Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Huff-duffers go postal

I'm no philatelist and I wouldn't think of dispensing philatelic advice. But I'm guessing that CFS Bermuda is the only HF-DF station featured on a postage stamp, given that information about such places used to be more typically mailed on microdots.

CFS Bermuda stampIssued by the Bermudian government in 1996 as part of a set commemorating former Second World War and post-war bases in Bermuda, the CFS Bermuda stamp shows the Canadian Forces symbol, some generic looking antenna masts, and Canadian personnel at work in the operations room. The actual HF-DF array is not depicted.

(Belated kudos to DND's Defence Matters, vol. 2, no. 3, April 1997 for mentioning the release of the stamp.)

NRS/CFS Bermuda operated from 1963 until 1993, providing cut-off bearings on Soviet missile submarine transmissions and other maritime targets.

Interestingly, the Bermuda HF-DF station was not the only Cold War-era naval SIGINT system immortalized by its own postage stamp. The U.S. Navy's WHITE CLOUD ocean surveillance satellite system, first launched in 1976, was actually shown in some detail on a U.S. stamp issued that year ("Navy Ocean Surveillance Satellite Depicted," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 24 May 1976, p. 22). I don't have the AWST article to hand, but if I remember the story correctly the stamp was rather quickly withdrawn from sale.

Are there any other SIGINT stamps out there?

1 Comments:

Blogger Milan said...

It seems there were some Bletchley Park stamps.

November 02, 2009 3:32 pm  

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