Cuban Numbers Stations and Spies

Ana Belen Montes receiving
CIA Intelligence Award

The August edition of Spycast has an interview with Scott Carmichael, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) counterintelligence official who investigated the Ana Belen Montes case. Montes, the senior Cuba analyst at the DIA, was arrested in 2001 and charged with committing espionage for Cuba.

The federal prosecutors stated that she communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba. This case reminds me again at the famous numbers stations, and more specific at the Cuban "Attencion" station.

This case, just as the "Spy With No Name" case I wrote about last month, once again confirms that numbers stations are indeed spy stations. The messages on these numbers stations are believed to be encrypted with the absolutely secure one-time pad.

See also my Cuban Agent Communications (pdf) about the implementation flaws by Cuben Intelligence and its agents, about Ana Montes, Carlos Alvarez and his wife Elsa Alvarez, Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber. Crypto Museum also covers the Ana Belen Montes case and the radio equipment she used to receive the Cuban numbers station messages.

 

Update: Ana Belen Montes, sentenced to 25 years in prison, was released on January 6, 2023 after serving 20 years in prison. In 2002 she had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate on a full debriefing of her spying activities, to reduce her sentence and avoid a possible death sentence. Spycast interviewed Jim Popkin on his book about Montes.

SPYCAST - Code Name Blue Wren: Cuban Spy Ana Montes is an interview with Jim Popkin about his book on the most damaging female spy in the United States. More about Popkin's book at  Goodreads.

Declassified Spy Stories - Cuba: Traitor on the Inside

 

Documentary with several of Ana Montes' colleagues interviewed.

 

The Two Faces of Ana: Model Employee/Cuban Spy

Podcast Nuggets Episode 8

Click for more

Time to spoil the ears again with another selection of podcast nuggets from across the Internet. We start with a man who knows the Soviet Union inside out. Next, a stupendously dangerous extortion that ends spectacular, how to catch a most damaging spy in your own ranks and finally the struggle between government and public for right to digital privacy.

COLD WAR CONVERSATIONS - A UK Journalist in the Soviet Union & the GDR is an interview with Mark Brayne who studied in 1972 two years in Moscow and traveled around Russia. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1974 as Reuters reporter and befriended Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear scientist who eventually became a Soviet dissident. After Russia he became correspondent for Reuters in East Berlin and later for BBC in Beijing and the BBC World Service. Also listen to Brayne under Stasi Surveillance and his Reporting the 1989 Romanian Revolution. So many fascinating stories about the many people Brayne got to know. The interview show notes contain photos and videos of Brayne's trips.

DAMN INTERESTING - The Zero-Armed Bandit brings the stunning story of  John Birges who lost a lot of money in Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. He got the brilliant idea to extort three million dollars from the casino by planting a 1000 pounds dynamite bombe in Harvey's Resort Hotel. The bombe had a complex tamper-proof detonation mechanism and once the ransom was paid, Birges would provide the instructions to disarm the bombe. He warned the FBI not to disarm the bombe but they decided to let the bombe technicians have a go at it.

SPYCAST - Cuban Intelligence and the Ana Montes Spy Case interview with Scott Carmichael, a senior counterintelligence investigator of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Carmichael was the man who identified Ana Belen Montes, one of the most damaging spies in recent U.S. history. Montes joined the DIA in 1985 and quickly became a rising star and later DIA's most senior and distinguished Cuba analyst. In reality, she worked for the Cuban intelligence service.

DARKNET DIARIES - Crypto Wars Jack Rhysider talks with Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the well known non-profit digital rights group. For many decades, cryptography was in the hands of governments and their military. That changes in the 1980s when the Internet arrived and ordinairy people began to use cryptography to protect their communications and data. Since then, governments have tried to restrict or weaken publicly available encryption.

Cuban Agent Communications

The United States has always been the principal foreign target of the Cuban Intelligence Service. Ana Belen Montes, Calos and Elsa Alvarez and Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn are some of the agents who worked for Cuban Intelligence and were jailed for espionage against the United States in recent years. Information, released into the public, showed that all these illegal agents received encrypted operational messages via shortwave radio, broadcast by Cuban Numbers Stations.

These mysterious stations always had a fascinating reputation. They are used by intelligence agencies since many decades and have proven to be a most secure way to covertly sent messages behind enemy lines. However, now these most secure shortwave communications provided evidence against all agents that were involved in the Cuban spy cases. How was it possible that such a solid encryption system failed several times?

As it turns out, it were bad implementation and operational procedures that compromised a veteran system of spy trade craft. Just as with the VENONA project, these Cuban spy cases are mistakenly referred to as cases of broken one-time pads.

On the website you find Cuban Agent Communications (pdf) that I wrote about these espionage cases, how numbers messages work and why the system failed, all based on FBI documents and court papers. More on Cuban espionage in the Unites states and a documentary about Ana Belen Montes at Cuban Numbers Stations and Spies. Many more documents are found on the Latin American Studies website.

Holiday Reading Stuff

We're half-way trough the holidays, and while some of us will surely have an exciting and adventurous vacation, some others will have to obey their wife's request for a lazy baking-brown-vacation on some remote club hotel swimming pool.

For those unfortunate ones who don't have any idea on how to survive those long hours at the pool, I selected a list of excellent previously posted papers. Behind each paper there's a [...] link to additional information. I suggest to print them out - leave your laptop at home - and put them in your luggage. You'll have many hours of reading fun, instead of boring things like observing other husbands wives in bikini.

1. USSR General Col. Danelevich Interview [...]
2. Cuban Agent Communications [...]
3. Assessment Aldrich Ames case [...]
4. The Berlin Tunnel Operation [...]
5. Ana Belen Montes Affidavit [...]
6. East German SIGINT Operations [...]
7. Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko complaint [...]
8. David Boak's COMSEC Lecture [...]
9. Analysis John Walker Case [...]
10.Report on the First Nuclear Explosion [...]

And if you take your MP3 player with you on vacation, here's a great BBC4 Radio program on Numbers Stations. Recent espionage cases like the SVR spy ring in the US, the Kendall Myers, Carlos Alvarez or Ana Belen Montes cases have shown that the era of these Cold War spy stations is far from over. More to discover in the Podcast Nuggets.

A tip: although all these documents are declassified, some airport customs might experience an anafylactic shock when discovering your reading pile. If you do want to cross a border, put the papers in your wife's luggage and deny everything. Burn after reading (the papers, not the wife).

James Hall – The Spy Inside Field Station Berlin

James W Hall III

James Hall was a U.S. Army signals intelligence analyst, stationed at Field Station Berlin from 1982 to 1985. Although less known to the general public, he became one of the most prolific and most damaging spies of the Cold War.

The listening station on top of Teufelsberg intercepted and analyzed East German and Soviet signals (SIGINT) and electronic intelligence (ELINT) during the Cold War, from radio communications, microwave links, satellite transmissions to different types of technical signals. Initially operated by the U.S. Army Security Agency (ASA), the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) took over in 1977 and the National Security Agency (NSA) provided most of the personnel.

Given its strategic importance and secretive mission, the well-guarded Field Station Berlin was an important target of both the Russian state security service KGB and the East German foreign intelligence service HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung).

Field Station Berlin on top of Teufelsberg (source: INSCOM)

James Hall was 17 when he joined the U.S. Army in 1976. He was trained as a signals specialist and his first assignment was in 1977 to Det J in Schneeberg, a U.S. listening station in West Germany near the Czech border. The Schneeberg station was a detachment of the 326th ASA Company in Augsburg. In 1981 he was transferred to Berlin.

From Secrets to Cash

Working at Field Station Berlin, Hall realized he could make a lot of money by selling top secret information. In 1982 he dropped a letter in the Soviet consulate mailbox, offering his services to the Soviets. After a first covert meeting with his KGB contact, Hall started his spying career to increase his low pay, but wasn't quite happy with the cumbersome KGB tradecraft and complex agent communications schemes.

Auto Craft Shop
Source: Berlin Brigade (archived)

Already in 1979, the HVA had recruited walk-in Huseyin Yildirim, a Turkish national who proved valuable in 1980 when he started working as mechanic in the Auto Craft Shop inside U.S. Andrews Barracks Berlin. Yildirim was a very skilled mechanic, nicknamed "Der Meister" (the master) by the Army personnel, but he was even more skilled in profiling people and making money fast.

Yildirim, codename BLITZ, was the ideal man to approach people who worked at the SIGINT station and serviced their car in the Auto Craft Shop. In 1984, Sergeant Hall then 27 years old,  got acquainted with Yildirim and proved to be an extremely valuable source for the HVA. Hall now had an additional and easier source of income.

Operating under the codename PAUL, Hall sold huge amounts of highly classified information to both KGB and their HVA counterpart. Yildirim served as middleman between Hall and HVA agents, and as his courier and paymaster.

Crown Jewels for Sale

Hall compromised ELINT systems to locate and identify enemy aircraft, missiles and vehicles, revealed NSA's SIGINT targets and several top secret programs, including TROJAN, a worldwide intelligence collection and dissemination system, and CANOPY WING, the electronic warfare plans to disrupt and mislead crucial Soviet command and missile communications in the event of a war against the Eastern Bloc.

He also sold the complete National SIGINT Requirements List (NSRL) to the KGB and HVA. The crown jewels and holy grail in one. The massive 4258-page NSRL was a catalog of all NSA activities, their list of targets, and the U.S. government wishlist of intelligence and enemy capabilities they were interested in.

Hall was reassigned in 1985 to 513th Military Intelligence Brigade in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The KGB took over running Hall during his stay in the United States because the HVA had no agents over there. Due to Hall's problem with elaborate precautions and using dead drops, his spying was temporarily halted.

Huseyin Yildirim's entry pass
for U.S. military installations

Hall transferred back to Germany in 1986, this time to 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion (205th MI Group) in Frankfurt where he worked as chief of the SIGINT and EW (electronic warfare) section.

He resumed passing large amounts of classified SIGINT information to the HVA through his trusted courier Yildirim. Hall meticulously copied classified documents during his working hours or smuggled them out to photocopy them.

When Hall applied for an appointment as warrant officer, he was subjected to a routine background investigation. A supervising officer complained that Hall apparently spent more money than his wages could afford, but Hall told him that a deceased aunt left him a large trust of which he received $ 30,000 annually.

Hall was reassigned in 1987 to Fort Stewart, Georgia. After completing his training as warrant officer, he was assigned to the G-2 (military intelligence staff) of the 24th Infantry Division in early 1988. As a warrant officer, he now had even greater access to classified material. Yildirim had also moved to the United States in 1987, but the tide had turned for both men.

Defector vs Traitor

East German professor Manfred Severin, who was hired by the Stasi as interpreter for Hall, defected in 1988 and offered his services to the CIA. His information lead to the identification of Hall, who was put under surveillance by the FBI and Army counterintelligence for several months. The FBI moved Severin in December to Savannah, close to Fort Stewart. Severin contacted Hall to arrange a meeting with a KGB agent in a hotel. On 20 December, Hall was introduced to an FBI agent, posing as KGB agent Vladimir.

FBI mugshot

During that meeting, videotaped by the FBI, Hall believed he was talking to a genuine Soviet contact. He explained to “Vladimir” that he made a lot of money by selling secrets and bragged about his work as an agent. The FBI agent assured him that Moscow pays better than the East Germans, and Hall handed over several top secret documents in exchange for $60.000. When Hall walked out the hotel he was arrested. Yildirim was arrested one day later in Tampa.

In total, Hall had received an estimated $300.000 from the East German and Russian agents, which was actually a bargain for the HVA and KGB. His flood of documents enabled the Eastern Bloc to take countermeasures, prevent eavesdropping and adapt their strategy. An NSA official estimated that Hill caused $3 billion worth of damage to the United States.

 

Hall and Yildirim to Court

On 9 March 1989, James Hall was court-martialed and sentenced to 40 years in prison for espionage. Huseyin Yildirim was convicted on 20 July 1989 for conspiring with Hall and carrying classified intelligence to East Bloc agents. He was sentenced to life.

Hall served 22 years in Leavenworth military prison and was released in 2011. Yildirim was released after 14 years in a secret 2003 prisoner exchange with Turkey, under the condition that he would serve his sentence in Turkey. The Turkish government however immediately set him free for humanitarian reasons.

The New York Times archived the 1989 investigation of James Hall and a report on Hall's trial. Smithsonian Magazine brings the story of FBI agent Dimitry Droujinsky who posed as KGB agent Vladimir (mid-page, after Robert Lipka case). The book Seduced by Secrets - Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World by Kristie Macrakis has 14 detailed pages on James Hall. You can also read about James Hall at the DOD PERSEREC website.

Der Spiegel published three interviews with James Hall. Hunt for the Stasi Superstar (translation) and many photos of the FBI arrest, the follow-up interviews The Treasure from Teufelsberg (translation) and The Scope of NSA Surveillance Surprised Me (in English) with former Stasi agent Klaus Eichne. Huseyin Yildirim's side of the story was published on the 6941st Guard Battalion Berlin website (you can select your language).

The Stasi archives contained a steel container with copies of 13088 classified documents, marked Top Secret and Top Secret Umbra, sold by James Hall to the HVA. After the reunification of Germany, these documents were returned to the U.S. government, as explained in Der Spiegel's Destruction of Traces in the Office (translation).

Related Info on this Blog

More about Teufelsberg in the Field Station Berlin. The damage Hall inflicted on U.S. military and intelligence was comparable to the betrayal by John Walker, a US Navy communications specialist, who was preceded by Joseph Helmich. Both sold technical details and key lists of crypto machines.

Some argued that personnel with low income and access to highly classified documents, like James Hall, might be tempted to sell secrets for cash. However, even people with high income committed espionage, out of greed or financial problems. Besides money, the other incentives to spy are ideology (Ana Montes), compromise (Romeo spies and Swallows) and ego (Robert Hansen). 

Visit the Cold War Signals page on the website for information on signals intelligence. US Army Border Operations provides more on other intelligence operations in Germany with links to Det J Schneeberg, including many photos of the listening station.

There are several posts on legendary HVA chief Markus Wolf. In a German documentary (subtitles available), Markus Wolf talks about James Hall. Jump directly to Part 2 segment at 21:16 (enable CC Subtitles with Settings > Subtitles > Auto-translate > English).

There's also a documentary, Deckname Blitz, about Huseyin Yildirim and the James Hall spy case, which includes video footage of the actual meeting between the covert FBI agent and Hall (at 36:00). The documentary is in German, but no subtitles.

Deckname Blitz - Der Spion vom Teufelsberg

Spies and Numbers - The Kendall Myers Case

On June 5, 2009 the US Department of Justice announced that US State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers were arrested on charges of espionage for the Cuban government for nearly 30 years. Myers, now retired, worked at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). He held a Top Secret security clearance and had daily access to classified information. This is without a doubt a most damaging spy case.

He and his wife acknowledged having received encrypted messages from Cuban Intelligence via a shortwave radio they possessed. The Columbia State District Court indictment stated that "Cuban intelligence broadcasts encrypted shortwave radio messages in Morse Code or by a voice reading numbers" and also that "It was part of the conspiracy that Cuban Intelligence would and did broadcast shortwave messages in Morse Code which were receive by Kendall Myers". Cryptome published the State Court indictment (3.3 MB zip file) which contains sections describing the numbers station.

Kendall Myers and
Gwendolyn Steingraber

This case once again confirms that the mysterious numbers stations are indeed used by Intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents. The streams of numbers or letters are sent by powerful shortwave transmitters in Morse or by voice. Although there were more numbers stations in the Cold Ware era, many are still very active and, not surprisingly, some of them are Cuban.

Radio amateurs monitor these broadcasts and they sometimes give nicknames to stations, according to the introduction phrase. The Cuban Spanish Lady "Attencion", described at Simon Mason's Shortwave Espionage pages, is one of them. The Attencion station is still active to date, as you can hear at the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive.

Although no government or legal broadcaster has ever acknowledged the existence of numbers stations or admitted any involvement with these stations, the official court documents again show clearly that these stations are indeed used by intelligence services to send secret messages. And still, every day, numbers messages are transmitted all over the world. Who's listening to them? If you want to learn more about the mysterious numbers stations, what they are and how they operate, visit the Numbers Stations page on my website.

More about the Myers case is found on the US DOJ website. The FBI affidavit (pdf) on the Ana Belen Montes case, a Cuban agent caugth in 2001, is also published. It describs in detail how she received and deciphered numbers messages. And as a bonus, a video of the  Stasi Speech and Morse Generator, used by the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit and the Attencion station. Update: In november Tom Diaz wrote a good two-part post called "Spies Like Them" on the Myers case. Read Part One and Part Two on his Fairly Civil weblog.

True Spies SPYSCAPE - Spycatcher is an interview with spycatcher Robert Booth who identified Kendall Myers as the spy inside the INR. Visit their SPYSCAPE page for more espionage podcasts.

Read my Cuban Agent Communications (pdf) to learn more about three Cuban spy cases, including Myers, and how their communications security was compromised. Based on official FBI documents and court papers on these cases.

Update July 16, 2010: The US Department of Justice announced that Walter Kendall Myers is sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and that Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers is sentenced to 81 months in prison, for their 30 years spying carreer and for passing highly-classified U.S. national defense information to the Cuban Intelligence.

Cuban Spies in US Government (Declassified Spy Stories)

German Spy Couple Indicted

Last Thursday the Attorney General of the German federal court has released a statement with the indictment of the spy couple, arrested in October last year during a spectacular raid.

Allegedly working as SVR agents, Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag are now charged with collecting information on political and military strategy of the EU and NATO. They are also accused of running an agent inside the Dutch Foreign Office who provided them with additional EU documents.

According to the Attorney General, they operated for more than 20 years in the Federal Republic of Germany as agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR. Using fake passports and pretending to be Austrians of South American descent, they had created a legend (a fictitious life) to move to Germany and build up an innocuous civilian life.

The indictment also sheds a light on their agent communications. The couple used dead drops to exchange information with their Dutch agent, whom they also have met. Throughout their spy career they had regular contacts with their Russian handlers, receiving instructions mostly by means of shortwave radio (Agentenfunk). The information they collected was usually transmitted to Russian intelligence by satellite link but they also used an Internet video portal to convey hidden messages. The couple received an annual 100.000 Euros in recent years.

This is another textbook example spy case that shows that the Cold War  is far from over. In fact, the good old spy techniques like dead drops and shortwave numbers stations are still used extensively in today's secret wars, albeit sometimes beefed-up a bit with modern technology. The shortwave spy stations now often operate with digital modes instead of reading the numbers by voice, and even wireless electronic dead drop caches, disguised as a rock, to replace small hidden containers. Nevertheless, the old dead drop is still standard spy trade craft.

This spy case, and cases like the Estonian Herman Simm, spying on NATO and EU, the SVR spy Ring in the United States and the Kendall Myers and Ana Belen Montes (pdf) cases show that espionage never declined after the fall of the Iron Curtain. On the contrary, only two weeks ago, Alain Winants, head of the Belgian state security service, confirmed in an interview that Brussels, with all its EU offices and NATO headquarters, is now a most active world capital of espionage.

Without the restrictions of the Iron Curtain, separating the world into East and West, espionage has gone global and probably on an even larger scale than before. Especially economical and technological (corporate) espionage between Russia, China, the United States and Europe (to name a few) is now driving what I usually call the "Cold Peace" (since some idealists believed it to be useful to retire the term "Cold War").

These targets aren't new. A well known Cold War era example is the Soviet KGB Directorat T, very effective in collecting (read stealing) mostly military science and technology (see also Farewell Dossier). The only difference is that all those top notch spy organisations now point their experienced arrows to unsuspected civilian companies, officials and politicians who don't have a clue about what is stolen right under their noses. Those who are living the neo Cold War dream can always visit websites like Intell News or Global Security to wake up.

For more details on the arrest of the  spy couple and their background, please visit my previous post Russian Spies Arrested in Germany with many additional links. Official statements are in the press release by the Attorney General of the Bundesgerichtsamt. More on the Dutch diplomat who worked for the couple is found on Intellnews.org.

Talking of espionage on shortwave, take a peek on my website with pages on Numbers Stations and Cold War signals intelligence, both still going on today.

Update January 16, 2013: a closed-door trial of Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag is due to start in Germany (via IntelNews)

Update: another new spy scandal has emerged only days after this one. More about this new case in Russian Network Arrested for Illegal Export.