How Foreign Spies Use Radio to Broadcast Secret Messages

This is one of the coolest things I’ve learned recently: foreign intelligence agencies. always use good old radio to share top secrets. Even with all the powerful technology at their disposal, the use of radio in espionage has effectively disappeared up in popularity since the 2010s. Pretty wild.

Russia is particularly fond of this technique. Why? Intelligence agencies don’t trust the Internet. It makes sense.

A Brief History of Spy Radio

Foreign agencies have been using shortwave radio frequencies to broadcast coded messages for decades.

Starting in the mid-1960s, if you tuned your radio to shortwave frequencies between 5.422 and 16.084 megahertz (MHz), you could hear music…or the voice of a woman with an English accent reading out combinations of numbers.

The British intelligence agency MI6 and other spy networks used these “number stations” until at least 2008 to communicate with agents in the field. Wow!

Old technology, new tricks

This tactic is still relevant today. In 2020, the FBI discovered messages sent to Russian secret agents living in Massachusetts. Last March, researchers caught the Russian intelligence agency SVR broadcasting a test transmission in French.

So what’s the benefit of old-school radio? Even encrypted phones can be hacked. It’s also easier than ever to install spyware on an internet-connected device.

The number stations are not so easy to decipher

With each broadcast, the sender and recipient use what is called a “one-time notepad” to encrypt and decrypt the message. This is basically a list of matching random numbers, no sophisticated spying equipment required.

Of course, anyone listening could understand other Diffusion patterns can reveal how many agents are present and when or where they are active.

When the FBI discovered the 2020 broadcasts, they realized the messages matched pieces active agents were there!

Maybe try a carrier pigeon instead.

The moral of the story: Sometimes old things are more reliable than new things. Even in the age of artificial intelligence and the internet, spies trust the radio!

If you Really If you want to delve into the underworld of secret radio messages, check out Priyom, a group of international radio enthusiasts who track radio stations around the world. They have chat rooms for swapping stories, and their website tracks intelligence, military, and diplomatic communications via shortwave radio. Happy listening!

😂 The FBI raids a suspected spy’s apartment when they discover a hard drive labeled “KGB.” One of the agents holds it up and asks, “Why doesn’t he just write 1TB?” (Oh, geeky humor… Sometimes that’s harder to get than a ground-floor hotel room in Moscow for a Russian agent!)

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Keywords: Internet, technology