Page 10 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - April 2024
P. 10
10 Ghostly Radio Station That No One Runs
The Ghostly Radio Station
That No One Claims to
Run
Continued from Page 8
Another idea is that the radio station
exists to “sound” out how far away the
layer of charged particles is. “To get good
results from the radar systems the
Russians use to spot missiles, you need to
know this,” says Stupples. The longer the
signal takes to get up into the sky and
down again, the higher it must be.
Alas, that can’t be it either. To analyse the
layer’s altitude the signal would usually
have a certain sound, like a car alarm
going off – the result of varying the
waves to get them just right. “They sound
nothing like the Buzzer,” says Stupples.
agent caught an employee sneaking into a difficult to generate a completely random
Intriguingly, there is a station with some communist news office in London, police number because a system for doing so
striking similarities. The “Lincolnshire officers stormed the Arcos building. The will, by its very nature, be predictable –
Poacher” ran from the mid-1970s to basement had been rigged with anti- exactly what you’re trying to avoid.
2008. Just like the Buzzer, it could be
intruder devices and they discovered a Instead officers in London found an
heard on the other side of the planet. Just secret room with no door handle, in ingenious solution.
like the Buzzer, it emanated from an which workers were hurriedly burning
undisclosed location, thought to be documents. They’d hang a microphone out of the
somewhere in Cyprus. And just like the window on Oxford Street and record the
Buzzer, its transmissions were just plain
It may have been dramatic, but the British traffic. “There might be a bus beeping at
creepy. didn’t discover anything that they didn’t the same time as a policeman shouting.
already know. Instead the raid was a The sound is unique, it will never happen
At the beginning of every hour, the wake-up call to the Soviets, who again,” says Stupples. Then they’d
station would play the first two bars of an discovered that MI5 had been listening in convert this into a random code.
English folk tune, the Lincolnshire
on them for years.
Poacher. Of course, that didn’t stop people trying
“This was a blunder of the very first to break them. During World War Two,
“Oh ‘tis my delight on a shining night order,” says Anthony Glees, who directs the British realized that they could, in
the Centre for Security and Intelligence fact, decipher the messages – but they’d
In the season of the year
Studies at the University of Buckingham. have to get their hands on the one-time
To justify the raid, the prime minister had pad that was used to encrypt them. “We
When I was bound apprentice in famous even read out some of the deciphered discovered that the Russians used the out-
Lincolnshire telegrams in the House of Commons. of-date sheets of one-time pads as
substitute toilet paper in Russian army
‘Twas well I served my master for nigh on
The upshot was that the Russians hospitals in East Germany,” says Glees.
seven years…” completely reinvented the way messages Needless to say, British intelligence
are encrypted. Almost overnight, they officers soon found themselves rifling
After repeating this 12 times, it would switched to “one-time pads”. In this through the contents of Soviet latrines.
move on to messages read by the system, a random key is generated by the
disembodied voice of a woman reading
person sending the message and shared The new channel of communication was
groups of five numbers – “1-2-0-3-6” – in only with the person receiving it. As long so useful, it didn’t take long before the
a clipped, upper-class English accent. as the key really is perfectly random, the numbers stations had popped up all over
code cannot be cracked. There was no the world. There was the colourfully
To get to grips with what was going on, it longer any need to worry about who named “Nancy Adam Susan”, “Russian
helps to go back to the 1920s. The All-
could hear their messages. Counting Man” and “Cherry Ripe” – the
Russian Co-operative Society (Arcos) Lincolnshire Poacher’s sister station,
was an important trade body, responsible Enter the “numbers stations” – radio which also contained bars of an English
for overseeing transactions between the stations that broadcast coded messages to folk song. In name at least, the Buzzer
UK and the early Soviet Union. Or at spies all over the world. Soon even the fits right in.
least, that’s what they said they did.
British were doing it: if you can’t beat
In May 1927, years after a British secret them, join ‘em, as they say. It’s quite (Continued on Page 24)
