Absolutely..all number station operations have past and present used "opaque fillers" to fool and confuse the opposition and sometimes themselves.....I clearly remember s07c variant broadcast during the Moscow Whitehouse seige along with some very long Russian number broadcasts strong in the uk when there was a Russian state visit and and u.s visit just possibly to let uk or us intelligence agencies ...were still here guys pick the bones out of this......
In particular, sudden changes in message traffic are often very strong clues that something is changing (new missions, new resources, etc), and you may not want to give that away, so the best way is to transmit garbage to fill extra time.
Several stations historically sent the same rather large number of groups - I think at least one sent 200 groups, every message, every day. It was almost certainly for this reason. I honestly think that's why Russia still runs The Buzzer. Any attempt to actually use it at this point would be fruitless. If it started sending OTP messages, it would get jammed into oblivion by people just doing it for the lulz. But it draws attention from elsewhere.
Whew! Just the thought of that tune gives me the creeps and the heebie-jeebies, all I had for my receiver back in the early 80s was an old Heathkit HW-101 SSB transceiver - those notes wavering over the airwaves would send a chills down my spine! Yikes!
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!
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.
@@RingwayManchester I still remember the first address it spat out: 12 Liverpool Rd, Lancashire Most were around the western part of the UK, going on an axis almost from Birmingham to Lancaster. We had about 150 or so transmissions over a two year period. Eventually there was nothing that fit that cipher coming out of that station and the length of the transmissions changed to just be short groups of 4 numbers followed by 12 letters spoken phonetically. I don't know how long ago he recorded them, it could have been decade old stuff.
@@RingwayManchester Yeah, don’t most of these things use one time pads? But this story is not totally improbable. There might be some advantage to having a cipher where an agent could memorize how to decode by hand, thus eliminating the need to keep incriminating code books and having to exchange new code books. But I agree this seems like a tall tale.
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?
@@RingwayManchester You're welcome. I was attached to the British army in Germany before during & after the Wall fell. As well as Communism later. So these kind of post's catch my interest.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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"
Agents with normal jobs and no access to sensitive information are either handlers or agents intended for dirty operations instead of intel gathering... the worst kind.
This reminds me of an old joke from an otherwise deeply forgettable sitcom that ran ABC in the '80s. I can't even remember what it was called, _Mrs. President_ or some such, because the whole premise of the show was that the President of the United States was a woman. (This was considered an absurd enough concept to hang an _entire sitcom_ on in the 1980s.) Anyway, I can't even remember why I happened to watch it one night, but this one joke has stuck with me all these years regardless. There's an episode where the First Gentleman is seriously ill with something or other, and in one scene set at the Soviet Embassy, the KGB _rezident_ bursts into the Ambassador's office and tells him, "Comrade Ambassador! I have important news for you! The President's husband is very sick, he may die!" "Incredible!" shouts the Ambassador. "The KGB is the most effective intelligence-gathering agency in the world!" "I heard it from Ted Koppel," admits the KGB officer.
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
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 liked listening to RHC. When I contacted Radio Moscow, I got a highly censored magazine from them. Someone cut out so many words that the pages hardly held together. It was a USSR propaganda magazine, so I doubt they did it.
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!
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.
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.
" 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
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
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❤!
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.
The Jack Barsky/Lex Fridman interview is one of the coolest things to watch on UA-cam. It’s amazing to hear what a former Soviet spy has to say about intelligence.
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.
I don't think so. Combining for example agent specific, character pair transposition grid with a crossword type grid for sequential garbling seems simple and compact and is more confusing than using a bulky documented cipher machine.
@@2adamast Leo Marks was SOE's chief codemaker - at least for European agents. His wartime memoirs ('Between Silk and Cyanide') document the huge problems of message garble reulting from SOE's of their original go-to columnar transposition cipher. Marks had a huge uphill battle to get OTPs accepted even with strong support from Bletchley Pk. Marks won the day with even the naysayers eventually endorsing the spreed and reliability of the OTP. I. specifically mentioned SOE. about which Marks is an impeccable source.
@Alastair Barkley _Leo Marks describes inventing such a system for the British Special Operations Executive during World War II_ While Marks was inventing one time pads other allied agencies were breaking soviet and german variants. Small quality portable cipher machines only appear in the fifties and even then they had their own problems. The (two letter) encryption grid then (crossword like) transposing grid is a wartime method from John Tiltman. (that even I am able to implement in two minutes)
@@2adamast Marks and Tiltman worked on implementing SOE's OTP because agents were making such a hash of transposition ciphers. The OTP is unbreakable if, and only if, it's used absolutely correctly - as proved by Vernam and Mauborgne (US crypto in WW1). German OTPs were machine generated with faulty randomisation: the Soviets, despite dire warnings, compromised their own OTPs by re-using them, an elementary blunder. Is that what you meant by 'breaking' their ciphers? Quality cipher machines AFTER WW2? Used correctly, the Enigma provided impressive security (some of the German cryptonets remain undeciphered to this day) and the WW2 M-209/C-38 Hagelin machines gave 'good security' in a small package (as stated by Wm Friedman) if, and only if, the cipher machine was used correctly. American signals formations weren't particularly careful about secure operation of the M-209 and the Italians lost a large part of their Meditteranean Navy because of their criminal carelessness with their flavour of Hagelin rotor machine.
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?
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.
I recognise the line, but can't quite place it. It was from a film or TV programme, wasn't it? About (French?) resistance agents in WW2. The message was broadcast by the BBC: a chap heard it and got very excited 'cos it was for him. But I've no recollection of what he had to do. ;-)
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.
That is one fantastic book. I have read it twice. It is also the blueprint for proving the guilt of Roger Hollis as The Fifth Man, or, at the very least, a foreign agent against the west.
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 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.
@@mal_752 the gr👀test f👀r of all is the unknown the hardest thing to s👀 is ourselves ones selves are our greatest fear then 2nd, it's the knowing!, it's definitely the KGB knocking on your door 😅😅
@@2adamast Understood, but if you got one, you could run the codes against the transmissions and see if there was any match - but that would work only if you had a record of the transmission.
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 😳.
You have been identified as a Mossad asset of prime importance RM. Cease and desist or you will get electric shocks to your extremities.
How do I get that treatment. Hey hey heyyyyy!!!!
Don't threaten me with a good time 😏
@@jaymzx0 me 3 I got my assless chaps on boys !!! Lmfao
Or he’ll get caught up in a honeypot, which seems to be Mossad’s MO. Look at Jeffrey Epstein 🤣
Tingling Testicles comes to mind😊😂😂😂😂😂🤭🤭🤭🤔🤔🤔🤫🤫🤫🤫
Here's a thought. Even if you aren't transmitting to your agents, making your enemies think you are is also useful.
Absolutely..all number station operations have past and present used "opaque fillers" to fool and confuse the opposition and sometimes themselves.....I clearly remember s07c variant broadcast during the Moscow Whitehouse seige along with some very long Russian number broadcasts strong in the uk when there was a Russian state visit and and u.s visit just possibly to let uk or us intelligence agencies ...were still here guys pick the bones out of this......
In particular, sudden changes in message traffic are often very strong clues that something is changing (new missions, new resources, etc), and you may not want to give that away, so the best way is to transmit garbage to fill extra time.
Several stations historically sent the same rather large number of groups - I think at least one sent 200 groups, every message, every day. It was almost certainly for this reason. I honestly think that's why Russia still runs The Buzzer. Any attempt to actually use it at this point would be fruitless. If it started sending OTP messages, it would get jammed into oblivion by people just doing it for the lulz. But it draws attention from elsewhere.
That's an established MO. And always using the same message schedule, length and format.
Yes, deltas in SIGINT are generally thought to be a something.
How paranoid are we all going to feel if the local ice cream van uses The Lincolnshire Poacher as his chime..?
Nine nine...
@@markfethney7086 That's how you get caught out, everyone else knows they haven't been that cheap for a long time 😆
Whew! Just the thought of that tune gives me the creeps and the heebie-jeebies, all I had for my receiver back in the early 80s was an old Heathkit HW-101 SSB transceiver - those notes wavering over the airwaves would send a chills down my spine! Yikes!
You'll get extra paranoid when the ice cream prices will start to get listed as groups of 5 digit numbers.
Its just The Klf. They drive an ice cream van.😂
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!
Agree 👍
100% 👍🏼
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.
@@cheechicana No, I just remember being told that he was a border at the big house across the street.
Add some details- his name , country, convicted, etc...
Every time I listen in on somebodies broadcast chatter I feel a bit like a spy myself 😂
listening to the grumpy old hams on 80m :D
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.
Hmmmm, I’m not convinced. Cool story though.
@@RingwayManchester I still remember the first address it spat out: 12 Liverpool Rd, Lancashire Most were around the western part of the UK, going on an axis almost from Birmingham to Lancaster. We had about 150 or so transmissions over a two year period. Eventually there was nothing that fit that cipher coming out of that station and the length of the transmissions changed to just be short groups of 4 numbers followed by 12 letters spoken phonetically. I don't know how long ago he recorded them, it could have been decade old stuff.
@@RingwayManchester Yeah, don’t most of these things use one time pads? But this story is not totally improbable. There might be some advantage to having a cipher where an agent could memorize how to decode by hand, thus eliminating the need to keep incriminating code books and having to exchange new code books. But I agree this seems like a tall tale.
@@RingwayManchester lol *BOOM*
You did not.
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?
Wow, thanks!
@@RingwayManchester You're welcome. I was attached to the British army in Germany before during & after the Wall fell. As well as Communism later. So these kind of post's catch my interest.
You find the most fascinating histories! Thanks for your efforts!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
Still work?
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"
99% of the Russian population
could only imagine
Russian Walmart doing 2 for 1 on anything 😂😂
Agents with normal jobs and no access to sensitive information are either handlers or agents intended for dirty operations instead of intel gathering... the worst kind.
Nope in Moscow they would just be saying,
‘Ivan what is a chicken? Is it a new type of potato’
😃joke inspired by Stephen ‘potato’ Colbert lol
This reminds me of an old joke from an otherwise deeply forgettable sitcom that ran ABC in the '80s. I can't even remember what it was called, _Mrs. President_ or some such, because the whole premise of the show was that the President of the United States was a woman. (This was considered an absurd enough concept to hang an _entire sitcom_ on in the 1980s.) Anyway, I can't even remember why I happened to watch it one night, but this one joke has stuck with me all these years regardless. There's an episode where the First Gentleman is seriously ill with something or other, and in one scene set at the Soviet Embassy, the KGB _rezident_ bursts into the Ambassador's office and tells him, "Comrade Ambassador! I have important news for you! The President's husband is very sick, he may die!"
"Incredible!" shouts the Ambassador. "The KGB is the most effective intelligence-gathering agency in the world!"
"I heard it from Ted Koppel," admits the KGB officer.
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
I know I listened to plenty of numbers stations on my 2010 when I was in England in the early 90's. Not a spy, just a shortwave listener.
That's correct. Ana Belen Montez had an ICF-2010.
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!
What do you believe that card was and who from? Very interesting
I liked listening to RHC. When I contacted Radio Moscow, I got a highly censored magazine from them. Someone cut out so many words that the pages hardly held together. It was a USSR propaganda magazine, so I doubt they did it.
Freaky weird!
I've been watching for a while love the channel
Great vid! Lots of detail about the work that went in to decoding messages.
This is one your best videos to date. Thank you for covering this very exciting subject.
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!
& his name was Bond. James Bond. 👁
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.
Quite nice to see the other side! Thanks
Thank you for the very interesting video 👍🙂
Fascinating stuff Lewis!
Great to hear this side of it
First time learning the spy side of it, but it confirms my theories
What is interesting, are the times when stations break schedule to transmit. Then you have to wonder where the action is
You never cease to amaze me dude. Great show!
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.
Good blog nice to see some off the faces at the other end of the numbers stations
Honestly, I can't get enough on numbers stations.
i once discovered one of the number stations as a child i was gobsmacked couldnt fathom it
" 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
Thanks. Amazing and fascinating. To think now any schmuck can use a burner phone, VPN and end to end encryption on thermal or signal.
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
Today I would assume the number stations are revealing website addresses or even social media accounts to make contact.
That would defeat the object of it completely. Not going to bother explaining why though.
Very interesting series. You always have something new for ham radio!
"A7, B2, 34, 2, 7, 9.... 73S" 😮😂
Ringway Manchester Your accent reminds of The Beatles accent. I was able to See The Beatles in Memphis Tennessee in 1964.
Wrong city haha but thanks
hahahaha ...thats fighting talk to him... that is ...
the Lincolnshire poacher.. now..
the Manchester scouser 😅😅🤣🤣🤣🤭🤭🤭🤭🤣🤣🤣🤣
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❤!
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.
Another fascinating video. Thank you
This reminds me that I need to get back to my Morse code practice...
The Jack Barsky/Lex Fridman interview is one of the coolest things to watch on UA-cam. It’s amazing to hear what a former Soviet spy has to say about intelligence.
Btw you can still sometimes hear atención and I've listened to it myself, for some reason they called it "cuban spy numbers"
Fascinating ! 👍👍👍👍👍
That's just creepy. What must go on in the mind of a spy.
good work buddy.
Great vid Lewis keep up good work 000 000 ende!
We are all deffo on ‘the list’ now
We’ve watched this 😅
Myers received his messages in Morse.
Very interesting!
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.
I don't think so. Combining for example agent specific, character pair transposition grid with a crossword type grid for sequential garbling seems simple and compact and is more confusing than using a bulky documented cipher machine.
@@2adamast Leo Marks was SOE's chief codemaker - at least for European agents. His wartime memoirs ('Between Silk and Cyanide') document the huge problems of message garble reulting from SOE's of their original go-to columnar transposition cipher. Marks had a huge uphill battle to get OTPs accepted even with strong support from Bletchley Pk. Marks won the day with even the naysayers eventually endorsing the spreed and reliability of the OTP. I. specifically mentioned SOE. about which Marks is an impeccable source.
"SOE's use of.."
@Alastair Barkley _Leo Marks describes inventing such a system for the British Special Operations Executive during World War II_ While Marks was inventing one time pads other allied agencies were breaking soviet and german variants.
Small quality portable cipher machines only appear in the fifties and even then they had their own problems.
The (two letter) encryption grid then (crossword like) transposing grid is a wartime method from John Tiltman. (that even I am able to implement in two minutes)
@@2adamast Marks and Tiltman worked on implementing SOE's OTP because agents were making such a hash of transposition ciphers. The OTP is unbreakable if, and only if, it's used absolutely correctly - as proved by Vernam and Mauborgne (US crypto in WW1). German OTPs were machine generated with faulty randomisation: the Soviets, despite dire warnings, compromised their own OTPs by re-using them, an elementary blunder. Is that what you meant by 'breaking' their ciphers? Quality cipher machines AFTER WW2? Used correctly, the Enigma provided impressive security (some of the German cryptonets remain undeciphered to this day) and the WW2 M-209/C-38 Hagelin machines gave 'good security' in a small package (as stated by Wm Friedman) if, and only if, the cipher machine was used correctly. American signals formations weren't particularly careful about secure operation of the M-209 and the Italians lost a large part of their Meditteranean Navy because of their criminal carelessness with their flavour of Hagelin rotor machine.
Could you perhaps do a video about the now defunct Dutch pirate radio station called Radio Veronica?
And caroline maybe , would be intresting to me .I like all the vid's very good.
Veronica is not defunct lol. It's now a legit TV station, as well as a radio station.
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?
I know there are like 8 towers in the US that are emergency towers that do have bunkers underground
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.
Number stations would be more popular if they broadcast future winning lottery numbers.
John has a long mustache. John has a long mustache.
The chair is against the wall
@@hexdegen understood..
otherwise the vegetables won't get to the market
and uncle will be upset
@@01cthompson your at the wrong channel.. mate 😂😂
@@grahamfisher5436 Wolverines!
I recognise the line, but can't quite place it. It was from a film or TV programme, wasn't it? About (French?) resistance agents in WW2. The message was broadcast by the BBC: a chap heard it and got very excited 'cos it was for him. But I've no recollection of what he had to do. ;-)
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.
That is one fantastic book. I have read it twice. It is also the blueprint for proving the guilt of Roger Hollis as The Fifth Man, or, at the very least, a foreign agent against the west.
now there's a book that stirred waters
You should interview Jack.
Now that you know.... Watch out if someone follows you.... heh heh
It's probably a lot easier and quicker to decrypt messages these days due to availability of computers.
I wonder if Ukraine and Russian and the USA are using number stations right now?
Great vid, Lewis...👍
Great video, thanks!
Fascinating
Great show.
Dude where is the DnB at the end of the video?
Top notch man.
Hopefully my C. Crane CC Skywave SSB 2 order went through. I'd love to figure out how to record from this though.
"Chat botski"
I see what you did there...
ChatGPT just told me, that these number stations are still in use. So I assume these are still an effective way to communicate.
Definitely
@@guessundheit6494 that's a very interesting idea, considering how cryptic alot of main stream media can be at times
@@guessundheit6494 you mean.
the government opened the station and the BBC front it .
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…
worked at 13 sigs mate, all makes sense
Thanks!
thank you so much
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.
I wonder how long it takes the sender to find out the receiver has been compromised.
Sometimes it took months !!!
A knock on the door 🚪 👌 😊
@@mal_752 the gr👀test f👀r of all
is
the unknown
the hardest thing to s👀
is ourselves
ones selves are our greatest fear
then 2nd, it's the knowing!, it's definitely the KGB knocking on your door 😅😅
Cool stuff!
there is a film starring John Cusack called "numbers station" dreadful such a dissapointment
@ 7:12 ... Anna Montez looks a bit like a joyless Ghislaine Maxwell.
Where is the link for the documentary you did?
That was interesting.
These days they probably use encoded jpeg images sent via email.
On what frequencies, and at what times can one receive numbers stations in the UK?.
Check the priyom website
I Wonder how many ladies was fooled by fake spies pretending to be spies 😂
I would not be surprised if Lewis suddenly disappeared with no trace.😂👍
spyin never stops. so sure the numbers stations stay going ..
Stay spoooooky!
Is that saddleworth Lewis?
Certainly is Peter
I know 2 many sites 😂 pirate years for ya.
Treason = Public Execution. No ifs, buts or maybes.
If they use a computer to decode then the encryption can be broken in principle.
No it can’t if a one time pad system is used only once
@Ringway Manchester If they used OTP on computer thats okish, but they might have used an encryption key instead.
@@asumazilla Forget computers lol. They're just a series of on/off switches.
05:00 - He's literally a cryptographic nonce
You’re not wrong there lad
Awesome work.
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.
Thre russian pads were unique, only two copies of each pad
@@2adamast Understood, but if you got one, you could run the codes against the transmissions and see if there was any match - but that would work only if you had a record of the transmission.
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 😳.
Hey, Jack Barsky: How's the _SOVIET UNION_ doing these days, eh? 😉
Viva Cuba
Thanks RM. Very Good Video. Take Care****
Great video, as usual, Lewis. 73s de ZL1DFA