On the day of the US and Israeli attack on Iran, a new Persian-language digital radio station began operating in Western Europe, the Financial Times wrote. According to the experts interviewed by the newspaper, this is how the United States maintains its contacts with its agents hiding inside Iran.
Digitized radios have been used by intelligence agencies and militaries around the world for decades to transmit secret messages. The operator reads the digital code over the air, and the agent receives the signal via an ordinary radio receiver and, using a key known to him in advance, decrypts the message.
This method of transportation is very simple, reliable and safe. You can receive a signal hundreds of kilometers away from the transmitter, and all you need is a radio receiver and a notepad – in fact, the agent can only be detected if he is caught red-handed at the moment of decryption. There are no effective ways to deal with stations other than jamming frequencies. The fact that anyone in the world can listen to the broadcast is not a problem either – without the key, which only the sender and the agent have, the message cannot be decrypted.
Digital radios were particularly popular during the Cold War, but then intelligence agencies began using more modern methods of transmitting Internet-based encrypted messages.
The new radio station broadcast its first signals on February 28: it began with the word “attention” in Persian, followed by a series of numbers. The signals were sent twice a day – at 5:30 and 21:30 Tehran time, each lasting an hour and a half. Shortly after the radio station went into operation, the broadcast began to be interrupted due to interference, and according to experts, Iran was trying to drown them out. However, after a few days, the radio station simply switched to a new frequency.
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Radio enthusiasts who followed numbered radio stations named the new station V32. According to the Financial Times, this was the first station to broadcast in Persian since 2001. Using a triangulation method – by comparing the time it takes for a signal to reach several different receivers – activists determined that the transmitter was located in Western Europe.
Experts interviewed by the Financial Times point out that the station began operating on the first day of the war, when the Iranian authorities sharply restricted the country’s communications with the outside world. This likely made radio broadcasting the only option for communicating urgent information to customers.
“This is potentially a backup contact for our sources inside Iran,” former CIA station chief John Seaver told the Financial Times. “These are the people you should not lose contact with. If you are going to fight, this is the ideal backup option.”
For the CIA, Iran is considered one of the most difficult countries for operational work because there is no American embassy in this country, which makes standard intelligence practice impossible under the guise of a diplomatic mission. Therefore, reliable mechanisms for remote communication with clients in the case of Iran are of particular importance for the United States. If you have worked with Iran or North Korea, such things would not be unusual for you [как номерные радиостанции]. “It’s one of those old-fashioned things that really works,” says John Seaver.