I suspect that you found this information in the Haynes manual. The one big fault with this otherwise great manual is that they have merged the US manual with the European manual and have overlapped a lot of things that are unique to the European car.
The US Contour does not use radio codes. I suspect that the European Mondeo does. This is common practice and is used by Volvo, Saab, and Volkswagen that I am familiar with and probably more that I am not as familiar with.
