Numbers Stations

When I was a child (5/6 years old) there was no TV in the house, but there was a big radio. Short, medium, long waves..
One of my passions was listening to the radio, and especially all those strange sounds that came out of the shortwave. But more than anything, I was fascinated by certain stations where you could hear voices speaking in strange languages, with a cadence that wasn't that of a normal, conversational broadcast, but rather that of someone reading announcements, a bit like a radio station. in the style of the BBC when it sent instructions to the French partisans with well-defined coded phrases, such as "the cat has eaten all the kittens", or like the famous verse from Paul Verlaine's Chanson D'Automne transmitted in two parts to announce the invasion: "The long sobs of the autumn violins", first and then, two days before the landing, the last part: "they wound my heart with monotonous languor";.

Some stations, then, were rather peculiar because they only transmitted infinite series of numbers, typically in English. "One, five, seven, six, eight"; pause; "nine, eight, two, three, four"; pause. And so on.
I knew the numbers in English and sometimes wrote them down, trying to figure out if there was a rule, but I never found one. Naturally, I imagined stories of spies who received the transmissions and then set out to decipher the message.

What I didn't know then was that it was true. Most likely, it was exactly that. Those were the famous numbers stations.
I would only learn about it many years later, at university, but by now it's well known, so much so that it's even reported on wikipedia:

Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of unknown origin. Broadcasts generally contain a voice reading sequences of numbers, words, or letters (sometimes using a phonetic alphabet).

There are three types of numbers stations:

Voice stations, where numbers are spoken by a voice or a speech synthesizer

Stations that transmit in Morse code

Stations that transmit apparent noise

The broadcast voices are often produced by a speech synthesizer and use a wide variety of languages, particularly in the USA, they are often heard in Spanish, while in Europe the broadcasts are generally in English, German, French, or even Slavic languages. Furthermore, they are mostly female, more rarely male or childish.

Popular belief, supported by the limited evidence available on the subject, would attribute these stations to espionage operations. This hypothesis has never been publicly confirmed by any government agency that might operate a numbers station, however, a station implicated in espionage has been publicly prosecuted by a court in another state.

In reality, shortwave is ideal for one-way communication (send only, no response) and therefore for sending orders or warnings, because

They don't need repeaters because they are reflected by the upper layers of the atmosphere and therefore travel along the curvature of the Earth, reaching any location; it's just a matter of transmission power.
They can be received with a normal, non-suspect radio.
They are complex to locate: you have to trace the signal based on the direction from which it arrives with the greatest power and then triangulate it.

Ultimately, they are perfectly suitable for sending messages from one state to its agents in a foreign country. The fact that they can be intercepted by anyone is not a problem because the transmissions could be encrypted with a very strong cipher, such as the Vernam Cipher (one-time pad).

Some of these stations have even received nicknames, such as The Lincolnshire Poacher, which broadcasts from Cyprus, is attributed to MI5, and plays the first two bars of the folk song of the same name before each set of numbers. Or its cousin, ... An Asian station broadcasting from Guam with the same format is called "Cherry Ripe (numbers station)" Cherry Ripe (and of course, the opening song here is "Cherry Ripe"). Or "Magnetic Fields," which uses music by Jean-Michel Jarre, or "Atención," which broadcasts from Cuba to the United States.
The group ENIGMA, formed specifically to study numbers stations, has classified them according to language and transmission methods. In 1997, the Irdial-Discs label released a 4-CD set containing recordings of these broadcasts: “The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations”.
Today, all this material is freely distributed by the Internet Archive. There is also the information site The Numbers Stations

Here are some examples

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