Mystery Signal From or to Middle East [Video]

A station, designated recently as V32 by the ENIGMA2000 monitoring group, is broadcasting strings of numbers into the night across the U.K. and Europe that began with the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and appears to be coming from or going to the Middle East.

What Are Number Stations?

The numbers station is a reminder of a time seemingly lost in the digital era. During this time, encrypted messages were sent over the radio to instruct operatives in the field. Both the sender and receiver held matching one-time-use pads of paper containing individual sheets of random numbers used to encode and decode each message.

After the message was received and decoded, it was destroyed, making the encryption impossible to break without the matching key. Anyone could hear the message, but only those it was intended for could make sense of it.

Mystery Signal Broadcast

A monotone voice reads a string of number sequences. This particular message is being broadcast on 7910 kHz outside major broadcast bands typically reserved for military and diplomatic traffic.

This number station is reading numbers in Fasris twice a day: 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.

The reception reports are consistent with a Middle East transmitter; however, direction finding results point to an area closer to the Red Sea, such as Israel, Western, or Arab intelligence broadcasting into Iran.

Italian ham radio operator Iz0kba Lorenzo argues the signal is from Iran. He asserts that the signal strength across Southern and Central Europe, the frequency range is that of military and diplomatic communications in the Middle East, and the voice cadence resembles that of Iranian intelligence.

Numbers & Oddities, a long-running archive of clandestine radio signals, catalogued the station as V32, using the ENIGMA classification scheme that assigns each known numbers station a letter-number designation. ENIGMA2000, the UK-based group that maintains the official list, has not issued a formal bulletin on the signal.

Sources:

Daily Star: Iran is sending a mystery number signal across UK and you can hear it – here’s how
Substack After-Action Report: A new SPy Radio Signal Has Appeared. It’s Broadcasting in Farsi.

Featured Image Courtesy of val.pearl’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License