Defense News:
Spooky Chinese Robot Speaks
They are eerie even if you can understand Chinese. Having listened to both Taiwan-based and mainland China-based
numbers stations for years, I have been impressed over the past few months by the increase in Chinese Robots.
Though an old Cold War trick common in spy novels written by John le Carre, the idea of using Ham radios for espionage is ignored today in the West due to reasonable arguments that we no longer need to broadcast shortwave messages to deep cover agents. We can just use the Internet. Why use shortwave when you can use PGP along with a Hushmail account giving you double encryption? Most likely because counterintelligence folks can always find the location of the computer that opened the e-mail, even if you are using an Internet café – you risk being identified. A Ham radio is different. You can turn it on and just listen like a million others. You write down your numbers and then use your one-time pad to decode the message. Sounds old fashioned? Then why are Chinese numbers still being broadcast?
Ham radio hobbyist who listen to them have been posting their data on the website
Spy Numbers, which has an excellent
ListServ called
Spooks Digest that provides specs on the latest frequencies and times. Below is a recent example: V16 Voice, November 02, 2012, 1522 UTC, 14123 kHz, USB Mode.