"Attention" is the first word, and it comes in Persian—three times—before a male voice launches into hours of measured, seemingly random numbers. The transmission, on shortwave radio, has aired twice daily since the US-Israel strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28, reports Wired, citing the group Priyom, which tracks military and spy signals. Radio sleuths have been fascinated by what appears to be a Cold War-style of coded communication, per Radio Free Europe. But what has everyone perplexed: Who is sending the messages—and to whom? Only recipients with a codebook would be able to translate the messages.
The broadcasts appear to be originating from a US military base near Stuttgart, Germany, according to Priyom, making it possible that the 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion is involved. But at this point, nobody is sure of anything. It could be US or Israeli intelligence sending messages to operatives, or maybe Iranian operatives sending messages to their own networks. Either way, things got even more intriguing five days after the broadcasts began when somebody began trying to jam the signal (and succeeded, but only temporarily).
"It's an adversarial situation, two groups acting against one another," radio expert Akin Fernandez tells BFE. "The question [is] who has the technical means to jam a station," but it turns out that both the US and Iran have that means. Whoever is behind it all, former CIA officer John Sipher tells Wired that such broadcasts are a communications option "of last resort" in an age of satellites and secure apps—slow and cumbersome, but hard to trace, since anyone with a basic radio can listen and there's no easy way to identify the intended recipient.
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