Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, last Archive listeners, we have something special for
Speaker 1: you today. As you know, we love uncovering forgotten stories
Speaker 1: from history, and we wanted to share another podcast that
Speaker 1: has that same passion. The show is called click Here
Speaker 1: and it tells stories about the world of cyber and intelligence.
Speaker 1: Former NPR Investigations correspondent Dina Temple Raston is the host.
Speaker 1: The episode You're about to hear is about a group
Speaker 1: of American musicians who smuggled messages in and out of
Speaker 1: the former Soviet Union in an ingenious way by burying
Speaker 1: code in their music. Here comes the episode. You can
Speaker 1: find click here wherever you get your podcasts. It's nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five and Soviet Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev is the head
Speaker 1: of the Communist part and his great opening to the
Speaker 1: West Glasnows and Parastroika is still just a glimmer in
Speaker 1: his i. Nineteen eighty five was still the time of
Speaker 1: that old Soviet Union, the one with defections and the KGB,
Speaker 1: And into this world stepped the most unlikely of people,
Speaker 1: four members of a klezmer ensemble from Boston. Klezmer is
Speaker 1: a kind of Jewish folk music. It's secular music and
Speaker 1: if you've heard Fiddler on the Roof, it's kind of
Speaker 1: in that style, but more authentic. Merril Goldberg is a
Speaker 1: professor of music at cal State sam Marcos and that's
Speaker 1: her on the saxophone. But back in the day she
Speaker 1: was part of a pretty famous Klesmer ensemble called the
Speaker 1: Klezmer Conservatory Band. And they had heard about a group
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union that went by a very intriguing name,
Speaker 1: the Phantom Orchestra. So we first heard of the Phantom
Speaker 1: Orchestra through the network of people who were working in
Speaker 1: the eighties trying to help people escape from the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: They were musicians like them. We started thinking we ought
Speaker 1: to find out about these people. These musicians were known
Speaker 1: as refuse Nicks because they wanted to leave the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union but the authorities refused to give them permission. They
Speaker 1: were called the Phantom Orchestra because they really had to
Speaker 1: play somewhat in secret, right, So if they had gone
Speaker 1: out and decided, oh, we're going to play in the park,
Speaker 1: they would have been picked up and arrested. Most of
Speaker 1: them had already been either imprisoned or beat up, or
Speaker 1: had a lot of issues already. They'd gotten fired from
Speaker 1: their jobs, drummed out of academic and professional associations, and
Speaker 1: would even get beaten up just for declaring openly that
Speaker 1: they wanted to immigrate. So when the opportunity of actually
Speaker 1: going to the Soviet Union presented itself, it all struck
Speaker 1: a chord with Merril and her friends in the Klezmer group.
Speaker 1: My friend hankas Nevsky, who is a wonderful musician and
Speaker 1: teaches at New England Conservatory of Music where I was
Speaker 1: a student, and he approached her with this crazy idea.
Speaker 1: The actual ask was to go over to the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union in secret essentially and meet with refused Nicks, mostly
Speaker 1: focus in on the Phantom Orchestra members, and to find
Speaker 1: out information about what they were doing, who they were,
Speaker 1: how they wanted their stories to get out. They were
Speaker 1: four simple musicians from Boston, a saxophonist, singer, a guitarist
Speaker 1: and accordion player, and they were going to go toe
Speaker 1: to toe with one of the world's largest secret police forces.
Speaker 1: So when he asked me, oh, my first reaction I
Speaker 1: think was that sounds crazy cool. I'm in. I'm Dina
Speaker 1: Temple arrested and this is click here a podcast about
Speaker 1: all things cyber and intelligence. Today, at a time when
Speaker 1: Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron curtain,
Speaker 1: We're going to take you back behind it with a
Speaker 1: story about a very different kind of code than the
Speaker 1: Zeros and ones we usually talk about. This code was
Speaker 1: made of music, and it was used to smuggle distant
Speaker 1: messages in and out of the Soviet Union. I remember thinking,
Speaker 1: we're musicians, just creating a code in music would be
Speaker 1: the easiest way to go about this. Merrill will play
Speaker 1: us out. It's no small thing deciding to travel to
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties to secretly help
Speaker 1: people escape, even if you were a trained spy, much
Speaker 1: less a musician from Boston and you think they're professions,
Speaker 1: might actually be a liability. But in a weird way,
Speaker 1: it became a strength. It was the perfect cover story
Speaker 1: and innocent looking cultural exchange. We're just some American musicians
Speaker 1: trying to bridge the cultural divide in the eighties. At
Speaker 1: that time, the more publicity of rashiznik or dissident had,
Speaker 1: the more protection they would have from being imprisoned or
Speaker 1: beaten up or whatever would happen to them. But if
Speaker 1: the West knew about them, they had a better shot
Speaker 1: at getting out. So coding music to sneak out messages
Speaker 1: and details about people who are trying to escape wasn't
Speaker 1: a completely new idea. Marily and her friends had a
Speaker 1: model Josephine Baker table version that's Baker's singing. She was
Speaker 1: a Paris celebrity, a singer, a dancer at Bon Vivant
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties, thirties and forties. She was famous
Speaker 1: for walking her pete down the chains in Lize, and
Speaker 1: she also happened to be working for the French Resistance.
Speaker 1: She'd sing at parties, chat up important people, and then
Speaker 1: pass along what she'd learned to the Allies. Her dispatches
Speaker 1: were the stuff of legend. She'd learned details about German
Speaker 1: troop movements or supply lines, and then smuggled the information
Speaker 1: out to the Allies by writing messages in invisible ink.
Speaker 1: She wrote on Sheep music between the notes. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, when Merrill was trying to work out how
Speaker 1: to bring coded messages into the Soviet Union, she went
Speaker 1: a step further. Her code was embedded in the music itself.
Speaker 1: I studied music in school so I assumed she must
Speaker 1: have created something from the staff. Those five lines and
Speaker 1: poor spaces that are the basis of musical notation are
Speaker 1: represented by letters. The five lines are E, B, D,
Speaker 1: and F, and the four spaces represent the notes fac
Speaker 1: except that wouldn't get you the whole alphabet. You know,
Speaker 1: with the regular notes you only have eight through G,
Speaker 1: So then you have the problem of twenty six letters
Speaker 1: with you know, only eight notes. Although what I did,
Speaker 1: without giving it away, was I created a situation using chromatics.
Speaker 1: Chromatics the twelve half steps when you play the black
Speaker 1: and white keys on a piano, and using different notes,
Speaker 1: figured out all twenty six. I had three leftover ones
Speaker 1: like x y Z, but you don't use x y
Speaker 1: z all that much. So if someone knew music, they'd
Speaker 1: look at it and they'd think, uh, that's modern music.
Speaker 1: Is there anything that you have that you coded that
Speaker 1: you might be able to play for us so that
Speaker 1: we have some idea of what that would sound like. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: So Merril picks up her saxophone. Here, all play a
Speaker 1: little bit for you. Believe it or not. There's actually
Speaker 1: the name of a dissonant coded in those notes. This
Speaker 1: one was intro to a new person that they wanted
Speaker 1: us to meet and was a musician, and it was
Speaker 1: for someone in Moscow. Marilyn Hankis and the other members
Speaker 1: of the Klesmer Band spent months preparing for the trip.
Speaker 1: It was more than just inventing a new way to
Speaker 1: code messages, though they did that too. The people at
Speaker 1: the Action for Soviet Jewelry gave them a crash course
Speaker 1: in tradecraft. We had to have several months of kind
Speaker 1: of a learning curve and figuring out how we would
Speaker 1: go in without giving up who we were. And it
Speaker 1: didn't take long to put all that to use. In fact,
Speaker 1: the group needed it as soon as they landed. So
Speaker 1: we land in Moscow and we get off the plane.
Speaker 1: People are talking in little little microphones and we think,
Speaker 1: oh oh oh, because the authorities seem to have been
Speaker 1: expecting them. There were at least two of them, and
Speaker 1: they took us aside. That's hankas Netsky, the teacher who
Speaker 1: brought up this whole idea to Meryl, and they told
Speaker 1: us to get our luggage, but not go anywhere, to
Speaker 1: bring the luggage into the I guess interrogation room. Definitely
Speaker 1: we were flagged. There's no question about it and sit
Speaker 1: with an agent. They start going through everything, and I
Speaker 1: mean absolutely everything, opening up every single thing we have,
Speaker 1: including Meryll's music. They're going page by page by page.
Speaker 1: She held her breath, kept their gaze, and then after
Speaker 1: what seemed like an eternity, they just hand it right
Speaker 1: back to me. Oh, it was just really fantastic. It
Speaker 1: was seven hours before they were permitted to leave the airport.
Speaker 1: There was one guy who spoke only in Russian and
Speaker 1: banged his fist on the table the entire time. When
Speaker 1: they were finally allowed to go, they had this sense
Speaker 1: that while the first hurdle was behind them, what lay
Speaker 1: ahead would be much harder. The Phantom Orchestra was based
Speaker 1: in Tablusi, Georgia, which was still a Soviet republic at
Speaker 1: the time the mission Merril and Hankas and their friends
Speaker 1: had chosen to accept involved trying to meet up with
Speaker 1: four of its members. Two were from a well known
Speaker 1: family of Jewish dissidents, Grigory and Easie Goldstein, and the
Speaker 1: other two were calling for Georgian independence, Teenis and Eduard Gudava,
Speaker 1: both of whom had been sentenced two years of hard
Speaker 1: labor for their activism. All four were considered enemies of
Speaker 1: the state, which meant they were definitely being watched and
Speaker 1: their phones were tapped, so it would be tricky for
Speaker 1: Merril and her crew to make contact with them. I
Speaker 1: had the directions to their apartment actually encoded in my music,
Speaker 1: and that's how we were remembered how to get there.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we stuck out and we didn't know who
Speaker 1: to trust, who not to trust. What they did know
Speaker 1: was that someone was following them. We noticed, for example,
Speaker 1: that we would walk up the street and the last
Speaker 1: car on the block would flash its lights, and then
Speaker 1: we'd cross the street, and then the first car on
Speaker 1: the next block would flash its lights, and then the
Speaker 1: same thing would happen on the next block. So it
Speaker 1: sure seemed like there was something going on. So I
Speaker 1: remember we went to our hotel room and interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: the sink was leaking, and they said as much out
Speaker 1: loud that it was too bad the sink was leaking,
Speaker 1: and then when we got back from dinner, the sink
Speaker 1: was fixed. So that's how closely we were being monitored.
Speaker 1: Marilyn Hankis and the two other Klesmer band members, Jeff
Speaker 1: and Rosalie, found themselves in the middle of a Cold
Speaker 1: war thriller. They'd go to ballet and museums one day,
Speaker 1: hoping to throw the authorities off the scent, and then
Speaker 1: rush off to go and meet Dissonance the next, hoping
Speaker 1: their basic tradecraft wouldn't put their contacts in danger. We devised,
Speaker 1: in our young brains, which now seems kind of cuckoo,
Speaker 1: that all of us would get on the subway because
Speaker 1: we had to take a subway to get to the
Speaker 1: gold Steam's apartment first to make contact. The apartment was
Speaker 1: into Belize, Georgia, and the directions to get there were
Speaker 1: buried in their musical notation code. They didn't have a telephone.
Speaker 1: We couldn't call them. We had to just try to
Speaker 1: find them, so to lose whoever was following them. They
Speaker 1: came up with what they thought was an ingenious plan,
Speaker 1: and so we're all going to get on the subway,
Speaker 1: and then we're all going to get off, and Rosie
Speaker 1: and I are going to jump back on. Then the
Speaker 1: tail would have to choose between the two groups, and
Speaker 1: we thought it worked. They spent hours walking around buildings
Speaker 1: and doubling back and climbing dark and stairwells, until finally
Speaker 1: they find themselves at the door of an apartment and
Speaker 1: they knock and east Side Goldstein in the door. And
Speaker 1: the gods were the first family that we visited. First
Speaker 1: thing we say is we think we've outwitted them, but
Speaker 1: you know we've been interrogated. Tell us if you want
Speaker 1: us just to turn around and go away. Gregory Goldstein
Speaker 1: walks over to the window. There were four cars. He
Speaker 1: pointed too. He said, these are all KGB and they
Speaker 1: laughed at us, like, of course you're being followed, and
Speaker 1: please come in, because it's way more important for you
Speaker 1: to come in. We need you to visit. We need
Speaker 1: you to tell our story when we come back. A
Speaker 1: secret concert with a phantom orchestra, probably the most profound
Speaker 1: music making I have ever in my entire life made.
Speaker 1: The phantom orchestra, of course, couldn't play openly in a
Speaker 1: concert hall. I thought they'd be playing in some secret
Speaker 1: venue after hours. But they actually had their concerts in
Speaker 1: an apartment, the Gudava's apartment, typical small apartment. They had
Speaker 1: an upright piano and a couple of music stands, and
Speaker 1: the Goudavas had at least one guitar, maybe two. The
Speaker 1: musicians gathered along with an audience of neighbors. The chairs
Speaker 1: went into the other room, I remember, and the idea was, hey,
Speaker 1: look we have visitors. They're musicians. It's time for the
Speaker 1: Phantom Orchestra to come meet and play a concert in
Speaker 1: the room. There was a palpable mix of excitement, damned
Speaker 1: a little fear. It wasn't about playing music with the
Speaker 1: Phantom Orchestra that frightened them. They were all prose at that.
Speaker 1: It was about what might follow the consequences of an
Speaker 1: impromptu concert with a room full of dissidents. And I
Speaker 1: think making music in and of itself is not such
Speaker 1: a big deal. Of course, it was the people who
Speaker 1: they were making music with that made it into a
Speaker 1: really big deal. Were you waiting for the KGB to
Speaker 1: burst in any moment? What was going through your twenty
Speaker 1: six year old head. My twenty six year old head
Speaker 1: was like living in the moment. I will tell you
Speaker 1: that Merrill and Hankis remembered the whole evening as if
Speaker 1: it were yesterday. I do remember just being transported that
Speaker 1: it was this feeling perhaps of amazement, of relief, of
Speaker 1: immediate camaraderie. There was klezmer music and traditional songs, and
Speaker 1: then this moment when everything seemed to come together with
Speaker 1: the standard that everyone loved, and then everyone who was there,
Speaker 1: the members of the orchestra, the visiting musician, the audience,
Speaker 1: they all broke into song. What you're hearing now is
Speaker 1: actually a Phantom Orchestra recording. It touched us in a
Speaker 1: way that I hadn't been touched before. And I think
Speaker 1: because the whole feeling of the song somewhere over the
Speaker 1: rainbow and the hope in that and for an evening,
Speaker 1: the Soviet minders, the cloak and dagger, the coded messages,
Speaker 1: they all faded away and the music became all there
Speaker 1: was for the people there who had so much courage
Speaker 1: and you know, we're constantly battling, you know, whatever was
Speaker 1: going to happen to them for their activism, saying music
Speaker 1: was the time when in their brains they could be
Speaker 1: totally one percent free. There was a lot of emotion
Speaker 1: when we played with the Phantom Orchestra, not just from
Speaker 1: them but from the audience, and we were really floating
Speaker 1: when we left that room that night. As they went
Speaker 1: back out into the night, they tried to recall all
Speaker 1: the details that they would later code into their music.
Speaker 1: What they would eventually tell the world was going on
Speaker 1: behind the Iron curtain. A marriage announcement here, a family
Speaker 1: history there. And the hope was once the world knew
Speaker 1: they existed, they'd have the leverage they needed to force
Speaker 1: officials in the Soviet Union to let them go. And
Speaker 1: I think that's part of what the goal of many
Speaker 1: of the folks was is. You know, if your story
Speaker 1: is never told, it's like it hasn't happened. So it
Speaker 1: was really important to get stories out there. It means
Speaker 1: you exist and other people know you exist. As they
Speaker 1: left the Goudava's house that night, Merrily and her friends
Speaker 1: were more than just musicians. They were messengers and now
Speaker 1: they just had to get home. Not long after the
Speaker 1: Secret concert, the Boston musicians awoke to an early morning
Speaker 1: call at the hotel. We were told to be down
Speaker 1: in the office at you know, whatever time. It was
Speaker 1: pretty early, and they hand us a baggy they were
Speaker 1: the Soviet authorities, with a tea bag and a hard
Speaker 1: boiled egg and a piece of salami, I think, and
Speaker 1: maybe some crackers, and they keep us very separated from
Speaker 1: everybody else. Their minders made clear they knew that Merril
Speaker 1: and Hankis and the others had met with the Fantom Orchestra,
Speaker 1: and they weren't happy about it. They took their passports,
Speaker 1: put them into cars and just started driving. And then
Speaker 1: they drove us for what seemed to be like hours
Speaker 1: and hours, and I thought, oh, man, now they're really
Speaker 1: going to do it. They're gonna lock us up. Hours later,
Speaker 1: they ended up at the airport, and while they didn't
Speaker 1: end up in a Soviet prison, they were told they
Speaker 1: were going to be thrown out of the country deported.
Speaker 1: But before they could go, there would be one more search.
Speaker 1: Though this time the four actually had even more to hide,
Speaker 1: not just the names and addresses of contacts, but now
Speaker 1: they had their stories and messages for the West. I
Speaker 1: remember being surrounded by military and they go through all
Speaker 1: of our stuff again and again. They went through every
Speaker 1: single page in my music and eventually handed it right back.
Speaker 1: The stories they smuggled out went very public once they
Speaker 1: returned to the States. There were speeches and congressional hearings
Speaker 1: and calls to help the Goldsteins and Gudavas and other
Speaker 1: refusniks who wanted to leave the Soviet Union. Remember, the
Speaker 1: purpose of their trip was to draw world attention to
Speaker 1: the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, and it worked.
Speaker 1: The following year, the Goldsteins were allowed to immigrate to Israel,
Speaker 1: and while the Gudavas were initially jailed after the concert,
Speaker 1: accused of taking part in treason as activity and blame
Speaker 1: for the hearings that took place on Capitol Hill, the
Speaker 1: two were finally released in April nineteen eighty seven on
Speaker 1: the condition that they leave the Soviet Union. They arrived
Speaker 1: in Boston that September. The crazy thing is the more
Speaker 1: things change, the more they stay the same. Tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of Jews have left Russias since Putin's invasion of
Speaker 1: Ukraine earlier this year, and now Moscow is moving to
Speaker 1: close a nonprofit organization that helps them emigrate to Israel.
Speaker 1: It's called the Jewish Agency for Israel and it's operated
Speaker 1: in Russia since nineteen eighty nine. That story came to
Speaker 1: us from click Here, a podcast about the world of
Speaker 1: cyber and intelligence. You can listen to more episodes every Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Wherever you get your podcasts, just search for click here.