Russia's "Doomsday Radio" Just Sent a Message

In January of 1983, Ary Boender was not looking to discover a secret Russian radio transmission.

He was a 29 year old living in the Netherlands, starting his career in finance. His hobby was shortwave radio -- specifically the high frequency, non-broadcast range, between 3 and 30 MHz. For shortwave radio nerds, this is where all the excitement is. Instead of radio broadcasts like the BBC or Voice of America, the higher frequencies are home to practical communications, used by governments for air traffic control, ship to shore messages, or weather stations. And once in a while, if you're obsessed with scanning and logging these frequencies like Boender was, you might just hear signals from the military, or even foreign spies.

On this particular night, Boender was scanning for a different station, rolling across the dial, when he heard a crackly beeping at 4625 kHz, over and over, and then it stopped. This pattern kept repeating. Boender was captivated. Because a haunting, mysterious beeping is addictive -- it's a mystery. Someone out there is sending  it, and someone else has the code and knows what it means. 

In a 2011 interview, Boender said that first night was "thrilling". He'd come across a true mystery -- no one knew what the signal was. "The fun is to find out who they are and where they transmit from and what the purpose is."

Well, it's fun until the world learned what it was.

The station at 4625 kHz is located 18 miles outside Moscow, broadcasting day and night from a lonely rusted tower in the countryside. At first it was dismissed as a relic of the Cold War, locked in a loop of repeating beeps. But that changed in 1992. Someone took control of the broadcast. This was no relic - the frequency was being actively used. The beeps changed to extended "buzzing", one second each, between 21 and 34 times per minute. Taken as a whole, the buzzing has been described as a "nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether". Then, every once in a while, the buzzing would be interrupted by Russian Morse code, or -- even more ominous -- a voice. They would always say the same thing. They would give the call sign for the station, common practice on shortwave radio. The mysterious station was UVB-76.

For years, the station remained in this buzzing mode. Was this just a channel marker, to keep the frequency occupied so no one else uses it? The military sometimes does this to hold a frequency open until it's needed. Or is it tied to Russia's early warning nuclear command system, part of the "Dead Hand" automated signal meant to launch an attack if the country's leadership was wiped out? It's this theory that has given the radio station the nickname "Doomsday Radio".

On Christmas Eve 1997, a major break in the buzzing occurred, confirming at least one thing about UVB-76: the Russians were actively using it to communicate. With no warning, a male Russian voice came on the air. He gave a series of numbers and names. Specifically he said the code word "BROMAL". "The Buzzer" station was broadcasting coded messages. Who was hearing this? What did it mean? Nobody knew.

The actual entire message that night: "Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 BROMAL 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4." What military entity or undercover operative heard this and took action? Or was it just a test of the system?

It might be surprising governments still use shortwave radio for crucial, secret communication in the digital age. But shortwave radio has significant advantages over digital networks and satellites. Especially the higher frequencies, which can bounce of the ionosphere and -- by doing this -- travel thousands of miles to remote locations, a key advantage reaching ships in isolated locations at sea. Shortwave is also more reliable. It doesn't rely on internet connections or phones or satellites or anything that can be hacked or jammed. For this reason, it's often the only method for communications in disasters. The fact anyone can hear the signals isn't really an issue. The coded messages are nearly impossible to interpret without the keys to decipher them. And the signals can be disguised, simply by making them continuous -- no one would ever know regular radio traffic from a coded signal.

What about those Russian names and numbers? They sound borderline corny, like made-up code for a James Bond movie. But it turns out, this style of communication is very familiar in military or diplomatic circles. Known signal stations that message field agents for the CIA or MI6, or US military frequencies coordinating ship movements use exactly the same mix of text and number coding. And the fact that the Russians have neither confirmed or denied the existence of UVB-76 is also expected if it is, indeed, a classified Russian military frequency.

So we're pretty certain the numbers station is, indeed, controlled by Russian military intelligence. But this knowledge isn't so comforting, because we don't know what the signals mean.

And they keep coming.

In December of 2002, a distorted voice suddenly came on the frequency, breaking through the static to say, "UVB-76, UVB-76. 62 691 IZAFET 36 93 82 70." In February of 2006, a message came on that combined numbers with the names, "Konstantin-Tatiana-Oksana-Anna-Elena-Pavel-Schuka". A similar message was broadcast in August of 2010 and June of this year, when the United States hit nuclear sites in Iran. UVB-76 broadcasted, "PANIROVKA, KLINOK, BOBINA".

Was this a warning to their Iranian partners? 

It's actually somewhat comforting when the messages coincide with world events -- the Russians maneuvers in Chechnya in December 2002, or the Iranian bombing this year. It's expected Russian military would need to give orders globally during these times.

But that doesn't explain the message sent yesterday.

On Monday, September 8 of this year, UVB-76 came alive once again. This time, it broadcasted 1.04 minutes of code words, a list of Russian names that went, "Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatyana, Ivan, Olga, Elena, Leonid". This was followed by a series of numbers: 38, 965, 78, 58, 88, 37, then followed by phrases like "soft sign," "five signs," and "reception." The instructions were complex.  Were they giving coordinates for a strike? Were they a green light to covert operatives?

We have no idea. But in this case, it's no fun to wait and see.