There has been a new ‘numbers station’ that has appeared on the radio spectrum in the shortwave section which lies, on most people’s shortwave radios, between 3 and 30MHz. For those who don’t know a numbers station is a station often used by state intelligence or military agencies that broadcasts one way messages from their home nation to operatives in the field. These messages are encoded and most likely use a one time pad system which is incredibly difficult for opposing security agencies to crack and damned near impossible for the ordinary civilian listener to do so. Numbers stations were very common during the Cold War and were used by the security agencies of both the West and the Iron Curtain countries. If you want more information on the matter of numbers stations then I would strongly recommend that you watch one of the videos on the subject by the You Tuber ‘Ringway Manchester’.
Anyway, this new numbers station is broadcasting in Farsi, one of the languages spoken in Iran, recently popped up on 7.910MHz and at first appeared to be emanating from within Iran itself and there were suggestions that this transmission could be by the current Iranian government. Later examination by short wave enthusiasts showed that this new numbers station is being jammed by a jamming signal that shares a lot of characteristics of jamming used against Western broadcasts targeted at Iran.
This raises the possibility that the new numbers station that the Iranians are trying to jam might be aimed at anti-regime elements within Iran after all why would the Iranians jam their own signals?
The beauty and the genius of numbers stations is that the field operative doesn’t need to have any specialised or incriminating equipment in their possession, all they need is a readily available short wave receiver of the sort that can be purchased in most parts of the world. All the operative needs to do is keep the decoding one time pad safe which would be much easier to do than hiding specialised communications equipment. Spies and similar using one time pads have been caught by security agencies in the West but they’ve more often been caught not by possession of a shortwave radio but because the agent’s trade craft has failed in some other way or they’ve been outed by an informant.
There is still a lot of debate going on among shortwave enthusiasts about this new numbers station on 7.910MHz such as about who would transmit it and for what ends but it’s important to note that this is a station that the Iranian regime is attempting to jam. If that is the case then the Iranian regime must be desperate to stop these messages getting through to whoever is the intended recipient.
It might well be that in this case the numbers station is one of the good guys, that is intelligence agencies from outside Iran but we should not ignore the possibility that the numbers station method might be used by Iran to communicate to and maybe activate terrorist sleeper cells in the West. This is something that has been vexing me for a few days now.
Here’s the scenario that has been bothering me. We can have a reasonable degree of confidence that Iran has placed a whole load of operatives within Western nations. Some of them are going to be publicly visible shit stirrers who will wind up Muslims in the West and their Leftist hangers on to take part in activities that benefit the Tehran regime. I would not be at all surprised to find out at some point down the line that some of these demonstrations in favour of the Tehran regime have had the backing of activists funded or supported by Iran.
But what if there are other activists who are less high profile than the ones who organise pro-Khamenei demonstrations in the West but who instead deliberately keep a very low profile? It would be relatively simple for these deeply hidden activists to take instructions from Tehran via a numbers station broadcast from Iran or from some country that is friendly with the Mullah regime in Iran.
In such a scenario where an Iranian sleeper cell terrorist group is activated and takes instructions from Iran via a numbers station we might not know this has happened until after some terrorist atrocity that they’d carried out and even then the use of numbers stations in the attack might not be properly revealed. This would especially be the case if any surviving terrorists from this cell didn’t talk to police or security services or the operatives had successfully destroyed their code books prior to the attack.
The problem of Iranian sleeper cells could be a big one. According to the Migration Observatory group there are 62,000 Iranians who claimed asylum in the United Kingdom in the period between 2015 and 2024. The vast majority of these Iranians might well be seeking sanctuary from the Iranian Islamic regime but we should not deny the possibility that Iranian agents might be among this cohort. If even one percent of this 62k Iranian entrants are agents of the Iranian government then that’s 620 potential threats. It doesn’t take 620 people to blow up a pop concert or a railway station or attack crucial infrastructure such as electricity or water distribution or to wreak havoc to communications systems, it only takes a few individuals to be able to do that. Imagine what chaos and disruption that could occur if for example these Iranian sleeper cells wiped out the electricity supply for an airport or a major conurbation? It really doesn’t bear thinking about. The disruption and disorder that may flow from such an attack might be immense. Imagine large parts of Birmingham for example suddenly going dark with hospitals having to rely on back up generators, police and fire service communications disrupted because of delays in powering these systems in alternative ways other than the national grid. It would be hell. Every criminal scroate and extremist would be out on the streets safe in the knowledge that when any police officer keys his radio in the field nothing could be received at the other end at headquarters. This would be a very cheap and effective way for the Iranians to disrupt one of Britain’s major cities.
So whilst it’s looking increasingly likely, based on what has come out publicly so far, that the signal heard at 7.910MHz is not coming from the Iranian regime that doesn’t mean that the Iranians or some other hostile force might use the numbers station method for their own ends. We might not know that a message has been transmitted by Iran and received by one of its operatives in the West until a terrorist attack takes place.
Numbers stations have been written off by many as a relic of the Cold War but it seems that there is a lot of life in this technique yet. The problem is that this technique might not be only used by those who are on the side of the West but by those who are the enemies of the West.
Links
Migration Observatory data on the number of Iranians who have come to the UK as asylum seekers
Ringway Manchester on the new numbers stations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmbTpxAM7Q
Shortwave Observer on jamming of new numbers stations
https://x.com/shortwave78/status/2029780557060567239
Ringway Manchester’s background piece on numbers stations
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