Covert Contact 118: Shortwave Numbers Stations
Scot Terban joins me to explore shortwave numbers stations, a KGB account of tracking a broadcast's recipient, and the mistakes that can undermine secure communications. We also discuss software-defined radio and the enduring appeal of listening for mysterious signals.
Scot Terban joins me for an October 2020 conversation about shortwave numbers stations and the intelligence operations behind those eerie sequences of spoken numbers. We both grew up listening to shortwave, and we revisit a world of international broadcasting, propaganda, and coded messages that could travel across borders long before the internet.
One-way broadcasts offer an important advantage: an agent can receive instructions without establishing a direct connection to the sender. We discuss one-time pads, the risks of reusing them, and the distinction between protecting a message's contents and protecting the person who receives it.
We walk through a KGB training manual's account of an investigation that combined radio monitoring, intercepted mail, and surveillance to identify a recipient. The crucial weakness was the communication back to the sender. I question how often investigators could successfully narrow such a large search to one person, how much luck the process required, and whether the account unfolded exactly as described.
The conversation turns to digital equivalents and the 2010 Russian illegals case. Internet communications offer enormous flexibility, but they also leave traces that can help investigators connect people and activities. Sophisticated tools still depend on the people using them. Mistakes in handling equipment, passwords, or communications can expose an operation even when the encryption itself works.
We also explore the appeal of listening for these signals, from the recordings collected in The Conet Project to software-defined radio. Web-accessible receivers let listeners use antennas in other parts of the world without building an elaborate station at home. The technology has changed, but the possibility of finding something strange on the dial remains a powerful draw.
Editorial note added October 2, 2026
The KGB manual discussed in this episode concerns Anatoly Filatov. In the recording, we mistakenly identify him as TRIGON and conflate his case with that of Aleksandr Ogorodnik, whose CIA codename was TRIGON. The cyanide-pen episode belongs to Ogorodnik's case. This correction applies to the original audio.