"RedOctober90" wrote in message
om...
I don't think the traditional numbers station is going to really
"advance" past this point in time. These stations apparently were very
vital during the dark days of the Cold War... but I doubt there is
still as much use for them as before.. so I don't think the
governmental organizations are willing to shove more of there
operating budgets into "DRMing" them or throwing them on satelites as
well as providing agents with specially modified sat comm rxers.

Typically numbers stations are transmit for regional purposes.. I
doubt the agents handlers will send the agent across the world and
expect him to pick up a numbers station on HF. Usually most numbers
stations are heard in Europe and seldom out of that area unless
conditions are good or if they are not based in Europe but Cuba or
elsewhere.

I believe most of the numbers stations are for agent sleeper cells.
For example, "Agent Bob" leaves his own county and goes to another
where he acts and works like a normal citizen. Then he may be
activated at any time.. by either a message transmitted in a numbers
station or another method of communications.



Defense analyst Ana Montes as well as a Cuban spy ring were taking
instructions from the Cuban numbers station. Both the spy ring and Ana
Montes were active. The numbers station still works because, while the
source of the message is well known, the message and target aren't.
According to the stories, much of spycraft is still very low tech. One
advantage about low tech spying approaches is that they are intuitive and
don't require much training. Ms. Montes got tripped up by the computer she
used to decode the transmissions. She didn't know that the body of a
deleted file remains on the hard drive until overwritten.

I think broadcast coded messages one sort or another will be around for a
long time. But I don't think the Cuban numbers will go to DRM until Radio
Havana goes to DRM.

Frank Dresser