To me the most remarkable thing about this story is that the KGB was apparently stymied for an extended period by the fact that Filatov had a "difficult" lock of "foreign origin" on his apartment door, to the extent that they had to steal and copy a key carried by his wife using an elaborate setup. It seems odd that an agency known for its skilled spycraft apparently was unable to pick a door lock.
How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#52I expected to see something along the lines of vans with directional antennas driving around Moscow listening for spurious emissions from local oscillators of superheterodyne receivers 465 kHz away from the number station frequency, as in Operation RAFTER.
As invented by Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#53Morals of the story: 1. Do not try to sneak stuff past the Russians in invisible ink. 2. If you are a spy and your friendly neighbours suddenly have to move, consider taking an unscheduled vacation in GTFO.
The way I see it: don't spy. You will get caught and the third party won't even reward you if you make it alive.
After release he demanded compensation from the US embassy, but was denied as a non citizen.Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any radio that uses a mixer is also a transmitter.
Only if it's poorly designed (leaks local oscillator frequency back into antenna) and not shielded. Modern receivers use quadrature sampling detectors rather than traditional superheterodyne. In that setup any leakage would be on the same frequency and harder to detect.
It is as good as impossible to run an oscillator based receiver that is also connected to an antenna that does not radiate. That's nothing to do with poor design, it's just physics. Zero coupling does not exist in practice. By design the mixer stage sits pretty close to the initial amplifier and it will result in some of the oscillator energy making it back to the antenna circuitry. FWIW I built a ton of transmitters and radio gear in my teens, it is pretty easy to take a theoretical stance here and declare that anything that leaks is not designed properly but that's about as 'true Scotsman' as you could get.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it is lost in translation, but video isn't film. So video surveillance probably means they placed a video camera (probably based on a video tube) and ran cables.
Lol. Kids. Video is certainly not film, but once upon a time was regularly recorded onto magnetic tape running over reels (google "VCR" or "VHS"). Still photography also used moving parts. Things like shutters would make audible clicks when exposing the photographic film, which then had to be moved out of position mechanically. That "click" noise on your iPhone camera is actually designed to mimic this ancient camera…
The tape deck would’ve been a separate unit and could be kept anywhere you could run a cable to.
It’s clear that the poster you’re condescending to understands this.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#56To me the most remarkable thing about this story is that the KGB was apparently stymied for an extended period by the fact that Filatov had a "difficult" lock of "foreign origin" on his apartment door, to the extent that they had to steal and copy a key carried by his wife using an elaborate setup. It seems odd that an agency known for its skilled spycraft apparently was unable to pick a door lock.
I'd guess the problem is if you spend a long time trying to pick a lock in an apartment building, it looks pretty suspicious.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#57Morals of the story: 1. Do not try to sneak stuff past the Russians in invisible ink. 2. If you are a spy and your friendly neighbours suddenly have to move, consider taking an unscheduled vacation in GTFO.
The way I see it: don't spy. You will get caught and the third party won't even reward you if you make it alive. After release he demanded compensation from the US embassy, but was denied as a non citizen.
Agreed it seems the only reason to do it would be as a service to you nation or political ideals.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if it's poorly designed (leaks local oscillator frequency back into antenna) and not shielded. Modern receivers use quadrature sampling detectors rather than traditional superheterodyne. In that setup any leakage would be on the same frequency and harder to detect.
It is as good as impossible to run an oscillator based receiver that is also connected to an antenna that does not radiate. That's nothing to do with poor design, it's just physics. Zero coupling does not exist in practice. By design the mixer stage sits pretty close to the initial amplifier and it will result in some of the oscillator energy making it back to the antenna circuitry. FWIW I built a ton of transmitters…
Note also with a highly directional high gain receiver that tiny bit of radiating energy is very detectable. It's just going to feed into background noise for most receivers so no one cares. But it will be detectable by a motivated hunter with the right equipment.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#59I expected to see something along the lines of vans with directional antennas driving around Moscow listening for spurious emissions from local oscillators of superheterodyne receivers 465 kHz away from the number station frequency, as in Operation RAFTER.
As invented by Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame
If your have not read it yet, I highly recommend this book!
Peter started as a radio engineer so there first part of the book is slightly technical. Last chapters are more psychological, also very interesting.
Re: How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have expected steganography in YouTube videos to be the numbers stations of today?
You seem unaware of the difference between unicast IP and broadcast radio. Watching youtube is just as anonymous as a phone call, not very hard to map to a person. Youtube has a log of every IP accessing their servers and what they do, augmented by cookies and google accounts. A radio station does not know who is listening.
You don’t seem to understand my point. With good steganography you don’t know a message is being transmitted in the first place. It doesn’t matter which IP addresses accesses a video because you don’t know which video contains a message. Given the number of videos uploaded to YouTube, checking them all for embedded messages from a sophisticated state actor would seem to be quite a significant challenge. Even more difficult if you’re in Latvia, the agent is Russian, and the video is hosted in the USA...
This approach offers a way of transmitting much more data, on demand, with very little risk of detection of either the existence of the communication channel itself, or of the recipient.
The recipient could casually watch on wifi in a food court, using a modified app, while eating lunch. They would obviously need to exercise good secops, presumably as part of their trade... it seems quite a reasonable approach to me, but I’m no expert, it was just a thought.