Happy Monday.

Today's edition has some genuinely wild stories. We've got the eerie shortwave numbers station broadcasting in Farsi since bombs started falling on Iran, and what it might tell us about the shadow war to come. We've got the small Oregon town that got hollowed out by a police chief who coached union officers to stage a political coup at city council, with the Halloween movie festival somehow at the center of it. We've got the CIA's secret Afghan paramilitary army, 10,000 fighters strong, now living in American suburbs afraid to leave their homes. And we've got the suspicious death of Spain's Mango founder on a mountain outside Barcelona, with his son as the only witness.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

Since bombs started falling on Iran on February 28, a mysterious shortwave radio broadcast has been airing numbers in Farsi, read by a man identifying himself only with "Attention! Attention!" The broadcast appears to be a numbers station, a Cold War-era spy communication method in which a recipient uses a one-time pad to decode an otherwise random string of numbers into a message. When used correctly, the system is unbreakable. What makes this particular signal strange is that someone is actively jamming it, using interference techniques that amateur radio trackers have previously linked to Iran, raising the possibility that Iran isn't sending the broadcast at all but is instead trying to block someone else from communicating with agents inside the country. Shane Harris reports that U.S. officials are watching Iran's asymmetric capabilities closely as the war enters what may be only its first phase. Overseas assassination plots, cyberattacks, and proxy strikes through groups like Hezbollah remain on the table. As of last weekend, the mysterious station had gone quiet, then reappeared on a different frequency, leading trackers into a cat-and-mouse chase whose sender, recipient, and message remain completely unknown.

Read here, free for LBR readers.

What started as a dispute over parade logistics at a children's movie festival has consumed an Oregon town of 13,000 in a years-long corruption scandal. St. Helens, which hosts an annual Halloweentown festival each October, became the setting for a power struggle between police chief Brian Greenway, the local officers union, and a series of elected officials. Reporting by The Western Edge, based on more than 2,500 pages of newly released public records, reveals that Greenway secretly coached union officers to issue a public no-confidence vote against the mayor and city administrator, coordinated with a citizen activist group to amplify allegations of municipal fraud, and sent pornographic memes to subordinates while logging into neighboring cities' Zoom meetings under fake names. That activist, Jennifer Massey, whose husband works for the department, subsequently ran for mayor on a police-support platform and won. An independent investigator later found that the city had never defunded the police and that the department's budget had actually doubled under the ousted mayor. Greenway resigned before the investigation concluded. Massey now controls a city still fractured by the episode, with the police consuming half the municipal budget and residents screaming at each other at council meetings and across Facebook.

Read here.

When an Afghan immigrant shot two Army National Guard soldiers in Washington in November 2024, most Americans learned for the first time that the CIA had spent two decades building, commanding, and paying a secret Afghan paramilitary force called the Zero Units, and that roughly 10,000 of its members had been evacuated to the United States after Kabul fell in 2021. Reporting by Matthieu Aikins and Wesley Morgan for the New York Times draws on interviews with 13 former Zero Unit soldiers and more than 30 CIA and Special Operations veterans to tell the program's full history. The units operated under a legal fiction that treated them as independent Afghan forces, but they were recruited, trained, funded, and directed entirely by CIA officers and contractors. Some veterans describe extrajudicial killings on raids that were tacitly condoned or ordered by American advisers. After the chaotic withdrawal, the soldiers were granted only temporary humanitarian parole. Congress never passed permanent immigration relief, and under the current administration, their asylum cases have been frozen. Some now hang their old tiger-stripe uniforms on the wall in case of an immigration raid, hoping a photograph will prove what paperwork cannot.

Read here, free for LBR readers.

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Isak Andic, the Turkish-born founder of Mango who built one of Spain's most recognizable fashion brands from a single market stall selling embroidered blouses in 1970s Barcelona, died in December 2024 after falling from a cliff on Montserrat, outside the city, during a hike with his eldest son Jonathan. Catalan police initially ruled it an accident. A second judge later reopened the case, Jonathan was identified as a person of interest in a possible homicide investigation, and his phone was seized as evidence. Reporting by Rachel Donadio for The Cut traces the family's arc from immigrant hustle to dynastic crisis. Friends and business associates describe Andic as disciplined, discreet, and intensely devoted to the idea of Jonathan succeeding him, but Jonathan's tenure managing the company ended in a costly failure that cost the company roughly €100 million in net profit over two years and required Andic to abandon a planned round-the-world sailing trip to stabilize things. Jonathan has since hired one of Spain's top defense lawyers. His girlfriend announced their engagement in Hola! magazine, they married quietly in September 2024, and their first child was born that fall. The investigation continues without resolution.

Read here.