There was a woman in East Berlin, who needed rescue. I can't remember if she worked with western intelligence, or if her husband did, but at any rate, she was in trouble. West Germany (or the Americans) decided to help her escape. At one point, she was given a pad. Told to turn her radio to a certain channel at a certain time of day. Write the numbers down and decode them with the pad.

Long story short, she and her son managed to get through one of the checkpoints into safety. Numbers stations were a key part of the plan because regular communications would have been impossible.

There's one example of how it was used. It's a little funny to me how the stations were quite mysterious to me, but they were just part of everyday life for others. A necessary chore.

Wish I had a link to the story. Heard it years ago. If this story rings a bell for anyone, and you have the link, I'd be forever grateful if you shared it. It stuck with me for not only being a good Cold War story, but also for the practical use of numbers stations.

Was it Garbriele Gast?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_Gast

> After agreeing to help, Gast very soon found herself sent on an intensive spycraft course, including hands-on training with the latest in covert communications equipment. She was given a Stasi code name, "Gisela", which came with a false passport and a new handbag, incorporating a well concealed secret compartment. Back home in Aachen, every Tuesday evening at the same time she tuned into a shortwave radio station from East Germany and carefully wrote down a long line of numbers, read out in a monotone, without further elaboration, by a "radio presenter". When she decrypted the messages from Schmidt she found some were instructions while others were simply encouraging love messages.

That sounds right. My memory is insisting it was an east-to-west rescue story, but memory is a very fallible thing. I very well may have reversed it from the actual story. Thanks very much for the link.

It was probably Helga Michnowski and her son Michael, later known as Ursula and Thomas Wagner: https://web.archive.org/web/20060213155527/http://www.myspys...

If you can read German, Werner Stiller, the Stasi agent who was involved in this story, wrote a detailed account in the following book: "Der Agent: Mein Leben in drei Geheimdiensten".

Also in German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vVYu2HaX10

An account in English from Werner Stiller's son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y30yDu7_JBU

It makes sense that you wouldn't want to transmit messages only when your spies needed them, because that can leak information. So you constantly transmit random-looking information, and the spies have a special decrypter pad (either one time or multi use), and know that they can tune into the station at a certain time of day to receive instructions. If the instructions turn out to be jibberish after running it through the pad, then there are no new instructions. And you wouldn't want the transmission to require some esoteric equipment, whose mere ownership would indicate that the person is a spy.

Using one numbers station, you could do one-way transmits of information to hundreds of different spies with commodity radi hardware who know when to tune in to get their slice of information.

I guess you could use that device to report telemetry from say an automated weather station. Spoken words can be probably propagated better over a noisy channel. Task an intern to listen to this every day & compile a report with the weather data inside and bam, daily weather report from an automated station. :)

This is also how ATIS works - these are condition reports for airports that are broadcast on a loop. They tell pilots the active runway (if a small airport), surface weather, etc and any special information.

They're often fully synthesised, but might also have some manual recordings at the end.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_terminal_informati...

Until not-that-long-ago, the weather service did have radio weather reports broadcast using an automated, synthesized voice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_Weather_Radio#Voices

Cool, haven't haven't about that before - thanks for the link! :)

I looked at the link because I was surprised that they had stopped. Turns out the stations are still transmitting.

Maybe they were used for sending automated radio from lighthouses etc? Radio beacons.

I don't think so. Radio beacons are sending the same information constantly. And are well documented.

The numbers stations were sending seemingly random strings of numbers non-stop. They were a typical cold-war phenomenon shrouded in much mystery.

Oh. Ye well obviously each number sequence has to correspond to pre-written orders? And mostly they sent numbers that had no corresponding value to cover actual activity? Or maybe it was a joke to waste foreign intelligence resources?