Listening in on the secret state: numbers stations and the aurality of secrecy

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This research project examines so-called numbers stations: shortwave radio broadcasts designed to send coded messages to state spies abroad. Numbers stations can appear on shortwave frequencies without warning, announcing themselves with a musical tone, followed by a ream of seemingly random numbers and words read out by an automated voice, often accompanied by indecipherable noises, before disappearing as suddenly as they came. Despite existing for decades worldwide, there has been next to no research on these broadcasts.The project will examine numbers stations as an example of a covert state practice that crosses over into the public sphere, that leaves traces in its wake, in the form of broadcasts that can be picked up on a radio by anyone. There is a growing literature on the ways in which state secrecy does not simply remove things from the public sphere by covering them up, but can itself become part of the public sphere. Acts of keeping things secret can leave a public mark: from an official's refusal to confirm or deny a story, to the black ink of a redacted sentence. These marks reflect the use of secrecy to project state power, but can also have political effects in excess of state intentions - redactions in a torture investigation can imply unsavoury practices that the state would rather hide.In the past, traces of secrecy have been understood primarily as speech acts or as material visible phenomena: the fences surrounding a military base, or the carefully chosen words of a politician. By contrast, this research will investigate secrecy that operates through sound, both vocal and non-vocal. Numbers station broadcasts are sounds that produce secrecy as something aural in the public sphere. These radio frequencies allow states to carry out secret practices, while the sonic qualities of the broadcasts - from their robotic voices, to radio silence and static - ascribe characteristics to that secrecy, just as the words or redactions of a government can imply different things about their attempts to hide things. These sounds can represent secrecy, moreover, in ways that exceed state intentions. This process is also shaped by how sounds are accessed; state secrecy is shaped not just by numbers station broadcasts, but by the act of 'tapping into' these stations. As traces of state practices, these broadcasts also manifest the state as a covert actor, heard but not seen, and encourage particular understandings of the state that carry political consequences.Numbers stations offer a unique opportunity to explore how state secrecy exists aurally, in ways that go beyond visual understandings of secrecy as that which hides or makes invisible. These broadcasts open up space for considering the conceptual links between sound and secrecy: the ways in which sound is both a novel resource for states to practice secrecy, and a material that broadens our ideas of how secrecy exists in, and impacts on, the public sphere.This project will therefore document how numbers station broadcasts reproduce the state and secrecy in public, and will use this analysis to rethink state secrecy in terms of sound. To complete these objectives, this project will first examine the known history and geography of numbers stations, and what this tells us about states' covert operations; second, carry out field recordings of radio frequencies used by numbers stations, to analyse how these broadcasts and their interception reproduce state secrecy in public space; and third, analyse recordings of these broadcasts on internet archives, to understand how sonic secrecy implicitly shapes the meaning attached to states' covert activities. Out of this, the project will produce academic and magazine writings on how state secrecy shapes public life, and a website that makes the research findings accessible to the public and relates the research to current debates around state secrecy and covert practices.