The Buzzer UVB-76

During the Cold War governments needed to communicate with their spies without anyone understanding their messages. Number Stations became quite popular in some parts of the world. Here is just one of these strange radio stations

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Are you?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Are you coming to the truth?

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Well? Hung up?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Am who will say she murdered?

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Truth?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Joe, things have happened that no joner a mamma holling truth.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Christ James. Each
day I consume an elixir made from magical beans that
brings life back to my somewhat beat up body. Coffee
can almost bring the dead back to life. In my book,

(01:00):
This Sucks, It does. This Sucks is about a guy
who gets turned into a vampire, but he doesn't know
how to be a vampire. I wrote it some time ago,
and maybe I shouldn't have, but I did, and so
it's out there. If you want to get a copy,

(01:21):
you can find it at Amazon dot com. It was
my second attempt at humor. To get your hands on
some of these magical beans, go to Organicman Coffee Trike
at four or five zero one McPherson and see what
real coffee tastes like. If it's too far to get there.

(01:45):
From there, you can go to Organicmancoffeetrike dot shop and
make the dead come back to life. It's almost Halloween
time to start decorating. I have to thank Sergeant Elliott
form my art bell coffee cup. It seems to make

(02:09):
the best coffee in the universe taste even better. You, sir,
are way too close to Washington. That can't possibly be
good for your health. Kind of like living next to
a black hole. But thank you very much for the
coffee cup. I will do my best not to break it,

(02:32):
which means I probably won't use it as much as
I usually do. I'll use a metal cup. They're harder
to break. I know I did a show on Number
Stations sometime in the past. I searched my show notes.
I even tried looking on iHeartRadio in the podcast section.

(02:57):
Couldn't find it. Maybe I just dreamed the whole thing,
or maybe I used a different name in the title
and then forgot. I used to listen to Ground Zero
with Clyde Lewis before it became a paid podcast. Now
I'm not cheap. I just am careful with my cash.

(03:21):
I know if I start paying to listen to podcasts,
the next thing I'll know, I'll have dozens of shows,
and I'll not have loads of money, which I don't
have anyway. But it will attack my financials somewhat in
a bad way. I know, me I know it happened.

(03:44):
That's why I never played with a oija board and
I stay out of cemeteries at night. The only podcast
I'm willing to pay for is Expanded Perspectives Elite, only
because I know those guys. I met him up in Jefferson,
we had dinner together. Back to Clyde Lewis. He did

(04:08):
a couple of shows on number stations, which for those
of us growing up during the Cold War could be
quite unsettling. All that duck and cover and watch the Skies. No, wait,
that was from a movie. It was a weird time
to grow up, especially seeing as the whole thing just

(04:32):
might have been one big shell game instead of a
chess game. Did Russia really want to blow us up?
Or were the elites of the world using this as
a means to scam billions of dollars from us all
of the planet while at the same time becoming enormously

(04:54):
rich while we all lived in terror. The craziness was real.
People were waiting for movies like Failsafe and Doctor Strange
Love to actually happen, and on way too many occasions
they nearly did. Spies were real. I knew one way

(05:21):
back in the day, he drank a bit, and he
was removed from service because of it. Once he was
no longer allowed to do top secret things, well, he
talked even more, nothing to land him in prison, but
he did have some wild tales to tell. The major

(05:45):
problem with most spies was you could never be sure
who they were actually working for. Once they were on
the other side of the Iron Curtain, they just might
be offered a much more lucrative income than the on
our government was paying them. Any information sent back had

(06:06):
to be confirmed by more than one source. Other spies
had to be found had to be able to find
the same intel. This led to having to have more
than a few people all working on the same thing.
Once some juicy bit of secret news was in hand,

(06:27):
it needed to be sent back across the Iron Curtain,
which could be very hazardous If it fell into the
wrong hands, well, the spy would find himself in hot
water or cold water, depending Anything on paper had to
be carried either in a diplomatic mail bag, which sometimes

(06:50):
those could be searched, or it had to be hidden
away in some dark orifice somewhere unpleasant to say the least.
Sending it over the airwaves was done a lot, but
the intel needed to be encrypted and the radio had
to be hidden somewhere safe. The enemy had all kinds

(07:13):
of ways to track down any unauthorized transmitters. Also, any
electronic equipment was prone to break down, so somebody had
to be able to maintain it. The intelligence folks didn't
all run around spying on each other. Some had special

(07:35):
missions they were trained to perform, and they would sit
and wait until orders came, saying, the woods are lovely,
dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and
miles to go before I sleep. If you didn't see

(07:59):
the movie Telephone, you missed a pretty good spy movie.
Charles Bronson was a Ruski. He almost was convincing too.
These folks weren't called spies. They were called sleeper agents.
They were given instructions on what to do and told

(08:22):
to wait for proper code words which would be sent
out over shortwave radio. Since they didn't need to transmit,
the radio could be small and easily replaced if it
got damaged. The agent could literally pick one up at
any electronics store. Since nothing about the radio was unique,

(08:44):
it was just a radio. Shortwave radio is transmitted using
radio frequencies in the shortwave band. There's no official definition
of the band range, but it includes all of the
high frequency, which extends from three to thirty megahertz. It

(09:08):
lies between the medium frequency band and the bottom of
the VHF. My neighbour Eddy has a shortwave antenna on
top of his garage, but he works so much he
hardly ever has time to use his radio. Radio waves
can be reflected or refracted from a layer of electronically

(09:32):
charged atoms in the atmosphere known as the ionosphere. Shortwave
directed at an angle into the sky can be reflected
back to Earth at a great distance beyond the horizon.
This is called shortwave or skip propagation. Shortwave radio can

(09:54):
be used for communications over very long distances. It in
contrast to radio waves of higher frequencies, which travel in
a straight line and are generally limited by the visual horizon.
At about forty miles, the whole world can listen in

(10:18):
since the airwaves are the same everywhere. This leads to encryption.
The Enigma machine was one example of a really advanced
encryption device, but you had to have the machine in
order to use it. Sneaking a secret mechanism would have

(10:39):
made the sleeper agents way too easy to identify. If
all you're doing is listening, all you need is a
radio and the key to unlock the message. One common
type of key was the book. Both parties had to

(11:00):
have the exact same copy of this book for it
to work. It could be the Bible, it could be
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, just about any book imaginable.
The sender would transmit a page number and the position
of the word on the page. The listener would flip

(11:22):
from page to page, picking out the words until an
entire message was there. Then there was the replacement cipher.
Each letter was replaced either by a number or a
different letter, since the vowels are used the most. All
you needed to do was sift through the message looking

(11:43):
for the common letters or numbers, and eventually you could
break the code. During World War II, just about every
Enigma machine ended their message by saying Hyle Hitler, which
the folks at Bletchley Park managed to use to decipher

(12:08):
some of the messages. Really was it necessary to say
that at the end of every message so you knew
what letters HI, L H I, T L E R
were because they said it every time. To create an
unbreakable code, you have to make it so complex that

(12:30):
the agent in the field is going to be unable
to memorize it. So the key was written down on
a piece of paper, which is known as a had.
Once the key was used, it was burned and the
next page was set aside waiting for the next message.

(12:51):
Spies have been discovered with small, neatly inscribed pages hidden
in all kinds of weird places. One guy had a
hollowed out bar of soap with a dozen small encrypted
keys inside. The radio frequency used had to be the

(13:12):
same each time so the agent knew where to listen in.
The frequency has to be kept open, as in no
one else might decide to jump on and transmit on
that particular location. The number stations transmit a sound day

(13:32):
in and day out to hold on to that particular frequency.
Some play a tone, while others send out a musical sound.
When something important is about to be heard, the tone
or the music will be replaced by a voice saying
some key phrase. Number stations can be technically categorized into

(13:59):
three transmission types, numbers, Morris code, and noise based signals.
Sometimes that can have more than one type of transmission
Each category represents different approaches to information encoding and transmission.

(14:21):
Voice based number stations typically employ pre recorded messages that
are delivered by female or child voices. Often used a
digitally synthesized speech that ensure consistent audio quality and it
eliminates operator identification. The technical quality of these recordings varies significantly,

(14:49):
with some stations employing high fidelity audio, while others you
can barely understand what they were saying. I guess it
depended on how important the agent in the fields was
and what his mission might have been. Morris code implements.
Implementation represents the most technically straightforward approach, utilizing traditional signaling

(15:17):
methods that have remained largely unchanged since the early twentieth century.
That was how the Nazis did it in World War Two,
except the coding was done by the Enigma machine and
then they just typed it out on a keypad. These
transmissions often feature machine generated Morris code at a standardized speed,

(15:42):
typically between fifteen to twenty five words per minute, optimized
for manual reception and transmission by field operatives. The consistency
of timing and character formation in these transmissions suggest just
automated generation systems rather than a human operator. The third

(16:06):
category encompasses various forms of noise based or tonal transmissions
that may represent advanced encoding schemes or deliberate jamming operations.
These signals often consist of complex tonal patterns, burst transmissions,

(16:27):
or modulated noise that require specialized analysis techniques and equipment
in order to decode the information that is coming in.
A number station is a shortwave radio station characterized by
broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed

(16:50):
to intelligence officers operating in other countries. Most identified stations
use speech synthesis to vocalize their numbers, although digital modes
such as phase shift king and frequency shift king, as

(17:10):
well as Morris code transmissions are not uncommon. Most stations
have set time schedules or schedule patterns. However, some appear
to simply come on the radio anytime they wish and
send out a message. How the receiving agent is going

(17:31):
to know when is beyond me. The genesis of number
stations traces back to the earliest days of military radio communication,
with British forces employing basic wireless signals during the Boer
War in eighteen nineties the British Navy operated without cryptography

(17:56):
techniques since they were the only ones using the radios
at the time. This advantage quickly dissolved as other stations
adopted radio technology, which necessitated the development of secure communications
that led to massive encryption of the radio messages. The

(18:21):
outbreak of World War I marked a critical point in
military communications strategy. British forces deliberately severed undersea communication cables
connecting England to Germany, which forced the German military to
rely exclusively on radio communications across all of Europe. Number

(18:46):
stations were most abundant during the Cold War. According to
an internal Cold War era report from the Polish Ministry
of the Interior, number stations DPA three seven and DFD
two one were transmitted from West Germany beginning in the

(19:08):
early nineteen fifties. Many stations from this era continued to broadcast,
and some longtime stations may have been taken over by
different operation operators. The Czech Ministry of the Interior in
the Swedish Security Service have both acknowledged that the use

(19:30):
of number stations by the Czechoslovakian for espionage, with classified
documents that prove it. One well known number station was
the E zero three Lincolnshire Poacher, which is thought to
have been run by the British Secret Intelligence Service. It

(19:54):
was first broadcast from Bletchley Park in the mid nineteen seventies,
but later was broadcast from raf Accreatory in Cyprus. It
ceased broadcasting in two thousand and eight or it moved
on to some other location. In two thousand and one,

(20:16):
the United States tried the Cuban five on charges of
spying for Cuba. The group had received and decoded messages
that had been broadcast from the Entension number station in Cuba.
The Entension station in Cuba became the world's first number

(20:38):
station to be officially and publicly accused of transmitting to spies.
It was a centerpiece of the United States Federal Court
espionage trial following the arrest of the WASP network of
Cuban spies in nineteen ninety eight. The US prosecuted prosecutors

(21:01):
said the accused would write down number codes received from
a tension using sony handheld shortwave receivers and typing the
numbers into laptop computers so they could decode them. The
FBI testified that they had entered a spy's apartment in

(21:22):
nineteen ninety five, and they copied the computer decryption program
for the atension number code. They used it to decode
a tension spy messages, which the prosecutors unveiled in court.
In two thousand and one, Anna Belen Montes, a senior

(21:45):
US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested and charged with espionage.
The federal prosecutor said Montes was able to communicate with
the Cuban Intelligence direct It through encoded messages, with instructions
being received through encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba. In two

(22:12):
thousand and six, Carlos Alvarez and his wife Elsa were
arrested and charged with espionage. The US District Court for
the Southern District of Florida stated the defendants would receive
assignments via shortwave radio transmissions. In June of two thousand

(22:34):
and nine, the United States charged Walter Kendall Myers with
the conspiracy to spire for Cuba and receiving and decoding
messages broadcast from a number station operated by the Cuban
Intelligence Directorate to further that conspiracy. As discovered by the

(22:56):
FBI in two thousand and ten, one way Russian agents
of the illegal program were receiving instructions via coded messages
on shortwave radio. It had been reported that the United
States had used number stations to communicate information to operatives

(23:17):
in other countries, so it's not just the Commies that
were doing it. Both sides had number stations. The State
Department operated stations such as KKN five zero and KKN
four four used to broadcast similar number messages. North Korea

(23:41):
revived number broadcast in July twenty sixteen after sixteen years
of not using one, a move which some analysts speculated
was psychological warfare. Sixteen such broadcasts occurred in twenty seventeen,
including unusually timed transmissions. April was a busy month when

(24:08):
it came to bizarre occurrences, especially number stations, But it
couldn't find anything that may have been tied to North Korea.
The way the world works these days, it could have
been anything. It could have been something that North Korea
was picking up for somebody else. It has long been

(24:29):
speculated and was argued in one court case, that these
stations operate as a simple and fool proof method for
government agencies to communicate with spies working undercover. According to
this idea, the message must have been encrypted with a
one time pad to avoid any risk of decryption by

(24:54):
the enemy. The one way voice link is a covert
communications system that transmitted messages to an agent's unmodified shortwave
radio using the high frequency short shortwave band three to
thirty megahertz at a predetermined time, date and frequency contained

(25:19):
in their communications plan. The transmissions were contained in a
series of repeated random number sequences and could only be
deciphered using the agent's one time pad. If proper tradecraft
was practiced and instructions were precisely followed, a transmission was

(25:41):
considered unbreakable as long as the agent's cover could be
justified the owning of a shortwave radio and he was
not under any kind of a surveillance. Shortwave was a
secure preferred method for the CIA during the war. Evidence

(26:03):
to support this theory includes the fact number stations have
changed details of their broadcast or produced special, non scheduled
broadcasts that consisted coincided with extraordinary political events, such as
the attempted coup in August nineteen ninety one in the

(26:25):
Soviet Union. Generally, number stations follow a basic format, although
there are many differences in details between stations transmissions usually
begin on the hour or the half hour. The prelude,
introduction or call up of the transmission, from which station's

(26:48):
informal nicknames are often derived, include some kind of an
identifier for the station itself, the intended recipient, or both.
Can take the form of numeric or radio alphabet code names,
characteristic phrases, and sometimes musical or electronic sounds. Sometimes, as

(27:12):
in the case of radio alphabet stations, the prelude can
also signify the nature or the priority of the message
that follows. Often the prelude repeats for a period before
the body of the message begins. After the prelude, there

(27:33):
is usually an announcement of the number or number groups
in the message, the page to be used from the
one time pad or other appertinent information. The group are
then the group of numbers are then recited. Groups are
usually either four or five digits or radio alphabet letters.

(27:58):
The groups are typically repair either by reading each group
twice or by repeating the entire message as a whole.
Some stations send more than one message during a transmission.
In this case, some or all of the above process
will be repeated. After all the messages have been sent,

(28:22):
the station will sign off in some characteristic fashion. Usually
it will simply be some word such as end, which
has been pre arranged. Some stations, especially those in the
Soviet Union, would end by listing a number of zeros.

(28:45):
Sometimes it be zero zero, or it could be zero
zero zero zero, but of course it was in Russian.
Because of the secretive nature of the message, the cryptographic
function in employed by the particular station is not publicly known.
It is assumed that most stations use a one time

(29:07):
pad that would make the contents of these number groups
indistinguishable from randomly generated numbers or digits. In one confirmed case,
West Germany did use a one time pad for number transmissions.
The pad is a set of two copies of the

(29:28):
alphabet and its substitutions. One is held by the number
station encoder and one by the agent. Each letter may
be represented by one letter number, or even a series
of each. Using the pad, the numbers have to be
turned into letters, which on occasion also need to be deciphered.

(29:53):
Since there are only two copies, and as soon as
it is used, the pad is destroyed, the chances of
anybody managing to break the code is about zero. Even
the people transmitting the numbers may not know what the
code is because the only person with the pad is
the guy that encrypted the thing. High frequency radio signals

(30:20):
transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world
under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local noise levels, weather,
the seasons, and even sun spots, and it can be
best received with properly tuned antenna and a good receiver.

(30:43):
Although few number stations have been tracked down by location,
the technology used to transmit the numbers has historically been
clear stock shortwave transmitters using power from ten kilowatts to
one hundred kilowatts, amplitude modification or AM transmitters which operate

(31:09):
variable frequencies use Class C power output stages with plate modification,
and the workhourse of international shortwave broadcasts include number stations.
Some of y'all will understand that, like Art Bell would
have known what all that was, but I'm not into shortwave.

(31:34):
Application of spectrum analysts analysis to number station signals has
revealed the presence of data bursts, radiotype modulated subcarriers, phase
shifted carriers, and other unusual transmitter modulations like polytones or

(31:55):
multi tones. Modulated subcarriers were also pressed on some US
commercial radio transmissions during the Cold War, so they're not
just sending out a number code. Sometimes they're sending out
burst messages at the same time. In telecommunications, a burst

(32:18):
transmission or data burst is a broadcast of a relatively
high bandwidth transmission over a very short period. Burst transmission
can be intentional broadcasting a compressed message at a very
high data signaling rate within a very short transmission time.

(32:41):
The frequency reported use of high tech modulations like data
bursts in combination or in sequence with spoken numbers suggests
varying transmissions for differing intelligence operations. So they can be
sending out two, three, four messages at the exact same time.

(33:05):
I wonder if the guy listening to the numbers feels slighted,
maybe knowing that some high falutin technical wizard somewhere is
getting his message handed to him. In like a couple
of seconds. The burst needs to be recorded and then
turned into an understandable message. Now my cats are being

(33:30):
cats in the wrong place. Those receiving the signals have
to work only with available handheld receivers, sometimes under difficult
local conditions, and in all reception conditions in the field.
Low tech's spoken number transmissions continue to have the advantage.

(33:54):
Even in today's technical world, you can't beat simple technology.
High tech data receiving equipment can be difficult to obtain,
and even a non standard civilian shortwave radio can sometimes
be difficult, depending on which country you're in. Some countries

(34:16):
that's against the law to have a shortwave radio. A
BBC frequency seven three two five killerhertz has also been used.
This prompts a letter to the BBC from a listener
and Andra. She wrote to the World Service wave Guide

(34:37):
in nineteen eighty three complaining that the radio program that
she was listening to was spoiled on a female voice
reading out numbers in English came on instead of the
music she was expecting. The BBC presenter laughed at the
suggestion of spy activity. He had consulted the experts at

(35:03):
bush House, who declared that the voice was reading out
nothing more sinister than snowfall figures for ski slopes near
the listener's home. After more research into this case, shortwave
enthusiasts are now certain that the number station was actually

(35:23):
broadcasting a secret code and they had accidentally gotten on
the wrong frequency. In October nineteen ninety, it was reported
that a number station had been interfering with communications on
six five seven seven killer hertz, a frequency used by

(35:44):
air traffic in the Caribbean. The interference was so bad
that they had to tell the airplane pilots to switch
to another frequency in order to communicate with air traffic control.
The North Korean foreign language service Voice of Korea began

(36:05):
to broadcast on E zero three lend Lincolnshire Poacher their
former frequency of eleven five four five killerhertz in two
thousand and six. They were believed to probably be deliberately
trying to interfere with their signal. Lincolnshire Poacher broadcast on

(36:31):
three different frequencies, and the remaining two were not interfered with,
so it sounds like the North Koreans didn't know there
was three signals and not one. September twenty seventh, two
thousand and six, amateur radio transmissions on thirty megahertz band
were affected by the S zero six Russian Man number station.

(36:56):
So sometimes you get these things where the transmission is
accidentally moved to another frequency, not by switching the dial,
but simply because that's how radio works. The Cuban number
station HM zero one has been known to interfere with

(37:17):
shortwave broadcasts of Voice of Welt on eleven five thirty
killer hertz. Number station transmissions have often been the target
of international jamming attempts. Despite this targeting, many number stations
continue to broadcast unhindered. Historical examples of jamming include the

(37:40):
E ten, a station thought to originate from the Israeli
Massad intelligence agents, which was being jammed by the Chinese
Music station, thought to originate from the People's Republic of
China and usually used a jam sound of hope radio broadcasts,

(38:02):
which are anti CCP and nature monitoring and chronicling transmissions
from number stations has been a hobby for shortwave and
ham radio enthusiasts from the early nineteen seventies. Number stations
are often given nicknames, often reflecting some distinctive element of

(38:26):
the station, such as an intervals and a signal. For example,
the Lincolnshire Poacher station used to play bars from this
folk song known as the Lincolnshire Poetuer before each string
of numbers. Sometimes these traits have helped to uncover the

(38:51):
broadcasting location. The Intension station was thought to be from
Cuba because an error allowed to Radio Havana, Cuba to
be carried on the same frequency. Although many number stations
have nicknames, which usually described some aspect of the station itself,

(39:14):
these nicknames have sometimes led to a lot of confusion
among listeners, particularly when discussing discussing stations with similar traits.
The Enigma Number Stations Monitoring Group began assigning a code
to each known station. Portions of the original Enigma group

(39:40):
moved to other interests in two thousand and the classification
of number stations was continued by a group known as
Enigma two thousand. The document contained a description of each
number station and its code designation. It was called the
Enigma Control List in twenty sixteen, after which it incorporated

(40:06):
into the Enigma two thousand Active Station List. If you're
curious about any of these, you can just look them
up on the Internet and find all of these stations listed.
The latest edition of the list was published in September
twenty seventeen. This classification scheme takes the form of a

(40:29):
letter followed by a number. The letter indicates the language
used by the station that you want to listen to.
If you speak Russian, look for an R before a number.
If you only want to listen to English, look for
an E. Why would this still be in use today?

(40:51):
Computers are everywhere, and it would seem like the logical
thing to do is just send a message out using
encryptis to email. Computers are also very good at spotting
codes and in and then encoding them deciphering them. A

(41:12):
computer ID, also sometimes referred to as a hardware i D,
a device identifier or machine fingerprint, is a unique identifier
that is assigned to each computer or device, usually when
used on a network. Its primary purpose is to determine uniqueness,

(41:34):
as well as persistence of a machine among mental multiple devices.
You also have an IP address. An Internet protocol address
is a unique identifying number assigned to every device connected
to the Internet. An IP address definition is a numeric

(41:58):
label assigned to devices that use the Internet to communicate.
Computers that communicate over the Internet or via local networks
share information to a specific location using their IP address.
For every wild and crazy means of hiding these IDs,

(42:20):
the government has developed ways to figure them out. If
it's important enough, they can find things that have been deleted, erased, scrubbed, burned,
and flushed down the toilet. Just because we can't remember
our own passwords doesn't mean the government probably has them
all written down somewhere. Wouldn't it be nice if there

(42:44):
was some way you could call them up and say, hey,
what's my password? Of course, you know that the bad
guys would do it too. Computers can be unlocked. The
airwaves are all there around us at all time, and
nobody has figured out how to control them. Yet. For

(43:06):
a spy to disappear, they would have to effectively destroy
any and all electronic equipment, and the risk of things
being left behind is great. Any computer is hackable, and
the intelligence organizations have some of the best hackers. Then
there is the possibility of some agent on the other

(43:29):
side deciding the best thing to do is to defect
and take as many secrets as possible with them so
they can sell them, which will lead to a very
comfortable living. Knowledge is power and power means money. A
spy using shortwave is only harnessed by the need of

(43:52):
a radio and is decryption papers. Number stations are still
out there as we speak, well as I speak, they
will probably be around for decades. UVB seventy six is
also known as the buzzer. The sound put out to

(44:17):
hold the frequency is a buzzing sound. You can tune
in day or night and listen for as long as
your sensibilities will allow. Some people say the original call
sign was you z B seventy six. The numbers aren't
all that important since they have changed several times over

(44:40):
the last several years. Most folks will simply refer to
it as v B or simply the buzzer. The Buzzer
is an HF radio station that usually broadcasts at four
six two five killihertz on an upper side band channel.

(45:05):
Side band is an obscure but very important way to
communicate via radio. It is used primarily for two way
voice communication by ham radio operators, aircraft and air traffic
control ships at sea, military and spy networks. Occasionally some

(45:29):
shortwave broadcast stations used this format. A lot of interesting
and sometimes exciting talk goes on every day on these sidebands.
The buzzer features a short, monotonous buzzing tone that repeats
at a rate of approximately twenty five tones per minute

(45:52):
twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three
hundred and sixty five days a year. The station has
been listened to by curious ham operators. Ever since about
nineteen eighty two till twenty ten, most transmissions in the

(46:13):
Russian mono like code signals were extremely rare. When talking
on any radio, you don't want to say letters the
way that we're taught to in school. C sounds like
D and P and G and e and a lot
of other letters. In the army and the border patrol,

(46:37):
we used the phonetic alphabet alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, foxtrot,
et cetera. Most police departments, for some odd reason use
Adam Brian, Charles David or something like that. I'm not
too sure. I was never in the police department, but

(46:59):
I talked to a lot of cops. Everyone wants to
have their own way of doing things, and naturally Russia
has their own phonetic alphabet UVB seven six or The
buzzer also went by m d ZB, which when said

(47:19):
over the air was Mikhail Dmitri Zenya Boris. They also
used z u zero z being said as Zenya Uyana,
Olga sinyada and a n vf anna Nicola visally foidor.

(47:45):
I don't speak Russian, So if you're in Russia and
you're listening to me. I'm sorry for mispronouncing your names,
but like I said, I have a hard enough time
with English. Russia writes numbers the same way that we
do Arabic numerals, like most of the planet does. They

(48:07):
don't pronounce them that way. I am not even going
to attempt to pronounce these things in Russian. If you're
from Russia and you're listening and I say the wrong thing,
well I don't want to start a fight. The station
transmissions on buzzing sound that lasts about zero point eight seconds,

(48:30):
pauses for one to one point three seconds, and then
repeats again twenty one to thirty four times a minute.
One minute before the hour, the repeating tone is replaced
by a continuous tone, which continues for about a minute
until a short repeating buzz resumes. Between seven and seven

(48:55):
point fifty Greenwich meantime, the station transmits using lower power
when transmitter maintenance is believed to be taking place. We
don't know how long the buzzer has been broadcasting. They
started out with two second pip sound and then changed

(49:17):
to the buzzer in nineteen eighty two. Otherwise we would
be calling it the pipper in two thousand and three,
the buzzer went up in tone and length. It became
twenty seconds long. This lasted for a while, but then
it switched back to the original buzzer. Anytime there's a

(49:38):
change in sound or length, folks get really excited, thinking
that something is about to happen, because sometimes things did happen.
The folks listening in have come to the realization the
buzzer isn't being sent out directly, but it is being

(49:58):
played by some re quarter set near the microphone. On
many occasions, sounds can be heard in the background, as
if someone or several people are in the room. Working
around radio equipment can lead to unfortunate things. One day,
at the fire station one department on the north side

(50:21):
of Euston accidentally opened their mic and left it that
way for a long time, proceeding to destroy several people's reputations.
The female radio operator was talking on the phone about
her late night adventures with the local firefighter, Stud Muffin.

(50:48):
She compared him to every other man working at the station.
Apparently she ran around a bit no a lot twenty
one fifty eight Greenwich Meantime, December twenty fourth, nineteen ninety seven,
The buzzing abruptly stopped, to be replaced by a short

(51:11):
series of beeps and a male voice speaking Russian, who
announced yeah UVB seven six one eight zero zero eight
Boris Roman Olga Mikhail Anna Larisa seven four two seven

(51:36):
nine nine one four. The same message was repeated several
times before the beep announced the beginning of the buzzing
once more. Had this been some kind of a glitch
sh it would have wouldn't have been repeated over and
over the way it had been our search for any

(52:00):
substantial activity from that day or around it, but I
found nothing. Whatever happened was either kept quiet or nobody
knows about it, But it seemed important at the moment.
Could this have been a message alerting some agent or
agents to act on some pre arranged mission, or simply

(52:23):
an oops. On February twentieth, nineteen seventy one, at nine
thirty three em EM nine three am Eastern Standard time,
the National Warning Center sent out an emergency message to

(52:43):
eight hundred television stations and five thousand radio stations across
the United States. Along with the message, the teletype operator
sent out a code word indicating that the message was
not a tech, but a real live emergency, you know,

(53:03):
the emergency broadcast system, Those folks, this was the nineteen seventies.
Fear of nuclear attack was real. The war in Vietnam
was still going on. Stations that had been directed to
go off the air after reading the announcement did people

(53:25):
had no information beyond the initial message. Some stations simply
went off the air without even broadcasting the message. Frantic
people began calling neighbors and radio stations and the police,
asking what's going on, and nobody knew. When the warning

(53:47):
center realized what had happened, they tried to cancel the broadcast.
They tried six times to cancel it, and they failed.
Each time. They couldn't find the correct code to cancel
the emergency broadcast. It took more than forty minutes after

(54:09):
the first transmission for the Civil Defense to send an
official cancelation message over the wire. Ah, such fun we
had back then. Good times duck and cover and then
kiss your butt goodbye. Once the Iron Curtain came down,

(54:30):
we discovered that the Soviets had just as many, if
not more, problems with their World War three preparations than
we did. Why we are still alive today? Must have
been a miracle. God must have done something to keep
the planet in shape, because us humans, we sure were

(54:54):
trying to destroy it. During World War Two, the BBC
played crucial role in supporting the French resistance by sending
coded messages in their broadcasts. The broadcasts included seemingly nonsensical
statements such as molasses tomorrow will bring forth Kanyac, which

(55:24):
was actually instructions for sabotage. The folks listening in were
being told it was go time, and the Nazis listening
in were being told to make kanyac using molasses. November three,
two thousand and one, a conversation in Russian was heard.

(55:45):
I'm not going to repeat it here because it sounded
like some worker or maintenance guy was talking about repairs
that he was doing to the station, and it was
in Russian. September twelfth to a similar voice message was broadcast,
but with extreme distortion which rendered it impossible to decipher.

(56:10):
A third voice message was broadcast I'm making a months
September February February twenty first, two thousand and six. Again
the speaking voice was highly distorted, but the message's contents translated.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
As seven five five nine seven five, five nine three
nine five two five three five eight five five two
five Constantine one nine zero, nine zero eight nine eight,

(56:56):
Tatiana Anna Anna Elena pavel Skuka Constantine eight four nine
seven five five nine Tatiana Hannah Larissa Oologna nine four

(57:20):
one four three four eight.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
Great. I probably just told some Russian spy to do
something nasty. In fact, I think I told several Russian
spies to do something nasty. But like I said, this
is from two thousand and two, so or two thousand
and six, so if they're just now getting this message,
there's something really screwed up going. On July fifth, twenty

(57:46):
and ten, the buzzing ceased, no announcement, no explanations, only silence.
Some worker walking through the room probably accidentally tripped over
the power cord or it was one of these like
what does this button do? Oops. The following day, the

(58:09):
broadcast simply resumed as if nothing had happened. For the
rest of June and July, UVB seventy six behaved pretty
much as if nothing had happened. There were some short
lived worrisome activity, including bits of what sounded like Morris Code,
but nothing dramatic and as far as we know, nothing

(58:31):
happened throughout the world. In mid August, the buzzing stopped again,
then it started, and then it stopped, and then it started.
August twenty fifth, at ten thirteen UVB seventy six went
entirely haywire. First there was silence, then the series of

(58:54):
knocks and a shuffling sound was made, as if somebody
was moving things about the room. All the beeping, buzzing,
codes and numbers had hinted at an evil force hovering
in the airwaves, and now it seemed as if some
nincome poop was in control of that particular radio station,

(59:14):
and they were just dragging things across the floor, making noise,
kind of like when my cat gets on my computer
and does things. For the first week in September, transmission
was interrupted frequently, usually with what sounded like recordings of

(59:35):
Dance of the Little Swans from Tchaikowski's Swan Lake. On
the evening September seventh, something more dramatic. One listener said
it was existential. At eight forty eight pm a Moscow time,
a male voice issued a new call sign Mikhale Dmitri's

(59:58):
Zenya Boris, indicating that the station was now called MDZB.
This was followed by one of UVB seventy six, or
mdzb's typically nebulous messages zero four ninety seven nine d

(01:00:19):
R E N d O U T, followed by a
longer series of numbers, and then t R E N
E R s k I Y, followed by more numbers,
and of course that was the Russian phonetic alphabet I
don't speak Russian. Distant conversations and other background noise could

(01:00:43):
be heard behind the buzzer. This sound suggests that the
buzzing noise is actually being played on a live, constantly
open microphone, or the microphone may have been turned on accidentally.
It's September two thousand and ten. The station was closed

(01:01:03):
and abandoned. Reason they know this is they had figured
out where they were broadcasting from. The transmitter was moved
to Saint Petersburg, near a village of Kiro, Massiv. This
may have been due to reorganization of the Russian military.

(01:01:24):
Voice Messages from the Buzzer were very rare until twenty ten.
Then suddenly the airwaves became kind of pregnant with numbers.
One transmission August twenty three, twenty ten, UVB seven six
UBV UVB seven six nine three eight eight two, Niminia

(01:01:54):
seven four one four three five seven four. This went
on several times. Another transmission was on January twenty fifth,
twenty thirteen, more indecipherable letters and numbers that must have
meant something to someone. One transmission December fifteenth, twenty fifteen,

(01:02:20):
more of the same numbers, letters of people's names, all
sent out for some reason. March twenty nineteen, the station
changed its assign assignment number again to Anna Nicole Vasilly Feuder.

(01:02:42):
All of this sounds like just a bunch of nonsense,
and that's how it was supposed to be. Only the
person sending the coded message and the person receiving it
knew what was going on. The rest of us were
kept in the dark. Were a bunch of mushrooms. The

(01:03:04):
station's transmitter was relocated to Pavorova, Russia, and is now
halfway between Zalingrad and sol Yeah, another big city in Russia.
It's about twenty five miles northwest of Moscow. The location
and the call signs are unknown until the first voice broadcast,

(01:03:28):
and then all of a sudden we knew where they were.
We just didn't know what they were saying. Some ham
operators decided to try communicating back to the buzzer. One
enterprising person actually had a brief conversation with the station.
He asked if he could call. He asked if he

(01:03:51):
could talk to the person in charge. One buzz for
yes and two for no. The buzzer went off twice.
He asked if he could tell a joke. Once again,
there were two buzzes. This implies that not only is
it an open mic, but somebody is listening. Can you

(01:04:12):
imagine that's your job, sit there in front of a
radio and listen to that buzzing noise all day. I
can't think of many worse jobs. One website claims the
buzzer was meant to transmit orders to the military or
maybe the recruitment center in Moscow. This is unlikely, seeing

(01:04:36):
as the station transmitted the buzzing stone for fifteen years
before any numbers were even broadcast. Because of the nature
of the broadcast and the fact that his transmitter location
is rumored to be a communications hub for the general
staff of the Army, the buzzer is more than likely

(01:04:57):
being used for spies. Transmitter sites for some number stations
have been triangulated to military or intelligence installations in several countries,
although no nation's government ever actually confirms or denies the
existence of these stations. There's also the possibility the constant

(01:05:21):
transmission is supposed to signal the availability, operation, or alertness
of some kind of installation, what is known as a
dead man switch, military or other installation, which is also
known as the Russian dead hand system. The Russian dead

(01:05:45):
hand system also known as the perimeter system, It is
an automated nuclear weapons control system designed to ensure a
retaliatory strike even if the country's leadership is incapacitated. A
command and control system measures communications on military frequencies, radiation levels,

(01:06:13):
air pressure, heat, and short term seismic disturbances. If the
measurements point to a nuclear attack, the perimeter begins a
sequence that would end in the firing of every ICBM
in the Russian Arsenal. Perimeter would launch a command rocket

(01:06:36):
tipped with a radio warhead that transmits launch codes to
Russian nuclear silos. Even if the radio system is being jammed,
it works. The rocket would fly across the entire length
of the country. After a number of task launches to
prove the viability of such a command rocket. The the

(01:07:00):
perimeter system went online in nineteen eighty five. Does that
make you sleep good at night? You can listen in
on the radio if you'd like go to and you
don't have to have a shortwave radio. You can do
it right now using your computer. You can go to

(01:07:24):
you VB dash seven six dot R you backslash e
N backslash. You more than likely going to hear nothing
but a buzzing sound. If you're lucky, you'll hear somebody

(01:07:46):
speaking in Russian. Hopefully nothing bad is about to happen.
Before nineteen ninety the only folks who knew about the
buzzer were the people using shortwave and the folks using
it or listening to it, and a few HAM operators
who found this signalless message to be fascinating and sometimes

(01:08:11):
a bit scary. An Estonian technician, an entrepreneur named Andres
Aslod had been listening to and thought that the best
way to figure out what was going on was to
get more people listening. Shortwave was an early form of

(01:08:32):
the Internet. If you really wanted to know what was
going on on the other side of the planet, you
could jump on the radio and ask Unlike today with
the fact checkers who only give us their ideas of
the truth, most HAM operators had no agenda, so they

(01:08:53):
would tell you what they knew. There were enough people
listening and talking to weed out the trash. A slod
went by the nickname of Laud. He managed to put
together enough electronics to not only pull in the signal,
but to retransmit it over the web. This was followed

(01:09:16):
by more people hearing about the buzzer and beginning to
tune in as well. Before the fall of the Soviet Union,
many people me included, believed the world was in imminent
danger of total destruction. Having grown up in this time,

(01:09:38):
I find it very difficult to get worried about things
like the why to gay disaster, the Mayan predictions for
December twenty one, twenty twelve, the Black Plague of twenty twenty,
now just about any coming apocalypse. The more the news
tells us this is it, We're all gonna the less

(01:10:01):
I pay attention. Lamestream media has kind of lied themselves
into non relevance. Now you can decide for yourself, is
this buzzer something we need to worry about, or is
some fancy means for a Russian military to send instructions

(01:10:24):
to some agent. It's time to buy that lucrative stock
we were talking about. Would a Russian radio operator try
to use a Southern accent? Was that even a Southern accent?
If you enjoyed tonight's show, if you did, tell your friends,

(01:10:44):
tell your neighbors, Tell people you don't even like. They
should be listening to strange things until next time. This
is Chris James, are you.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):
Are you coming to the tree. When they strung up
a man who they said he murdered, three strange things
have happened there. No stranger would it be if we
met at midnight in the hanging tree