Regardless of whose transmission it is and who is doing the jamming — there are plenty of competing theories — the mysterious broadcast is a throwback to another era, before the advent of digital encryption used widely in apps like WhatsApp and Signal and other places.<\/p>\n
The transmission is called a \u201cnumbers station<\/strong><\/a>\u201d — a Cold War-era tool that employs radio transmissions and old-school cryptology to transmit secret messages — usually to spies around the world.<\/p>\n The concept: Using a random series of a numbers, generated by some mechanical or electronic device or something more powerful, a person can send a coded message to another person in possession of a decoder, often called a \u201cone-time pad.\u201d<\/p>\n An Iranian radar system system is seen during the first day of an Iranian military air defense exercise in October 2020<\/p>\n Anyone can listen to the transmission; shortwave transmissions travel long distances, signals bouncing off the atmosphere. But only a person with the decoder key can decipher it. The concept got a cameo in the US spy drama The Americans, set in the 1980s.<\/p>\n Numbers station code is \u201cabsolutely unbreakable,\u201d said Fernandez, who more than two decades ago published a four-CD audio compendium of hundreds of recordings from around the world called the Conet Project. It\u2019s considered the Bible for numbers-station enthusiasts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe number keys that are used are perfectly random. There are no mathematical operations you can use on them to brute force them,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd even if the answer gets out, say in proper English, it\u2019s not necessarily understandable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou can’t tell anything about a random set of letters or numbers by their length other than their length. The length of message is not the content of the information being transmitted,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is possible to infer the purpose of stations by the length that they’re online and the noise they transmit if there is no text message.\u201d<\/p>\n A spy and intelligence radio set (R-394KM) used by the Soviet-era KGB<\/p>\n The Persian language broadcast is the first new numbers station in years, according to Priyom, <\/strong>a blog run by radio enthusiasts who were first to identify, catalog, and analyze the signal<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> which they\u2019ve dubbed V32. US-based reporter Seth Hettena also highlighted the signal<\/strong> <\/a>in a blog post on March 4.<\/p>\n The group says its far-flung members have been able to triangulate the origin of the signal\u2019s transmitter: \u201csomewhere in an area encompassing northern Italy, Switzerland, western Germany, eastern France, Belgium and the Netherlands.\u201d<\/p>\n That narrowed the possibilities for the owner of the V32 transmission.<\/p>\n And then the jamming started.<\/p>\n Bubble Jammer<\/strong><\/p>\n During the Cold War, broadcasts such as those from the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty, among others, were routinely jammed by Soviet bloc authorities who wanted to discourage citizens from getting uncensored information: news about their own countries, or, say, jazz and rock music from the West.<\/p>\n You drown out the incoming broadcast with dissonant noise, something known as a bubble jammer.<\/p>\n On March 4, according to Priyom, a bubble jammer started broadcasting noise on the same shortwave frequency as the original V32 broadcast, rendering it difficult to understand.<\/p>\n The V32 transmissions were interrupted briefly and then switched to another nearby frequency, Priyom said.<\/p>\n \u201cAt first the station was thought to be a spy station for the Iran Islamic regime, but when the bubble-jammer appeared to jam it, it was an eye-opener,\u201d said Mauno Ritalo, a database administrator at the Radio Data Center, a German-based radio company.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is exactly the same kind of bubble jammer that is used against Radio Farda, VOA Farsi, Iran International TV shortwave relay and BBC Farsi,\u201d he said. \u201cEven Radio Free Iran suffered from it one night.\u201d<\/p>\n Radio Farda is the Persian-language service for Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty, also known as RFE\/RL.<\/p>\n As for the source of the transmission, the global radio community has competing theories; many appear to home in on the United States as the originator, potentially sending coded messages to agents within Iran.<\/p>\n Other theories focus on Israel or even Turkey, which is not a participant in the US-Israeli campaign but is a long-established regional rival to Tehran.<\/p>\n Or, the Priyom bloggers posited, it could be a psychological operation: \u201ca pretty visible, single-frequency station, starting up out of nowhere for a prime-time show on the first day of the war, with relatively few reliability features to ensure recipients actually could copy messages in their entirety and without errors.\u201d<\/p>\n The CIA did not immediately respond to an e-mailed query from RFE\/RL.<\/p>\n Further muddying the waters: ABC News on March 9 reported that the US government had sent an alert to law enforcement agencies regarding \u201cintercepted encrypted communications.\u201d<\/p>\n The report did not specify what exactly the transmission was, or whether it was a numbers station signal.<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/5d4b1862-dc61-449b-9257-2691b35246cc_w250_r1_s.jpg\"\/)
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