The Numbers Game - Russia's Secret Stations

During the decade leading up to 1992, from a secret location in the dense forests around Moscow, a radio station, known as UVB-76, broadcast almost nothing but continuous beeps. One day, without any warning, it switched to a on-off sharp buzzer sound that cut through the dark of the Russian night and carried across the Northern hemisphere. Occasionally, the buzzer was interrupted by a male voice reading sequences of names and numbers. Was this a signal to Soviet agents in the field? Was it related to the Russian Dead Hand system?

Rumour has it that the original signal came from from the grounds of a Voyenni Gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo. Most of the airtime was filled by a steady series of inexplicable tones. Occasionally, the amplitude and pitch of the buzzing would shift, and the timing between tones would change. Every hour, on the hour, the station would sound the buzzer twice, quickly. But why?

Despite the upheavals in Russia’s recent past, UVB-76 kept broadcasting and the buzzer sounded uninterrupted except for the disembodied voice reciting its secret sequences. The broadcasts came to transfix shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. On June 5, 2010, the buzzing stopped. There were no announcements, no explanations, just silence. The next day, the station resumed it’s buzzer broadcasts. For the next few months, UVB-76 behaved more or less as it always had except the buzzer was now punctuated by short bursts of what appeared to be Morse code.

On August 25, at 10.13am, UVB-76 something happened. The buzzer stopped and First there was silence, then a series of bangs and shuffles almost as if someone was in the room. For the first week of September, transmission was regularly interrupted with what sounded like recorded snippets of "Dance of the Little Swans" from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Also, hushed male and female voiced were heard in the background. On the evening of September 7, at 8.48pm Moscow time, a male voice issued a new call sign, "Mikhail Dmitri Zhenya Boris," indicating that the station was now to be called MDZhB . This was followed by one of the station's typically nebulous messages: "04 979 D-R-E-N-D-O-U-T" followed by a longer series of numbers, then "T-R-E-N-E-R-S-K-I-Y" and yet more numbers.

Distant conversations have been heard along side the buzzer, suggesting that the buzzing tones are not generated internally, but are transmitted from a device placed behind a live microphone. On November 11, 2010, intermittent phone conversations were transmitted on the station and recorded by a radio enthusiast. The conversations are available online, and seem to be in Russian. The phone calls mentioned the "brigade operative officer on duty", the communication nodes "Debut", "Nadezhda" (Russian for "hope", both a noun and a female name), "Sudak" (a kind of river fish and also a town in Crimea) and "Vulkan" (volcano). The female voice is heard to say "officer on duty of communication node Debut senior ensign Uspenskaya, got the control call from Nadezhda OK".

Numbers stations, such as the now defunct Lincolnshire Poacher operated by Mi6, are usually used to transmitted coded information to spies and agents operating around the world but the purpose of UVB-76 has never been confirmed by Russian government officials. However, the former Minister of Communications and Informatics of the Republic of Lithuania Rimantas Pleikys has written that the purpose of the voice messages is to confirm that operators at receiving stations are alert. There is further speculation published in the Russian Journal of Earth Sciences which describes an observatory measuring changes in the ionosphere by broadcasting a signal at 4625 kHz, the same as UVB-76. Many listeners believe that the voice messages are some sort of Russian military communications related to Russian Dead Hand system, otherwise known as PERIMITER, a Cold-War-era nuclear-control system used by the Soviet Union. General speculation from insiders alleges that the system remains in use in post-Soviet Russia. An example of fail-deadly deterrence, it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors.

Radio enthusiasts have used triangulation techniques to narrow down the origin of the signals but so far have been unsuccessful in pinpointing its exact location, or purpose. Is this simply a weather experiment or is the buzzer something much, much more sinister?

For those who are interested, a live feed of UVB-76 had been made available online (UVB-76.net), cobbled together by an Estonian tech entrepreneur named Andrus Aaslaid.