[Spooks] E25

[Robert Ryan-Silva]

For three years until August of this year, I lived in Egypt and was 
cruising the dials there. When reports of first E15a and then E25 surfaced, 
I did not pay much attention until I saw speculation from Simon Mason that 
the signals might be of Egyptian origin. So I tuned in, and recorded the 
broadcasts pretty regularly for a while.

The broadcasts came in very clearly from Cairo, to the point where I could 
hear the announcer shuffling papers and hitting the table. Early E25 
broadcasts started with about ten minutes of an Um al-Kalthoum song. Um 
al-Kalthoum is an iconic Egyptian singer, and the intent here seems to have 
been to identify the broadcast as Egyptian. The song was different each 
time, and was played for shorter and shorter periods and ultimately dropped 
entirely. The accent of the announcer is clearly Arabic ("rebeet" for 
"repeat," etc.). It all seems to point to an Egyptian source for the 
broadcasts.

The broadcasts were pretty amateurish and done manually. There are at least 
two distinct voices on the recordings I made, and probably more. The series 
1111 occurs at the beginning of more than one broadcast.

I found the timing of the broadcasts odd. They occurred in the middle of 
the afternoon local time. The obvious target, Israel, is in the same time 
zone as Egypt. Mid-afternoon would seem to be an awkward time to be copying 
numbers stations. (It was for me -- I had to set up an elaborate system of 
timers and voice-activated recorders.)

At the time, I did not want to say anything on the list because the 
Egyptians are hypersensitive about spies, and the security services are 
pretty omnipresent. I did not want to cause any problems for myself or the 
organization I worked for. But I have now left Egypt and all my personal 
effects have arrived here, so now it can be told.

I'll make some recordings available soon. Unfortunately, I digitized each 
recording and tagged the file name with the time and frequency of the 
recording, but because I burned them onto a CD in wav format, I can't get a 
computer to recognize them as anything but Track01, Track02, etc. Anyone 
know a workaround for this?

- Rob