fathom it

First time learning the spy side of it, but it confirms my theories

Thanks!

I can vouch for receiving morse for 5 figure groups and then decrypting with a OTP and then decoding with a dictionary as being time consuming ... and then doing the whole thing in reverse .... very time consuming and so prone to opetator error

Ringway Manchester Your accent reminds of The Beatles accent. I was able to See The Beatles in Memphis Tennessee in 1964.

That's just creepy. What must go on in the mind of a spy.

Now that you know.... Watch out if someone follows you.... heh heh

Interesting I remember Iistened several times to German speaking Number stations on an old tube 1950ies AM radio with with separate spread SW bands. I this period i asked a friend of my parents who was a radio ham at this time. It was some a known fact at this time in the late cold war era that informations were send to spies or agents via SW radio. And I wonder that those stations are still operated in the internet era.

Could you perhaps do a video about the now defunct Dutch pirate radio station called Radio Veronica?

Where is the link for the documentary you did?

Can I request a video about backwards music stations? Like [MrDrSmithJr] "The Backwards Music Station (Number Station)" & [auto9 Music & Remasters] "Number Stations - Backwards Music - MK Ultra - Mind Control 1990's Short Wave Radio Broadcast" & [Spy Stations] "XM Whales aka The Backwards Music Station - Shortwave Recording" & what causes the sounds?

John has a long mustache. John has a long mustache.

That was interesting.

Awesome work.

You should interview Jack.

Dude where is the DnB at the end of the video?

Btw you can still sometimes hear atención and I've listened to it myself, for some reason they called it "cuban spy numbers"

I know there are like 8 towers in the US that are emergency towers that do have bunkers underground

Myers received his messages in Morse.

What is interesting, are the times when stations break schedule to transmit. Then you have to wonder where the action is

It's probably a lot easier and quicker to decrypt messages these days due to availability of computers.

On what frequencies, and at what times can one receive numbers stations in the UK?.

worked at 13 sigs mate, all makes sense

Today I would assume the number stations are revealing website addresses or even social media accounts to make contact.

Stay spoooooky!

Provided the hassle and risk of distributing one-time-pads (and sufficient of them) to your agents isn't too great, OTP encryption is both the most secure and quickest/most efficient of the 'good' hand ciphers. SOE agents in occupied Europe were for most of the war stuck with transposition ciphers - rearranging the message letters (anagramming) according to some agreed key phrase - usually the first one or two lines of a (memorised) poem. Unless the anagram is long - typically more than 200 characters - the rearrangement is too obvious so the ciphertext needs to be superenciphered as well. And, the key-phrase can usually be 'extracted' from captured agents which the OTP cannot. Transposing and superencipherment took absolutely forever - sometimes hours - and the subtlest of errors (a misspelling of a word in the key phrase, for example) would garble the entire message. The kind of superhuman concentration demanded for deciphering and, particularly, enciphering transposition messages was often too much to ask of radio ops working under incredibly hazardous clandestine conditions in occupied Europe. Cipher machines, although never used by SOE, were thus a major advance in field cryptography.

Treason = Public Execution. No ifs, buts or maybes.

I think that this demonstrates the near un-breakability of one time pad codes. You just need to make sure that you don't include the same phrase in each message.

Number stations would be more popular if they broadcast future winning lottery numbers.

"Chat botski" I see what you did there...

Peter Wright's book SpyCatcher outlines the "Gordon Lonsdale" case. Quite a bit older but lays out exactly how the communication via Number Stations and a one-time pad worked.

I would not be surprised if Lewis suddenly disappeared with no trace.😂👍

I wonder how long it takes the sender to find out the receiver has been compromised.

Is that saddleworth Lewis?

ChatGPT just told me, that these number stations are still in use. So I assume these are still an effective way to communicate.

These days they probably use encoded jpeg images sent via email.

spyin never stops. so sure the numbers stations stay going ..

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.. Still relevant and more secure than most modern comms applications… everyone knows about them.. can’t really do anything about them… OTP still has its uses…

I wonder if Ukraine and Russian and the USA are using number stations right now?

I Wonder how many ladies was fooled by fake spies pretending to be spies 😂

there is a film starring John Cusack called "numbers station" dreadful such a dissapointment

Thanks RM. Very Good Video. Take Care****

While trying to decode the stations seems pointless, I'll bet there's someone who's job is to record them just in case a one-time pad is captured.

If they use a computer to decode then the encryption can be broken in principle.

Viva Cuba

Hey, Jack Barsky: How's the _SOVIET UNION_ doing these days, eh? 😉

05:00 - He's literally a cryptographic nonce

At university MI6 approached me to work for them but I turned them down. The pay was crap although the company car (1964 Aston Martin DB5), accommodation allowance (any 5 star hotel in the world fully paid for) and orders to seduce beautiful women for information was tempting. Instead after university I worked in a call centre and drove a Ford Focus 😔 My mate Jimmy Bond took up the offer but I don’t know if he stayed in the job I last saw him racing through London in an Aston with Dame Judi Dench sat in the passenger seat for some reason 😳.

Great video, as usual, Lewis. 73s de ZL1DFA