Catching the Lincolnshire Poacher

As a youth I think it’s fair to say I didn’t get out much. I used to spend Sunday mornings listening to short wave radio, mainly for short-wave pirates and English-language programmes from stations like Radio Netherlands.

But occasionally I’d hear something stranger. Weird echoing chimes or music followed by numbers read out in a mechanical voice. Some of them were quite chilling – cold female voices reciting numbers in German or English.

I now know that these were ‘numbers stations’ – almost certainly these are coded transmissions from various secret services to their agents.

Many years later I was working as London producer for NPR, and we had a man called Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner) in for an interview – he made music incorporating recordings of numbers stations. Lots of other people have done the same, such as Stereolab, Wilco, Boards of Canada and Pere Ubu.

I’d assumed that numbers stations had died out at the end of the Cold War, but a fair bit of Googling suggests they’re still with us. It might seem odd, quaint even, in the era of the internet, SMS and PGP, to still be using numbers read out over short wave. But it makes a lot of sense – there’s no route of IP numbers to trace, no records on hard drives. All you need is an innocuous radio set (and a rather less innocuous one-time pad or code-book!).

There are some fine audio clips on the web – for example at http://home.freeuk.com/spook007/ – I remember hearing the Swedish Rhapsody’s child-like voice, and it scared the willies out of me too.

A couple of the web sites I found said that at almost any time of the day or night there are numbers stations on the air. So I dusted off my short-wave radio, and scanned the dial. Maybe I’d find the Lincolnshire Poacher (MI6, supposedly active, and hey, kinda catchy!). Maybe the strange polyphonic beauty of XPH?

No. Nothing. Not even armed with a ‘schedule’ for the Lincolnshire Poacher.

I think I might possibly have heard a very brief snatch of a station believed to be Algerian called ‘Magnetic Fields’ – but then again, it might just have been a radio station playing a bit of ‘Magnetic Fields’by Jean Michelle Jarre.