Firstly, the holy grail of Number Station monitoring- contacting a person who actually used the broadcasts to decode messages. One such person contacted me after reading about his story on my website. I've decided to protect his anonymity by using false names, but the story is quite fascinating. I am currently trying to tease more of the story out, but unfortunately it may never see the light of day.

" Periodically I check various search engines to see if anyone has added new stuff to the Net that deals with my "illustrious" background. I enjoyed reading your excerpt about Klaus Schmidt. The girlfriend mentioned in it was my mom - and contrary to a lot of things Klaus published, my mom and I had a much bigger part in the entire defection. For example quite frequently I would check the short-wave transmissions. Its funny how you have all sorts of details listed that I had forgotten - it's been 20 years and I was just a 17-year-old "shrimp" back then. As I recall, the East German and West German espionage stations were almost next to one another on the short-wave (or so it seemed). The only way I could tell them apart was by the pronunciation of the number 5." I then replied and told him that I knew about the differences in the pronunciation of the two versions of the number 5. One is "Funnef" and the other "Funf" Here is his reply:

" You know about the "Fuennef"! ! ! ! That's so great!
It's the one way I could tell the stations apart. You know, as I said, I wasn't into the radio aspects of it too much so the frequency means more to you than to me. However - this is kinda cute.... as you had mentioned in the description on your home page, the transmissions were often pretty bad depending on a lot of factors. I do remember one winter night very clearly though. The reason is that my mom had to work until 11:00 PM and I was in "charge" of getting the messages. So I tuned in, all nervous not wanting to miss the number of columns we were supposed to get. Turns out that maybe because it was a crystal clear winter night with snow on the ground and no clouds at all I had the best reception in the world - almost 100% static free. So when I was finished I called my mom at work and told her "you know my friend XYZ, he wants to sell me a West-German record for 250 marks. Its really crystal clear and excellent quality " That was supposed to tell her we had gotten 250 groups of numbers and everything came out great. So there is a little anecdote for you :-)
 

Did you know there is a website out there that has pictures of Stasi uniforms and insignia. I couldn't believe it. Must be an American. Living over here I can see how people get fascinated with this stuff."
  I then offered to send him a tape with recordings of German stations to see if he could recognise the actual one, but he probably only has hazy memories of the era and probably couldn't identify anything.
" The offer of the tape is very kind - but like I said, I have a feeling you get a bigger kick out of the whole numbers thing than we did. I did listen to the sound clips on your site and did not see the West German lady. Of course you have to remember this all happened in 1979. Who knows what has changed since then. I'm actually contemplating writing the story of our escape and posting it on the web - just for fun. The problem is that my own site is used for business and it would look sort of peculiar to potential customers to see this crazy stuff. So for now I'm just happy chatting with folks like yourself. 

Sorry that I'm not the best source about the radio stations - but I really was "tickled pink" when I saw that you knew about the way the number five was pronounced by the east-Germans. It really was my only way to tell that I was listening to the wrong station. Oh before I forget. Did I mention that my mother bought the short-wave receiver in an Intershop in East Berlin? An Intershop was a store were one could buy Western goods for Western currency. The problem is that she had to register that radio in some way - I think they took down her ID information. Now you can imagine that this is not the thing a person wants to do when that person plans to use the radio for espionage. Mom was pretty upset about the German officialdom. 

Luckily they didn't catch on in time. Back in 1991 a German TV station ran a documentary about this entire story and I found out that 20 minutes after we left our apartment to get on the train to defect the Stasi showed up to arrest us. If your interested, my hometown has a website its www.oberhof.de and if you click on the coat of arms it shows you some pictures - including the very train station we went to catch the "final train". It's a pretty little town in the mountains."
   Hopefully more of the story will come out, especially from the mother. It has Read it here: