The 38 North blog attempts to cover and analyze incidents and trends in North Korea. Recently they covered an activity out of the Cold War – the recurrence of a Numbers Station. Numbers Stations are shortwave radio stations which send coded messages, presumably to agents operating in other countries, and have fallen out of use with the advent of the Internet and digitally secure communications. 38 North’s Martyn Williams explores why North Korea may have resumed use of a Numbers Station:
Some are worried it signals that North Korean might be planning some type of operation, alerting its spies by sending the coded broadcast. But for that to be true, North Korean agents would have had to have been listening at the right time to take down the message, and how would they have known it was coming? Numbers haven’t been broadcast for 16 years, so have agents really spent the last decade and a half listening just in case something came across? It is possible they could have been alerted that such a message was about to be broadcast, but then when why not send the message contents over whatever communications channel was used for such an alert?
Had this been a real broadcast, interpreting the message would have relied on code books that are probably years out of date, making the whole thing all the more unlikely.
There is also a possibility the broadcast really was some sort of remote mathematics course, but that seems equally unlikely given its sudden and unexplained start.
Perhaps the most credible theory says that North Korea is trying to cause a bit of panic and confusion in Seoul. If that’s true, then mission accomplished—at least for a day or two.
But the fuss in Seoul about the return of North Korean numbers on the airwave misses an important point: South Korea itself resumed its own numbers broadcasts back in February, although the National Intelligence Service isn’t as keen to talk about those.
South Korea has a much richer recent history of using numbers stations than its northern neighbor. After all, while the Internet and digital communications have made the radio stations obsolete in the rest of the world, North Korea stands alone in the almost complete absence of technological progress. So radio remains the best and safest way for South Korea to contact its agents in the north.
Beyond what I read in Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, I know very little about North Korea, so this is fascinating. No doubt reflective of the convoluted machinations of current Leader Kim Jong-un, does this suggest espionage activity is increasing? I’m not so incredulous concerning the use of the station for exactly what it was used by in years past – getting agents out of North Korea and into South Korea may not be as difficult as Martyn believes.
The really sad part is we may never know the truth.
