Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB — The Untold Russian History of a Daring Cold War Mission

How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB – The Untold History of a Daring Cold War Spy Mission

In 1985, while the United States engaged in a battle of nuclear brinkmanship, four Americans landed in Moscow on a mission to smuggle secret information in and out using music as their cipher. Under the watchful eye of the KGB, the group faced countless challenges and risks—because they weren’t trained in espionage. In fact, they were musicians with the New England-based Yiddish-music focused Klezmer Conservatory Band (KCB).

Now, the quartet’s saxophonist, Merryl Goldberg, together with Vince Houghton, the Director of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum, tell the harrowing story of how Goldberg devised an ingenious plan to encode the intelligence within the group’s sheet music. 

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Includes 16 pages of archival photos
 

Dr. Merryl Goldberg was the saxophonist and cipher-creator for the KCB quartet that entered the Soviet Union in 1985. She is currently a Professor in the School of Arts at California State University San Marcos and Executive Director of Center ARTES (a university center dedicated to restoring arts to education). She toured internationally for 13 years with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and has recorded over a dozen CDs with major labels. Dr. Goldberg received her undergraduate degree from New England Conservatory of Music and her Doctorate in Teaching, Curriculum and Learning Environments, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2018 she was awarded the Wang Family Excellence Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching in the California State University (23 campus) systemwide.  Merryl serves on the Board of CREATE CA and is Trustee for the California State Summer School for the Arts. She regularly speaks at national, statewide, and local conferences on the need and benefits of arts in education.

Dr. Vince Houghton is Director of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum. He is the former Historian and Curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. Vince has a PhD in Diplomatic and Military History from the University of Maryland, where his research centered on US scientific and technological intelligence (nuclear intelligence) in the Second World War and early Cold War. His Master’s degree, also from the University of Maryland, focused on the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union. He has taught extensively at the middle school, high school, and university levels, most recently at the University of Maryland, where he lectured on the History of US Intelligence, US Diplomatic History, the Cold War, and the History of Science. He is also a veteran of the United States Army, and served in the Balkans, where he worked closely with both civilian and military intelligence agencies in several capacities.   Dr. Houghton is the author of three books: Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Plots and Military Schemes Left on the Drawing Board (Penguin, 2019); The Nuclear Spies: America’s Atomic Intelligence Program Against Hitler and Stalin (Cornell University Press, 2019); and Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami (Public Affairs, 2024).