Notes of Deception

How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB

De: Merryl Goldberg, Merryl & Vince Goldberg & Houghton

In 1985, four American musicians—members of a New England-based klezmer band that focused on Yiddish music—landed in Moscow. With little training in espionage, they risked their freedom and their lives to smuggle information to and from the West under the watchful eye of the KGB and to help fellow Jews, activists, and dissidents escape an oppressive regime.

Merryl Goldberg was one of those musicians. Together with co-author Vince Houghton, the Director of the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum, she tells the story of how she devised an ingenious plan to encode intelligence within the group’s sheet music.