Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (83 page)

• No letter was ever found at American Media, workplace of the first victims, but several employees said they remembered a letter that had come to the company in early September that contained a “soapy, bluish powder.” They said all three victims had handled the letter, and that it was a “weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez.”

That’s a lot of dropped calls: About 125 million cellular phones are discarded each year.

BASEBALL CONTRACTS

Uncle John’s contract grants him use of the BRI’s toilet-shaped car (the Pot Rod). Here are some weird contract stipulations from the world of baseball
.

C
harlie Kerfeld.
In his rookie season with the Houston Astros in 1986, pitcher Kerfeld amassed an impressive 11-2 record and 2.69 earned-run average. That meant when it came time to negotiate his 1987 contract, Kerfeld could make some strange requests. So he asked for a salary of $110,037.37 (because 37 was his jersey number) and 37 boxes of orange Jell-O (because orange was the main color in the Astros uniform).

•
Mark Teixeira.
His 2007 contract with the Atlanta Braves included a $100,000 bonus should he be named that year’s American League Most Valuable Player. What’s so odd about that? The Braves play in the National League. (The contract had been negotiated when Teixeira played for the Texas Rangers, of the American League.)

•
Bobby Bonilla.
Bonilla signed with the New York Mets in 1999. After a subpar season, the team released him, but still owed him $5.9 million. The team had to get him off their books so they could sign another player, so they worked out a deal: If Bonilla would defer payment for a decade, they’d pay him an annuity worth far more than the $5.9 million. Offer accepted. Result: From 2011 until 2035 Bonilla will receive a yearly check for $1.19 million.

•
George Brett.
In renewing the All-Star third baseman’s contact in 1984, the Kansas City Royals gave him a strange perk: partial ownership of a Tennessee apartment complex. Team co-owner Avron Fogelman owned several in Memphis, and offered Brett a 10 percent stake in a 1,100-unit complex, which guaranteed him $1 million a year for however long he owned it.

•
Rollie Fingers.
Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley conceived a bizarre promotional gimmick in 1972: He promised $300 cash to any player who grew a mustache. Fingers took Finley’s offer and grew a curvy handlebar one—perhaps the most famous in baseball history. The next year, Fingers’ contract included a $300 “mustache bonus,” plus another $100 to buy mustache wax.

In a year, the Disneyland train will travel 20,000 miles…just circling the park.

NUMBERS ON THE RADIO

A mechanical voice cuts through the shortwave static, repeating sets of numbers endlessly into the night: “8, 6, 7, 5, 3… 4, 5, 7, 8, 9.” You’ve tuned in to a “numbers station,” one of the great mysteries of the airwaves
.

S
TRANGENESS IN THE NIGHT

If you’ve ever spent time turning the dial of a shortwave radio, you may have found a station on which a voice—usually a woman’s—slowly enunciates long strings of numbers, five at a time. It may go on for only a few minutes, or for many hours. And the voices, sometimes punctuated by tones or music, might recite their numeric codes in English, but they might use German, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, or a Slavic language. It’s almost hypnotic to listen to, but it’s also disquieting, even downright creepy. What’s it all about? You’ve stumbled upon what shortwave listeners call a “numbers station.”

Aficionados have recorded the signals, looked for clues and patterns, and tried to decode what the numbers mean. Their websites keep logs of times, languages, transcripts, and frequencies of transmissions, but all their efforts have yielded only a little bit of solid data…and a lot of conjecture. Their conclusion: The numbers stations are being used to communicate with spies and covert operatives. Even though no country has officially admitted to using numbers stations for espionage, enough tantalizing information has leaked out to support that theory.

OLD-FASHIONED

Numbers stations on the shortwave channels have been broadcasting for decades, at least as far back as World War II. (One expert claims to have evidence that the first one began during World War I.) But if they are being used as spycraft, why? Shortwave may seem like a remnant of the time when secret radio transmission was state-of-the-art for spies. After all, we’ve got encrypted telephones and e-mail, secure Internet sites, and miniature storage media that are easily hidden and can store millions of images and documents. Yet despite all these high-tech options and the fact
that the Cold War has ended, there may be more shortwave numbers stations now than ever before.

In 2005 German scientists succeeded in creating a material harder than diamond.

HANDLE WITH CARE

Intelligence agents in deep cover can’t risk making regular contact with their handlers. And even when mail, phone, and computer messages can’t be decoded, they
can
be detected. In fact, many agents have been caught by what’s called a “traffic analysis” of their outgoing and incoming messages, with spy-hunters looking for patterns, phone numbers, and addresses that suggest something suspicious. That’s what makes shortwave transmissions so useful.

Unlike AM or FM, shortwaves bounce off outer layers of the atmosphere. Result: Any modest transmitter can cover the entire world and obscure the broadcaster’s origin. Not that obscurity matters much: Even if the transmitter’s location is known, the receiver’s location isn’t. Anybody with an inexpensive shortwave radio can pick up the signals without anybody else being the wiser. If they know the code, they can get a secret message anonymously using just an everyday radio, a pad of paper, and a pencil. It’s simple and effective, and it saves the agent from being caught with an incriminating array of sophisticated communication devices.

But what about security? If
everybody
can receive these messages, aren’t the senders worried that somebody out there will figure out the code? The answer, it turns out, is that a few simple codes are, for all practical purposes, unbreakable if you use what’s called a “one-time pad.” (We’ll explain this later.)

QUIRKY FORMATS

How can spies be sure they’re tuning in to the right station? The broadcasters add distinctive trademarks to their transmissions. Hobbyist monitors have given informal names to the stations, based on some peculiar eccentricities. For example:

•
“Yosemite Sam,”
a station that appeared in 2004, is called that because its broadcast begins with the voice of the Looney Tunes character saying, “Varmint, I’m-a gonna blow yah to smithereens!”

•
“Tyrolean Music,”
reportedly from East Germany, started and ended with several minutes of “oom-pa-pa” music—complete with
yodeling—before a voice came on saying
“Achtung! Achtung! Achtung!
” and then numbers in German.

Technically speaking, the “fly” on a pair of pants is the cloth flap covering the zipper.

•
“Lincolnshire Poacher”
station, thought to be run by England’s supersecretive MI6, punctuates its broadcasts with a few bars of an English folk song (it’s called “Lincolnshire Poacher”) played over and over again on a calliope. Another quirk: It’s also the only numbers station with inflection; its voice generator delivers the last number in each five-number string with an upward lilt.

•
“Magnetic Fields”
divides its Arabic-language number messages with snippets of the album
Les Chants Magnétique
by French composer Jean Michel Jarre.

•
“Czech Lady,”
also known as “Bulgarian Betty,” opens with an unidentified synthesizer tune. The nervous-sounding voice delivers numbers in Czech. (Or maybe it’s Bulgarian.)

•
“Atencion”
begins with the Spanish command
“¡Atención!
” In the early 2000s, the station was publicly implicated as a Cuban broadcaster in American cases against Cuban agents.

•
“NATO Phonetic Alphabet”
uses lists of letters from the phonetic alphabet (“Alfa, Bravo, Charlie…”) instead of numbers. Israel is said to be the source of this station.

•
“Wunderland bei Nacht,”
believed to be a German station, starts with two songs by 1960s pop instrumentalist Bert Kaempfert, “Wonderland by Night” and “Dreaming the Blues.”

•
“Swedish Rhapsody”
begins its broadcast with part of Hugo Alfven’s “Swedish Rhapsody” as if played by an ice cream truck, and its numbers are read in a young girl’s voice.

(Don’t worry that there’s a real woman or child locked up in a broadcasting booth, being forced to read numbers all day. Nowadays, numbers stations use the same recorded voices and technology as automated messages from telephone service providers.)

THEY LIVE AMONG US

Cracks occasionally appear in the wall of secrecy: Some governments have admitted that
other
governments use numbers stations for espionage. A British government spokesperson even told the
Daily Telegraph
that numbers stations “are what you’d suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”

In 1941 Winston Churchill had a heart attack while opening a window in the White House.

In 2010, though, numbers stations became a part of a news story when 10 Russian spies were discovered living suburban American lives. Court documents revealed that a raid on an apartment in Seattle found a shortwave radio and spiral notebooks “which contain apparently random columns of numbers,” with the explanation that “the spiral notebook contains codes used to decipher radiograms as they came in.” And that wasn’t the first time numbers stations got a mention in U.S. espionage cases. In four separate cases between the 2001 to 2009, agents were said to have “received instructions through encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba.” Using code pads found in a break-in leading up to the arrests, the U.S. government said it was able to decode a handful of messages, including “Prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis,” and “Congratulations to all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman.”

GOING MAINSTREAM

For many years, numbers station broadcasters who wanted theme songs simply used music without crediting or paying the artists and composers. Since then, musicians have turned the tables by incorporating recordings of numbers stations into their work and thus dragging them into the sunlight.

The musicians’ awareness of the stations is mostly due to a four-CD set called
The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations,
released in 1997 by the Indial label. The spooky weirdness of the recordings began attracting the attention of recording artists such as the indie group Wilco, whose album
Yankee Foxtrot Hotel
got its name from a phrase heard repeatedly on Disc 1, Track 4. Wilco used that cut in the song “Poor Places.” At least a dozen other bands have also used
Conet Project
recordings, including the Submarines, We Were Promised Jet Packs, Boards of Canada, and Stereolab. Expect to hear more: Indial has made the out-of-print CD available as a free online download.

AN EASY, UNBREAKABLE CODE

Given enough time and computer crunching, most codes can be broken. For example, if you simply replace letters with numbers, it’s not hard to figure out the patterns, as anybody who has done cryptogram puzzles knows. But what if the code changes randomly
with every letter? That’s the idea behind a one-time pad system.

PEZ flavor flops: yogurt, eucalyptus, and chlorophyll.

For example, start with a very simple pattern of 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, and so on. When your handler wanted to send you a HELLO, he’d first convert the letters to the simple 1=A system, getting 8-5-12-12-15. Easy, right? But what if, before you left the homeland for your spy assignment, you were given a cleverly concealed pad of paper with computer-generated numbers on every page, and your handler kept an identical pad at his transmitter?

Now, make it obscure

To make the message impenetrable to eavesdroppers, he’d take out his pad and read the first five random numbers there—say they’re 7, 15, 1, 8, 3. He’d add the first number of his message to the code pad’s first number and get 15. He’d add the message’s second number to the second number on the pad, and so on, eventually ending up with 15-20-13-20-18.

When he broadcasts the message on his numbers station, you write down 15-20-13-20-18. To anybody else, the five numbers could mean anything. You, though, have the only pad that’s identical to the sender’s. You can subtract exactly the same random numbers he added and figure out the message. Since nobody else has a pad, every single number could literally be any letter—even the repeated number 20 offers no clue, because it happens to mean E the first time and L the second time.

Just to be safe…

After you translate the message, you destroy that page of numbers. The next time he sends a message, he’ll use the next page on the pad with a new set of random numbers. That way, no one can figure out your ever-changing code—unless they get ahold of one of your pads. That’s the only weakness of the system, so spy agencies have gone to great trouble to keep the pads secure. The U.S.S.R., it’s said, issued a powerful magnifying glass to spies because its code pads were made small enough to hide inside a walnut shell. Spy lore holds that the Russians also printed the pads on flash paper—self-igniting paper that stage magicians use to produce flames from their fingertips—so the pads could be destroyed in (literally) the snap of a finger. What about the United States? Rumor has it that the CIA accomplished the same result by printing its code pads on flattened pieces of chewing gum.