The Numbers Station Movie

The new movie The Numbers Station, starring John Cusack and Malin Akerman, will be released in April. When Black Ops agent Emerson (John Cusack) is put aside, he's reassigned to a seemingly boring job. He should protect a remote CIA shortwave numbers station.

The station sends encrypted numbers messages through shortwave radio to agents in the field. Katherine (Malin Akerman) works at the station and is responsible for encrypting and announcing the messages over radio. What looked like a dull job turns into a nightmare when the station is overrun and both have to fight for their life. Meanwhile, they discover that a series of messages has been sent to start a series of assassination.

To the layman, the story line might sound like absurd spy fiction. The truth, however, although seemingly less spectacular, is just as scary. Numbers Stations have been around since the Second World War and their use has grown exponential during the Cold War. They are more than real. The movie obviously is fiction and doesn't depict things very accurately, but I'm glad so see a movie with the numbers station in it.

For those who think the Cold War is far behind us, think again! These stations still broadcast today in English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and many other languages. The messages are destined to Intelligence personnel in foreign countries, Special Ops teams behind enemy lines, sleeper agents and...who knows. Several spies who received their operational instructions through numbers stations have been caught and convicted... also very recently.

Some believe that such shortwave espionage broadcasts are a thing of the past. However, these broadcasts have nothing but advantages. The operational messages are converted into numbers and encrypted before they are sent over shortwave radio. The shortwave broadcast travels around the world and no one can tell who is listening to them.

 

Anyone with a small commercial shortwave radio can receive these messages and decrypt them manually with a unique (mathematically unbreakable) one-time pad. No compromising equipment to be carried by the agent, no insecure communications channels to be used, unbreakable encryption. And even when all telephone networks, Internet and satellite communications are down or unavailable, numbers messages still arrive. It's the ideal one-way method to send instructions.

On my website you can learn more about Numbers Stations, and also check out my one-time pad page which explains how such numbers messages are composed and encrypted. Some very recent U.S. spy cases are documented in the paper Cuban Agent Communications. On this blog are several posts, related to numbers stations and spy cases. More about the movie at the Internet Movie Database.

The Numbers Station Movie Trailer 2013

First Strike

U.S Titan II missile in its silo
See video footage

It is always interesting to have a retrospective view on the Cold War history (yes, that's easy with hindsight) and see how accurate, or inaccurate, the assumptions were back then, influenced by the mind set of those days.

First Strike, the 1979 PBS documentary, is a good example of how assessment of one's own capabilities and of those of the opponent can trigger an enormous arms build-up in an era where disarmament and weapons control and limitations were the words of the day.

The documentary starts with a dramatization of a Soviet surprise first strike attack, destroying nearly all Minuteman missile silos, wiping nuke carrying B-52's from their runways and sinking nuclear submarines in their ports and at see. Crippling the U.S. Strategic Forces in minutes was a daunting prospect in those days, in fact, it still is, but one can question the accuracy of this scenario, and the capabilities of the Soviets in those days. Spicy detail: actual Air Force personnel and air force installations were used to film the documentary.

The fear for such a scenario was undoubtedly real, both in the U.S. and in the Soviet Union, but fear has often been a bad counselor. In the next part of the documentary, analysts from the Defense and Strategic Studies Program, Rand Corporation, Research and Development, and other think tank experts defended their what-if theories in the documentary. Pretty scary and risky statements and conclusions! Parts of the documentary were later used in the notorious 1983 movie The Day After (which even scared the hell out of Ronald Reagan). Both documentary and movie were very good at convincing tax payers, both in the United States, in Europe... and unfortunately also in the Soviet Union. War scare at its best.

As we now know, the fear was real, the facts and the estimated treat were not (the latter paradoxically later made itself come true). If fear did achieve one thing, then it were the exorbitant defense budgets on both sides, which eventually resulted in the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The route chosen made many on both sides poor and a few very rich. Both sides never intended to strike first, both believed the other one would do so, and no one used its nukes.

Words could have done the job just as well, and much cheaper. One can discuss ages about the sense or nonsense of Assured Mutual Destruction and yes, it did the job, but there must have surely been better solutions, with less risk of escalation.

We did have a few close encounters of the third World War kind, as you can read in 1983 - The Brink of Acopalyps. Lessons learned? Who knows? Today's analysts still have a tough job with the current military and geopolitical situation.

More on the U.S. estimates on the Soviet strategic capabilities, and how it often deviated from Soviet reality, is found on my post on US Strategic Intelligence on the USSR. In my Farewell Dossier post you can read how the defense budget itself was used as a weapon to destabilize the Soviet Union. If you want to find out more on the Minuteman missiles, you can visit the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site website, with lots of information, images and interviews with Minuteman personnel. You can pay a virtually visit to a Minuteman Missile site with spherical panoramas (click-and-drag to move around). Below the documentary First Strike.

First Strike (Full)

FedFlix on the Internet Archive

Fedflix is a project to digitize a large number of U.S. Government movies. It is a Joint Venture between the National Technical Information Service and Public Resource Org, which is also supported by the National Archives.

The FedFlix archive is published on the Internet Archive and it is a real treasure trove of Government movies related to intelligence agencies, espionage, the Cold War and various other subjects. There's a wide variety of historical movies, instruction movies, documentaries and interviews, and best of all, they are available as free download.

Many movies are also made available on Youtube, but at the FedFlix website you can download each movie in various video formats (MPEG4 and h.264 are the most commonly used). Just right-click the proper video format link and select "Save Target As...".

From the numerous titles, and I have selected here below a few that fit the profile of this weblog. Of course, there are many more movies, from how to fly a P-47, over Morse techniques, to atomic bombs, available on the FedFlix section of the Internet Archive. In total, there are more than 7,000 movies to discover! Select this link to view the complete list of movies and enter FedFlix AND your keyword in the search box and hit the GO! button to find your desired movies.

• A Point in Time - The Corona Story (undated)
• The Walker Spy Ring - Lessons Learned (1989)
• Defense Against the Spy (1967)
• Counter-Intelligence Special Operations (1969)
• KGB Connections - parts1 and 2 (1981)
• The Hollow Coin (1958)
• Intelligence Gathering (1947)
• Military Intelligence Specialists (1947)
• Small Town Espionage (1960)
• Soviet Active Measures (1984)
• Cutout Devices - Espionage (1953)
• Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1992)

Enjoy watching them! If you discover any other interesting movies in the FedFlix database, please post them in the comments of this post.

Science of Spying

Allan W. Dulles

Science of Spying is a 52 minutes documentary, produced by NBC in 1965. The video was made available to the U.S. government and is now available at the Internet Archive in cooperation with FedFlix, which makes available various government movies. Science of Spying presents several operations, carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Latin America and Congo.

Of course, the interviews with former CIA director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell and others must be met with enough skepticism. Many of the facts, presented back in 1965, were either inaccurate or deliberately wrong, as some of the many currently declassified documents have shown. Nevertheless, it is an interesting movie that gives an insight in the view on intelligence work in the 1950's and 1960's.

You can view the complete movie here below, or you can download it for free at the Internet Archive's FedFlix collection.

The Science of Spying 1965

The Farewell Dossier

Farewell is a recent Cold War espionage movie, based on the actual case of Vladimir Vetrov, an engineer who worked at the KGB's Directorate T. The 2009 movie was shown at several film festivals and is recently released.

The real story of Farewell begins at the end of the 1960's, when Soviet R&D in the field of electronics and computers trailed the West by a decade. In 1970, a new organisation, called Directorate T, was established within the KGB to start an aggressive intelligence collection of Western science and technology. Line X was it's operational section with many KGB and GRU officers covertly operating in foreign Rezidentura across the world.

The Line X operations were most successful and produced thousands of high quality R&D documents that could enable the Soviets to close the gap with the West, if it wasn't for their inability to organise the required corresponding industry and economy. Nevertheless, Line X provided crucial information that enabled the development and copying of Western technology on a large scale. It saved them billions of Russian Ruble.

Vladimir Vetrov

In 1981, French President Mitterand personally informed US President Ronald Reagan that the French intelligence service DST had a source within Directorate T. KGB Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, codenamed Farewell, was stationed as Line X officer in France during the 1960's and supervised later on in Moscow the evaluation of all intelligence, collected by Line X.

He revealed the names of more than 200 Line X officers, many of their recruited agents, and provided information about the Line X targets. Although Western intelligence suspected the Soviet collection of R&D, they were astonished by its size and success.

Farewell initiated one of the most important deception operations of the Cold War. Instead of dismantling the Line X operations, US intelligence decided to feed Line X with false information that appeared genuine but would fail later on, when actually applied. Knowing exactly what Line X was looking for, the CIA and FBI supplied the KGB with all kinds of flawed technology. A remarkable aspect of the operation was that, if discovered by the Soviets, it would still be a success, as the Soviets would be suspicious about anything that was collected by its Line X officers.

Farewell enabled the US to keep ahead of Soviet military technology, economics and industry, and played an important role in the aggressive US arms build-up to lure the Soviets into keeping pace with the American military industry. The Soviet efforts to close that gap eventually lead to the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan called Farewell one of the most important espionage cases of the 20Th century. You can read the full story on the Farewell Dossier on the CIA's Studies in Intelligence. The Mitrokhin Archive (see my book reviews) also contains information on Soviet science and technology espionage, the Farewell case and on Vetrov.

In the movie, Colonel Vetrov's name is changed into Grigoriev. As for the rest of the story, any resemblance with real persons and events is not a coincidence. Farewell is not a flashy action movie but one in the genre of the The Lives of Others (see its trailer, make sure to get the original with subtitles) or The Russia House, about ordinairy people who get involved in espionage and how it profoundly changes their lives.

Farewell - Movie Trailer