In italian language. The so-called Numbers stations are shortwave radio transmissions, broadcast in many different times of day, and with varying lengths, available on many frequencies and observed and studied for decades by amateur radio operators around the world. These transmissions consists in mysterious voices reading groups consisting of numbers or letters in the international phonetic alphabet, or Morse code signals or pulses of sound, and are often preceded by "callsigns" consisting of music tracks and sequences of letters or scale of notes, cyclically repeated at set times. Several studies, conducted independently by telecommunications experts, concluded that these transmissions were - and still are - used by many secret services to transmit short text messages to their undercover agents operating in other countries. The origins of this transmission method dates back to the First World War, when it was used by Imperial Austria, while during the Second World War the BBC sent coded radio messages - by reading conventional phrases - to its agents of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the European Resistance movements. Subsequently, in the years of the Cold War, this transmission technique was used routinely with dozens of Shortwave Numbers Stations employed by the U.S. CIA, the Russian KGB, the West German BND, the Czech StB, the East German Stasi, the Israeli MOSSAD ... the Numbers Stations were one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War if all these governments, with only a few exceptions, have for years denied any connection with them. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these programs suffered a significant decline. But in recent years, other Stations followed suit the new global geopolitical players, and SWL and researchers can return to fill their notebooks with sequences of numbers and letters, now also in Chinese, Indian, Korean ... and, in all likelihood, covert operations and destabilization manoeuvres will be dictated for a long time by monochord female voices reciting litanies of numbers in the ether, between static electromagnetic discharges and distorted chimes. Essays by Simon Mason, Massimiliano Viel, Raffaello Bisso, Andrea and Andrea Lombardi Viacava (editors).
With an audio CD with 25 rare recordings of Numbers Stations.