How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music

In 1985, saxophonist Merryl Goldberg found herself on a plane to Moscow with three fellow musicians from the Boston Klezmer Conservatory Band. She had carefully packed sheet music, reeds, and other woodwind supplies, along with a soprano saxophone, to bring into the USSR. But one of her spiral-bound notebooks, lined with staves for hand-notating music, contained hidden information.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Using a code she had developed herself, Goldberg had obscured names, addresses, and other details the group would need for their trip in handwritten compositions that looked, to an untrained eye, like the real melodies she’d written on other pages of the book. Goldberg and her colleagues didn’t want to give Soviet officials details of who they planned to see and what they planned to do on their trip. They were going to meet the Phantom Orchestra.

The group was a dissident ensemble that Goldberg describes as an amalgamation of Jewish refuseniks (Jews who were barred from emigrating out of the USSR), Christian activists, and Helsinki monitors—watchdogs who tracked Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The Americans’ trip was funded and coordinated by the nonprofit Action for Soviet Jewry (now Action for Post-Soviet Jewry), which works on humanitarian relief in the former Soviet Union and was focused on helping Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel and the United States.

The trip was a rare and special opportunity for American and Soviet players to meet in the USSR and make music together. It was also an opportunity for the American musicians to smuggle information about aid efforts and plans to the Phantom Orchestra, and for the ensemble to send updates out, including details about individuals looking to escape the Soviet Union.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Goldberg and her colleagues, all of whom are Jewish, traveled to Moscow separately in two pairs to make it less likely that they would arouse suspicion as a group. They had received training on how to react to questioning and been told to expect surveillance, even run-ins with Soviet officials, throughout their trip. But first Goldberg needed to get her notebook past border control.

“When we arrived, we were immediately pulled aside, and they went through everything in our luggage, to the point of unwrapping Tampax. It was crazy,” says Goldberg, who is presenting about the experience and her musical code at the RSA security conference in San Francisco today. “With my music, they opened it up and there were some real tunes in there. If you’re not a musician, you wouldn’t know what’s what. They went page by page through everything—and then they handed it back.”

Goldberg says that while the code worked and Soviet officials didn’t confiscate their music, they did interrogate all four travelers about what they planned to do while in the USSR. “We were brought into a room with a big burly guy who banged on the table and yelled at us,” remembers Goldberg, now a music education professor at California State University, San Marcos.

Musical note names span the letters A to G, so they don’t provide a full alphabet of options on their own. To create the code, Goldberg assigned letters of the alphabet to notes in the chromatic scale, a 12-tone scale that includes semi-tones (sharps and flats) to expand the possibilities. In some examples, Goldberg wrote only in one musical range, known as treble clef. In others, she expanded the register to be able to encode more letters and added a bass clef to extend the range of the musical scale. These details and variations also added verisimilitude to her encoded music.

For numbers, Goldberg would simply write them between the staves, where sometimes you might see chord symbols. She also added other characteristics of composition, like rhythms (half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, whole notes), key signatures, tempo markings, and articulation indicators like slurs and ties. Most of these were there to make the music look more legitimate, but some doubled as coded supplements to the letters hidden in the music notes. She even occasionally drew tiny diagrams that could be mistaken for charts to remind herself of where a meeting place was located or how to deliver something.

While someone could technically have played the code as music, it would have sounded less like a tune and more like a cat walking across piano keys.

“I picked a note to start, and then I created the alphabet from there. Once you know it, it ends up being pretty easy to write things. I taught my friends on the trip the code, too,” Goldberg says. “We used it in order to take in people’s addresses and other information we would need to find them. And we coded things while we were there so we would be able to take out some information about people and their efforts to emigrate, as well as details we hoped could help other people ask to leave.”

The US musicians got their bearings in Moscow before heading to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. There and on their next stop in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, they successfully met members of the Phantom Orchestra, many of whom spoke some English, and spent time getting to know each other, playing music together, and even staging small, impromptu concerts.

During eight days of travel, the musicians were tailed constantly by Soviet agents and were repeatedly stopped for questioning. Goldberg says that members of the Phantom Orchestra, all of whom faced similar treatment in their daily lives, gave her and her colleagues advice and encouragement. When the Americans would express concerns that their presence was endangering the activists, Goldberg says the Phantom Orchestra members were resolute about the importance of spending time together. She adds, though, that some of the activists were later arrested and even beaten, because of the interactions.

“On the second night, we were playing together and the KGB came in and everything got shut down. The electricity was turned off; it was a scary situation,” Goldberg says. “And yet, when we’re playing music no one can take away that sense of freedom and empowerment. Playing together and communicating with people through music is like nothing else. I was amazed by the strength it brought the people there. Music can be very comforting, but it also conveys a sense of feeling powerful.”

After their time in Yerevan, the American musicians had planned to go to Riga, the capital of Latvia, and then to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg in Russia. Finally, they were set to stop in Paris before returning to the United States. Instead, they were stopped and questioned again. The musicians were supposed to be placed under house arrest in Yerevan, but Goldberg says that Armenian officials bristled at the KGB intrusion and let them continue their trip. Eventually, though, the musicians were picked up and escorted back to Moscow, where Soviet agents confiscated their passports. Goldberg says the group was driven around Moscow for several hours, perhaps as a scare tactic, before finally being allowed to stay together in a dormitory room guarded by young Soviet men with machine guns.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

“At that point, you’re thinking they’re going to take us to Siberia or something,” she says. “We were super freaked out. So we kept playing music for each other that night. And we played a beloved Russian folk tune, but out of tune, to annoy the young soldier outside our door. It gave us a sense of humor and empowerment.”

Finally, officials said the group would be deported to Sweden. They were heavily guarded and brought to a plane that had come from Sweden and was going to return without passengers. While officials searched their possessions again before letting them on the plane, no one ever flagged the sheet music. Goldberg points out that she even got the film from her camera back, perhaps thanks to a sympathizer.

“They were given no reason for their expulsion, and US officials are still waiting for information from the Soviet Foreign Ministry,” Reuters reported in a wire about the situation on May 31, 1985. “The spokesman said the expulsion appeared to be linked to their meeting with … Georgian dissidents.”

Goldberg says that while she later learned that some of the Soviet activists faced consequences for the visit, some of the people the musicians met on the trip were eventually able to permanently leave the USSR. She notes that while her musical code wouldn’t have been very difficult to crack if someone were focused on it, the obfuscation served its purpose, making it both an elegant and harmonious encryption scheme.