Number Stations Still Exist

I captured one quite randomly while tuning through the dial, having not been able to sleep.  It was at 0825 UT on 9330 mhz, a frequency commonly used by legitimate, non-state broadcasters.

The strong, clear signal received in Virginia must surely originate in Cuba or some other part of the Caribbean for clandestine communications with agents placed in the US.

This absurd poetry continued for about half an hour.  It seems that in the digital age, this old technique refuses to be entirely abandoned.

Radio in the Age of Waiting



Creepy Remnant of Time Past

Those of you out there as enamouried as I am with Number Stations might enjoy the fact that some of them still operate, in this case on 6949 khz. In fact, they seem even MORE mysterious in this day and age when there are so many other means of communication, and many of the traditional users of Number Stations in intelligence communications are, well, gone.

In Case You’re Wondering...

...what Ost-Berlin Mitte looked like in the 80’s, it looked like Ost-Berlin Mitte in the 50’s. That is, if you just scratched the surface and got away from the Potemkin village near the Fernsehturm.

Es ist zum Kotzen

In the early 1980s on the imaginary political frontline of the cold war, desperation was ripe. The western left wanted to disarm unilaterally, just to get the voices out of their heads. Common sense prevailed, and the resolute were victorius.

Looking back, the bleatings and howlings of the fearful seem pathetic, as their only best option was to maintain the status quo that imprisoned hundreds of millions of people east of the “Antifaschistische Schutzmauer”

A Love that Dare not Speak its' Name

Meira Pentermann on the
Stasi’s legacy in film:

We are blessed to have many poignant movies about the Nazis and the atrocities committed in concentration camps. As the years tick by and those who lived through those unimaginable experiences slip between the pages of history, I thank God that history has been preserved in books and film.

In contrast, I find the lack of movies about East Germany (or any country behind the Iron Curtain for that matter) rather telling. It is not for absence of living witnesses or data. It is merely a lack of will to even touch the subject. When the president of the United States snubs the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe it is best to just not go there. Encouraging Americans to think about the mind-boggling amount of resources required to maintain the socialist utopia might cause them to question the entire concept of socialism.

Because it’s too close to the hearts of those in Hollywood.

Dalli Dalli

Another creepy number station, this one a recording of a transmission from the DDR. Jump right in.

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

Lone Listener, Secret Transmitter

While this is a highly entertaining mash-up, it conveys the sense many had about the secretive broadcaster transmitting to secretive, and likely pensive and lonely listeners.

The Near Distant Ago, Remembered

Those among us interested in radio will enjoy this one: one of those new fangled weblog thingies focusing on Radio Berlin International, the voice of the erstwhile German leftist dictatorship. For a collection of their QSL cards, as well as postcards from said erstwhile German leftist dictatorship, hier clicken, bitte.

Dystopia Then, Dystopia Now

Just as now, the wasteland of popular culture promoted a sort of "unilateral disarmament" against the world's evils. Otherwise we were to still enjoy the misery we were deserving.

Counter-Counter-Counter Something or Other... Still With me?

Veeeeery Interestink!:

DFS 904 was a propaganda station from east germany in the cold war. These messages, sent during night, were absolutely nonsense and were intended to pretend it was an underground station operated by banned communists in western germany. On a website I found *exactly* this messages as an example mp3.

Creepy Number Station Stuff: the Eternal Cubans

A Damned Good Read

Page for page, Ian McEwan’s The Innocents is as gripping as anything you’ll find. Set in Berlin during the Cold War, its story revolves around a murder so vivid in its description that I had to shut the book and steel myself to continue. The infamous American spy tunnel figures prominently in the tale as well.

Despite the usual European treatment of Americans as passive and two dimensional, as if they’re simply furniture, the story is an excellent one.

And it Fell without a Shot

It's not a special day. Celebrate it every day.
Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Near Distant Ago: the Beginnings

Building Design and the Capital of the Berlin Republic

Which is to say, Berlin, but I digress. Jim Hudson’s excellent blog visits Mitte, with photos that transit work from the 1933 to the present, visiting momentarily the flour that grew in the faded husk of the pride and joy of the DDR, trotting down the entirely “destalinized” Doreteenstraße.

Now, it should be noted that German architecture during the period 1933-45 is a complex business, with perhaps more continuity than many of the stripped neoclassical ‘banality of evil’ designs would suggest, albeit that modernism was relegated relegated to industrial buildings, where it survived at all. And one should not forget the need to consider the context of the buildings and the horrors of the regime, to avoid becoming one of those weird people with an unhealthy obsession with the subject. But, well, ooh, I love a good Nazi building, don’t you?

Euros to donuts, I agree, but atuill have a hard time thinking that one can express it openly without gimballing my neck to see who’s listening.

Feverishly Awaiting Orders from the Mother Ship

As you know, they are having forest fires in Russia. As you might expect, the “real truth©™” is “some other thing” that makes those “in the know” feel that they have some special wisdom that the ugly mass of morons that they imagine their fellow man to be. It always seems to be dispensed by what one can only describe as a modern day soothsayer-charlatan:

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, "At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries."

The second recurring features required for this kind of thing (that never seems to go away,) is that those that buy into it think that natural phenomena CAN’T be natural, because they are somehow personalized. The proof of this being that it is happening to them.

The primary recurring feature is ignorance.

But Russia isn't the only country suffering form a heat wave this summer. Indeed, the United States is also experiencing record temperatures. On July 24, temperatures in Washington, D.C., hit 37.7 degrees, and local weather services issued heat warnings for the first time this summer.

Areshev agrees that it is also hot in the United States, but notes that the United States is significantly farther south than Russia, meaning that such high temperatures are not so surprising there.

Statistics be damned! Some mysterious, evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld type controls the universe, and the weather at that, and has it IN FOR HIM! Possibly because he (at least believes) that he matters THAT MUCH! It’s the perfect, virtue-less circle.