Ep.

29 The Musicians Who Came In From the Cold

(MUSIC)

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s 1985 in Soviet Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev is head of the
Communist Party, and his great opening to the West — Glasnost and Perestroika — is still
just a glimmer in his eye.

1985 was still the time of that old Soviet Union – the one with defections and the KGB. And
into this world stepped the most unlikely of people: Four members of a Klezmer music
ensemble from Boston.

(KLEZMER MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Klezmer is a kind of Jewish folk music.

(MUSIC)

MERRYL GOLDBERG: It's secular music. And if you've heard Fiddler on the Roof, it's kind of in
that style but more authentic.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Merryl Goldberg is a professor of music at Cal State, San Marcos. That’s
her on the saxophone.

But back in the day, she was part of a pretty famous Klezmer ensemble called the Klezmer
Conservatory Band.

(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they had heard about a group in the Soviet Union that went by a very
intriguing name: The Phantom Orchestra.

GOLDBERG: So we first heard of the Phantom orchestra through the network of people who
were working in the eighties, trying to help people escape from the Soviet Union.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They were musicians like them.

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GOLDBERG: We started thinking we ought to find out about these people.

TEMPLE-RASTON: These musicians were known as “refuseniks” because they wanted to

leave the Soviet Union, but the authorities refused to give them permission.

GOLDBERG: They were called the Phantom Orchestra because they had to play somewhat in
secret, right? So if they had gone out and decided, oh, we're gonna play in the park, they
would've been picked up and arrested. Most of them had already been either imprisoned or
beat up or, you know, had a lot of issues already.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They’d gotten fired from their jobs, drummed out of academic and
professional associations and would often get beaten up — just for openly declaring they
wanted to emigrate.

All of which struck a chord with Merryl and her friends in the Klezmer group when her
teacher approached her.

GOLDBERG: My friend Hankus Netsky, who is a wonderful musician and teaches at New
England Conservatory of Music where I was a student.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And he had this crazy idea:

GOLDBERG: The actual ask was to go over to the Soviet Union in secret, essentially, and
meet with refuseniks. Mostly focus in on the Phantom Orchestra members and find out
information about what they were doing, who they were, how they wanted their stories to
get out.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They were four simple musicians from Boston: a saxophonist, a singer, a
guitarist, an accordion player…going toe-to-toe with one of the largest secret police forces
in the world.

GOLDBERG: So when he asked me, my first reaction, I think, was: That sounds crazy cool. I'm
in.

(THEME MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things
cyber and intelligence. Today, at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting

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to redraw the Iron Curtain…we take you back behind it — with a story about a very different
kind of code than the zeros and ones we usually talk about.

This code was made of music, and used to smuggle dissident messages in and out of the
Soviet Union.

GOLDBERG: I remember thinking we're musicians. Just creating a code in music would be
the easiest way to go about this.

(THEME MUSIC WITH GOLDBERG ON SAXOPHONE)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Merryl will play us out.

(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: We’ll be right back.

BREAK

TEMPLE-RASTON: It was no small thing deciding to travel to the Soviet Union in the 1980s
to secretly help people escape — even if you were a trained spy, much less a musician from
Boston.

And you’d think their professions might be a liability, but in a weird kind of way it became a
strength. The perfect cover story: an innocent looking cultural exchange, just some
American musicians trying to bridge the cultural divide by going to play with Soviet
musicians. That could give them an opportunity to do some good for people caught in the
Soviet Union.

GOLDBERG: In the 80s, at that time, the more publicity a refusenik or dissident had, the
more protection they would have from being imprisoned or beaten up or whatever would
happen to them. If the West knew about them, they had a better shot at getting out.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So coding music to sneak out messages and details about people who
were trying to escape wasn’t a completely new idea. Merryl and her friends had another
model: Josephine Baker.

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(CHARLESTON MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Baker singing. She was a Paris celebrity. A singer, a dancer, a bon
vivant in the 1930s and 40s who was famous for walking her pet cheetah down the
Champs-Elysee. She also happened to be working for the French resistance.

(BAKER SINGING)

TEMPLE-RASTON: She’d sing at parties, chat up important people, then pass along what
she’d learned to the allies.

Her dispatches were the stuff of legend. She’d learn details about German troop
movements or supply lines and then smuggle the information out to the allies by writing
messages in invisible ink. She wrote on sheet music between the notes.

In the 1980s, when Merryl was trying to work out how to bring coded messages into the
Soviet Union, she went a step further: Her code was embedded in the music itself.

I studied music in school so I assumed she must have created something from the staff –
those five lines and four spaces that are the basis of musical notation – since the notes are
represented by letters.

The five lines are: E, G, B, D and F

(NOTES PLAY)

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the four spaces represent the notes F-A-C-E.

(NOTES PLAY)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Except, that wouldn’t get you the whole alphabet.

GOLDBERG: You know, with the regular notes, you only have A through G, so then you have
the problem of 26 letters with, you know, only eight notes. What I did without giving it away
was I created a situation using chromatics

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Chromatics, the twelve half steps when you play the black and white keys
on a piano.

(CHROMATIC SCALES ON PIANO)

GOLDBERG: And using different notes, I figured out all 26. I had three leftovers like X, Y, Z,
but you don't use X, Y, Z all that much. So if someone knew music and looked at it, they’d
think, Huh, that looks like modern music.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Is there anything that you have that you coded so you might be able to
play for us so we might have an idea what that would sound like?

GOLDBERG: Sure, so…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Merryl’s saxophone is nearby.

GOLDBERG: I’ll play a bit for ya…

(PLAYS MUSICAL CODE)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Believe it or not, there’s actually the name of a dissident musician coded
in those notes.

GOLDBERG: This one was an intro to a new person that they wanted us to meet, who was a
musician. And it was for someone in Moscow

(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Merryl and Hankus and the other members of the Klezmer band spent
months preparing for their trip. It was more than just inventing a way to code messages,
though they did that too. The people at a Western non-profit called The Action for Soviet
Jewry gave them a crash course in spycraft.

GOLDBERG: We had to have several months of kind of a learning curve and figuring out how
we would go in without giving up who we were.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And it didn’t take long to put it to use: they needed it as soon as they
landed.

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GOLDBERG: Yeah, so we land in Moscow and we get off the plane and, um, people are
talking in little microphones. And we think, uh-oh.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Uh-oh because the authorities seemed to have been expecting them.

HANKUS NETSKY: There were at least two of them and they took us aside.

That’s Hankus Netsky, the teacher who’d brought up this whole idea to Merryl.

NETSKY: and they told us to get our luggage, but not go anywhere to bring the luggage into
the, I guess, interrogation room.

GOLDBERG: We were flagged, there's no question about it.

NETSKY: And sit with an agent.

GOLDBERG: They start going through everything and I mean, absolutely everything.
Opening up every single thing we have…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Including her music.

GOLDBERG: And I remember they're going page by page by page.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She held her breath.

Kept their gaze.

And then, after what seemed like an eternity…

GOLDBERG: They just hand it right back to me. Oh, it was just really fantastic.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It was seven hours before they were permitted to leave the airport.

NETSKY: There was one guy who spoke only in Russian and banged his fist on the table the
entire time.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: When they finally were allowed to go they had the sense that while the
first hurdle was behind them. What lay ahead would be much harder.

(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: The Phantom Orchestra was based in Tbilisi, Georgia, which was still a
Soviet Republic at the time. The mission Merryl and Hankus their friends had chosen to
accept involved trying to meet up with four of its members.

Two were from a well known family of Jewish dissidents – Grigory and Isai Goldstein. And
the other two were calling for Georgian independence – Tengiz and Eduard Gudava, both of
whom had been sentenced to years of hard labor for their activism.

All four were considered enemies of the state, which meant they were most definitely being
watched, their phones were tapped. So it would be tricky for Merryl and her crew to make
contact with them.

GOLDBERG: I had the directions to their apartment actually encoded in my music, and
that's how we remembered how to get there. I'm sure we stuck out, and we didn't know who
to trust, who not to trust.

TEMPLE-RASTON: What they did know was that someone was following them.

NETSKY: We noticed for example, that we would walk up the street and the last car on the
block would flash its lights and then we'd cross the street. And then the first car on the next
block would flash its lights. And then the same thing would happen on the next block. So it
sure seemed like there was something going on. So I remember we went to our hotel room
and interestingly enough, this sink was leaking.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they said as much, out loud, that it was too bad the sink was leaking.

NETSKY: And then when we got back from dinner, the sink was fixed. So that's how closely
we were being monitored.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Merryl and Hankus and the two other Klezmer band members — Jeff and
Rosalie — found themselves in the middle of a Cold War thriller.

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They’d go to the ballet and museums one day, hoping to throw the authorities off the
scent. And then rush off to go meet dissidents the next, hoping their basic tradecraft
wouldn’t put their contacts in danger.

GOLDBERG: We devised in our young brains, which now seems kind of cuckoo, that all of us
would get on the subway because we had to take a subway to get to the Goldsteins
apartment first to make contact.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The apartment was in Tbilisi, Georgia. And the directions to get there
were in their musical notation code.

GOLDBERG: They didn't have a telephone; we couldn't call them. We had to just try to find
them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So to lose whoever was following them, they came up with what they
thought was an ingenious plan.

GOLDBERG: We're all gonna get on the subway and then we're all gonna get off. And Rosalie
and I are gonna jump back on.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the tail would have to choose between the two groups.

GOLDBERG: And we thought it worked

TEMPLE-RASTON: They spent hours walking around buildings and doubling back and
climbing darkened stairwells until finally they find themselves at the door of an apartment.

And they knock.

NETSKY: Isai Goldstein opened the door. They were the first family we visited.

GOLDBERG: You know, the first thing we say is, you know, we think we’ve outwitted them.
We’ve been interrogated. Tell us if you want us just to turn around and go away…

NETSKY: Grigory Goldstein walks over to the window. There were four cars he pointed to. He
said, these are all KGB.

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GOLDBERG: And they laughed at us. Like, of course you're being followed, and please come
in because it's way more important for you to come in. We need you to visit. We need you to
tell our story.

TEMPLE-RASTON: When we come back, a secret concert with a Phantom Orchestra.

GOLDBERG: Probably the most profound music making I have ever in my entire life made

BREAK

TEMPLE-RASTON: The Phantom Orchestra of course couldn’t play openly in a concert hall.
But they also didn’t do their concerts in a secret venue after hours. They actually just played
in an apartment: the Gudava’s apartment.

GOLDBERG: A typical, small apartment. They had an upright piano and a couple music
stands. Um, and the Gudava’s had at least one guitar, maybe two.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The musicians gathered, along with an audience of neighbors.

NETSKY: The chairs went into the other room, I remember. And the idea was, hey look we
have visitors; they’re musicians. It’s time for the Phantom Orchestra to come meet and play
a concert.

TEMPLE-RASTON: There was a palpable mix of excitement, but also a little fear, in the room.
It wasn't about playing with the Phantom Orchestra; they were all pros at that. It was about
what might come next – the consequences of an impromptu concert with dissidents.

GOLDBERG: And I think making music in and of itself is not such a big deal. Of course, it was
the people who they were making music with that made it into a really big deal.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Were you waiting for the KGB to burst in at any moment? What was going
through your 26-year-old head?

GOLDBERG: My 26-year-old head was, like, living in the moment. I will tell you that.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Merryl and Hankus remember the whole evening as it was yesterday.

GOLDBERG: And I do remember just being transported, that it was this feeling perhaps of
amazement, of relief, of immediate comradery.

TEMPLE-RASTON: There was Klezmer music.

(NETSKY PERFORMANCE OF “ZIBN FIRTSIK”)

TEMPLE-RASTON: And traditional songs…

(NETSKY PERFORMANCE OF “7:40”)

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then a moment when everything seemed to come together, with a
standard that everyone loved.

(GOLDBERG PERFORMANCE OF “SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW”)

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then everyone who was there — the members of the orchestra, the
visiting musicians, the audience — broke into song.

(PHANTOM ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE OF “SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW”)

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is actually the Phantom Orchestra playing…

(MUSIC)

GOLDBERG: I think “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” touched us in a way that I hadn't been
touched before. And I think because of the whole feeling of the song, and the hope in that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And for an evening, the Soviet minders and cloak and dagger, the coded
directions, clandestine meetings…all faded away. And the music became all there was.

(MUSIC)

GOLDBERG: So for the people there who had so much courage and were constantly battling,
you know, whatever was gonna happen to them for their activism. Um, playing music was
the time when in their brains they could be totally, 100 percent free.

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(APPLAUSE)

NETSKY: There was a lot of emotion when we played with the Phantom Orchestra, not just
from them, but from the audience. And we were really floating when we left the room that
night.

(MUSIC — ”A SLOW HORA FOR THOSE WHO WAIT FOR FREEDOM” by JEFF WARSCHAUER)

TEMPLE-RASTON: As they went back out into the night, they tried to recall all the details
that they would later code into their music so they could tell the world what was going on
behind the Iron Curtain. A marriage announcement here, a family history there. And
hopefully, once the world knew they existed, they’d have the leverage they needed to safely
leave the Soviet Union.

GOLDBERG: And I think that’s part of what the goal of many of the folks was, you know, if
your story is never told, it’s like it hasn’t happened. So it was really important to get stories
out there. It means you exist, and other people know you exist.

TEMPLE-RASTON: As they left the Gudavas house that night, they were more than
musicians. They were messengers. Now, they just had to make sure they could get home.

Not long after the secret concert, the Boston musicians awoke to an early morning call at
the hotel.

(PHONE RINGING)

GOLDBERG: We were told to be down in the office at, whatever time it was pretty early, and
they hand us a baggy.

TEMPLE-RASTON: “They” were the Soviet authorities.

GOLDBERG: With a tea bag and a hard boiled egg and a piece of salami, I think. And maybe
some crackers and they keep us very separated from everybody else.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The authorities made clear they knew that Merryl and Hankus and the
others had met with the Phantom Orchestra. And they weren’t happy about it.

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They took their passports and bundled them into cars.

GOLDBERG: And then they drove us for what seemed to be like hours and hours. And I
thought, oh man, now they're really gonna do it. They're gonna lock us up.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hours of driving later, they end up at the airport. They weren’t locked up,
but they were informed they were going to be thrown out of the country. Deported.

But before they could go, there would be one more search — though this time they actually
had even more to hide. Not just the names and addresses of contacts, now they had all
those stories they had gathered to bring home.

GOLDBERG: I remember being surrounded by military and they go through all of our stuff
again, including our music again. So imagine, you know, we're like, uh oh. But we didn't even
tell the people there how we were taking information in and out. We really wanted to keep
our music coding completely a secret. They went through every single page of my music.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And eventually…

GOLDBERG: handed it right back.

(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: The stories they smuggled out went very public once they returned to the
States. There were speeches and Congressional hearings, and calls to help the Goldsteins
and Gudavas and other refuseniks who wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union.

The purpose of the trip to play with the Phantom Orchestra was to draw world attention to
the human rights situation in the Soviet Union. And it worked. The Goldsteins were allowed
to emigrate to Israel in early 1986.

While the Gudavas were initially jailed after the concert – Tengiz was accused of taking part
in treasonous activity, and Eduard was blamed for subsequent speeches made on Capitol
Hill about human rights abuses in Georgia — the two were finally released in April 1987 on
the condition they’d leave the Soviet Union.

They arrived in Boston that September.

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(MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: The crazy thing is, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Tens of thousands of Jews have left Russia since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year,
and now Mosocow is moving to close a non-profit organization that helps them emigrate to
Israel.

It’s called the Jewish Agency for Israel and it has operated in Russia since 1989.

This is Click Here.

(B SEGMENT MUSIC)

(AMBI FROM DEF CON)

TEMPLE-RASTON: So there are lots of hands-on projects at Def Con – the hacker conference
held this year at Caesar’s Forum. They have these little villages of hackers working on
things that, well, naturally interest hackers. Like breaking into voting machines or hacking
into a Tesla.

But my favorite activity was probably this one…

LUNCHBOX: My handle is lunchbox and it's DEF CON. So that's all I'm gonna say.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And she wanted to do something that included the rest of us. The mere
mortals, the non-hackers.

LUNCHBOX: DEF CON over the years has gotten really big, and it's grown and it's very
intimidating for newcomers people that are new to the industry, thinking about getting in
the industry. So we wanted to make a competition that had no barrier of entry.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And what she came up with? A tin foil hat competition. You know the kind
of thing that blocks the alien transmissions that come through the fillings in your teeth.

LUNCHBOX: This is the tongue-in-cheek contest. We make fun of, you know, alien mind
control rays and CIA lizard people. It's really all about fun. I mean, there is science to it.
There is a receiver, there are transmitters, but then it's also about style.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: You get three sheets of tin foil and all the time you need.

LUNCHBOX: So we have a mannequin — Miss Information — and she has a receiver in her
head.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Just to be clear the mannequin is just a head, like one of those heads you
see in hair salons.

LUNCHBOX: And we have transmitters in this room. And the goal is to try to build a tinfoil
hat that attenuates or blocks those signals the best from getting into her noggin.

TEMPLE-RASTON: There’s a big flat screen behind her that actually measures how much the
tin foil hat is blocking the signals they are transmitting around the room. A woman next to
me is fitting a hat to her boyfriend’s head.

CHANTING: Make a hat, make a hat.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He gives her a big smile and says, Hey, the voices just stopped.

And we all laugh.

(GROUP CHEERS)

MAN: I come in from the Middle East. This is my first DEF CON. I'm a student at business
university.

WOMAN: I work IT. I’m trying to convince him into a computer science degree in
cybersecurity.

MAN: And here I am making tin foil hats. My tin foil hat is just like, you know, traditional,
um, Middle Eastern headwear. Oh God. It's really hard to make without tape.

ATTENDANT: Alright come right up. May I have a handle?

MAN: My handle… um, XX Hackerman XX..

TEMPLE-RASTON: He places his Middle Eastern tin foil headwear on the mannequin head.

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ATTENDANT: All right, You ready? Hands off. Oh my gosh. Yeah. 308. That's that's your,
that's your range…

MAN: Out of what?

ATTENDANT: I'm not for sure. I think I've seen like 350 right today.

MAN: Okay. 308. We'll take it.

LUNCHBOX: We've had somebody make the entire alien predator helmet. Uh, somebody
made the entire James Webb telescope one year. We've had warrior helmets. We've had all
kinds of just amazing entries.

80KU: Greetings, I'm 80ku.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We give 80KU a Click Here sticker, and she agrees to talk. We ask her
where she’s from.

80KU: You wouldn’t have heard of my planet…

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Def Con, so we move on.

80KU: For the listeners I'm wearing a Flamingo hat from Target covered in tin foil, but the
Flamingo is also wearing a Flamingo hat. So it's like a meta Flamingo. I'm, I'm just, I'm a
Flamingo person. Uh, this is our second year in this competition right now. We're ranked
fourth. Last year we were third, and we've improved. We've had, uh, extra tinfoil. So I went to
the convenient store when I got here and got a whole roller of tinfoil, which I've used.
I got tape to hold it in place. It's a little more fashionable.

LUNCHBOX: She's the leader in our style category right now, So unless somebody comes in
with something pretty massive and beautiful, we might have a winner.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And she was right. 80KU did win the Def Con Tin Foil hat style
competition. And there were other winners, too. One for unlimited (think mostly foil but with
creative additions), and there was the classic – just foil and imagination and an ability to
block out unwanted transmissions…

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(ALIEN SOUNDING MUSIC)

TEMPLE-RASTON: No cash prizes. After all, this is a place where stickers are actually a kind
of currency. But for another year, 80KU does have bragging rights.

This is Click Here.

(HEADLINES MUSIC)

And here are some of the cyber and intelligence headlines from the past week.

Lotus Bio-Technology Development Corp. announced it will change its name after
discovering its stock was part of a pump-and-dump scheme that involved the hack of more
than 30 brokerage accounts. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates
publicly-traded companies, charged more than a dozen people in the scheme, including the
founder of the company.

The SEC said two overlapping groups of Canadian, U.S., and British citizens were able to
generate more than $1 million in illicit proceeds from the operation.

Lloyd’s of London will require that underwriters exclude state-backed cyberattacks linked to
war or catastrophic damages in their regular cyber coverage. The insurance giant said that
beginning in the Spring of 2023 underwriters must specifically exempt coverage for losses
“arising from a war,” as well as from state-backed cyberattacks that “significantly impair
the ability of a state to function.” It also says that syndicates have a clear system for how to
attribute an attack to a state-based actor.

The significance of the requirement is that it removes ambiguity in how the war exclusion
will be applied.

And finally there is this…

(JANET JACKSON’s “RHYTHM NATION”)

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m sure you heard: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation appears to have a
power no one expected.

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A bug related to the 1989 hit song has officially been declared a security issue in need of a
Common Vulnerability and Exposure tag. It turns out that playing Rhythm Nation – they
didn’t say how loud – can cause laptops with a particular hard drive to crash.

Still listening to us on your computer? Okay that means you don’t have the 5400 RPM OEM
hard drive, circa 2005. If you had, a little rhythm nation causes a denial of service
malfunction. Who knew Janet was into cyber?

(THEME SONG PERFORMED BY MERRYL GOLDBERG)

TEMPLE-RASTON: Click Here is a production of The Record by Recorded Future. I’m Dina
Temple-Raston, your host, writer and executive producer.

Sean Powers is our senior producer and marketing director, and Will Jarvis is our producer
and helps with writing. Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski are our editors. Darren Ankrom is our
fact checker. Ben Levingston composes our theme, and Kendra Hanna is our intern.

And a very special thanks to Merryl Goldberg, Hankus Netsky, Rosalie Gerut, Jeff
Warschauer and Phyllis Irwin. They provided every piece of music you heard on our show
today.

We have a little video of them on TheRecord.com news site.

And we thought it was only fitting that they send us out with an original composition, based
on their travels.

ROSALIE GERUT: Those were the days my friends, we thought they’d never end. We made
good friends and ran from KGB. But they caught up with us and sent us home again, as we
demanded let our friends be free.

The Goldsteins and Gudavas seemed like family. Phantom musicians welcomed the new
band. But the KGB gave us a serious warning. Soon enough, we left for Yerevan. Bravery we
saw that can’t be imagined. We learned so much in only 14 days. Arriving home, reporters
came to greet us, as we told our story while still in a haze.

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These are the days, our friends, we hope they never end. Let’s sing a dance forever and
today. These are the lives we choose to fight and never lose. These are the days, oh yes,
these are the days.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We’ll be back on Tuesday.

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