One of the very first Straight Dope Columns I ever remember reading was Cecil’s now classic column on the mysterious coded numbers being broadcast.
Cecil says:
Interestingly, the volume of coded message traffic doesn’t seem to have dropped appreciably with the end of the Cold War. I suppose that only makes sense. Even if you were running fewer spies than you used to, you’d keep the code numbers booming out at the same rate so as not to clue the bad guys should you have the need to expand your agent roster in the future.
[snip]
*Clearly the time has come for a courageous subset of the Teeming Millions to get jobs with the world’s national security agencies, find out the whole story, and then clue us in. (I’d do it, but I’m tied up this week.) *
This was probably 15 or so years ago now. I wonder if in this age of the Internet these stations are still broadcasting and if the questions Cecil laid out were ever partially answered:
It’s reasonable to assume other folks besides the CIA are broadcasting code groups, too. But nobody will say publicly:
(1) exactly who’s doing it;
(2) whether private parties are involved (some suspect drug traffickers because so many messages are in Spanish);
(3) where the stations are located (because of atmospheric reflection, direction-finding is difficult);
(4) how many of the messages are real and how many are dummies intended to lull eavesdroppers;
(5) who the intended recipients are (they can’t ALL be Cuban agents in the U.S.); and, of course,
(6) what the messages say.*
