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Counting spies | page 1, 2
Convinced that he was just the victim of ignorance, Mason's interest in shortwave waned. Until the 1980s, when he tuned in again and was confronted with the same mystery he'd encountered as a child. Finally, he discovered a mention of the numbers stations in the American magazine Monitoring Times. "That showed me that I wasn't alone in listening to these things," he says. Several years of spending many hours a day tuning in and cataloging led to Mason's "Secret Signals." Shortly after its publication, the West Yorkshire-based ENIGMA (European Numbers Information Gathering and Monitoring Association) was established and through its esoteric ENIGMA Journal, a nascent network of seekers formed. "Numbers station enthusiasts are usually in their late 30s, because they would have had to grow up with shortwave, which most people consider a dead media these days, but also they're usually what we call Anoraks, obsessive nerd types into railway engines and things like that," he says. Chris Smolinski, for example, the 32-year-old software engineer in Baltimore who runs the Spooks Spy Numbers Station Mailing List.
With more than 300 members, Spooks is where numbers enthusiasts meet and greet online. "With the Net, I can post that I'm hearing something and instantly find out who else around the world is hearing it," he says. Recently, for instance, the list was abuzz with reports of the first French language numbers broadcast. Based on format patterns, Smolinski says, it was determined that the station was most likely Russian in origin. Also good for a few online laughs are the technical gaffs common on the Cuban numbers stations. "We have jokes about how Castro can't do good radio," Smolinski says. "Lots of times you'll hear Radio Havana on top of the numbers because someone plugged in the wrong patch-cord."
Like most numbers enthusiasts, Smolinski has a sense of humor about his hobby. "Fortunately, conspiracy nuts haven't latched on to numbers stations and given us a bad name," he says. After all, he and Mason have no delusions about someday cracking a numbers code -- indeed, knowing what the spooks are saying would spoil the climax of this never-ending story. Basically, this isn't "The X-Files." Take the time Smolinski visited what an online associate told him was a CIA numbers station transmission tower an hour southwest of Washington. In the middle of a field, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence complete with U.S. government "no trespassing" signs, are several radio towers. Did Smolinski jump the fence? "I certainly wouldn't do something foolish like that," he says, before proudly adding that he "did get a few nice photographs that I posted on my Web site. After all, the government doesn't play any games -- they pretty much acknowledge the numbers stations and what they're used for." Conet, then, is a cultural artifact, an audio snapshot of a surveillance culture heard live or plucked from the airwaves and burned to CD. Not post-Cage chaotic white noise that "just sounds cool" over a kick drum, but content-rich transmissions that, quite simply, we'll never fully understand. Tune in.
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