Hacked - Throwback: The Phantom Orchestra

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Happy holidays, everyone. We’re bringing you a hacked classic to tide you over while Scott and I take a break to relax and gear up for the new year to hit us like a ton of bricks. This is one of my favorites from a couple of years ago, back in the halcyon days of June 2022—an interview with music professor Meryl Goldberg that I still think about. It’s got Cold War intrigue, hidden codes, and Klezmer music. Honestly, I want to make a movie about it, so if your 2025 wishlist includes setting a bunch of money on fire producing a film, let me know. Hope you had a happy holiday and a festive new year. Safe travels if you’re on the road, and if you’re home, I hope you’re relaxing. Enjoy The Phantom Orchestra. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy holidays, everyone. Bringing you a hacked classic to tide you over on the breakwell. Scott and I both relax and prepare for the new year. This is a favorite of mine from a couple years ago. Simpler days of summer 2022. And honestly, one of my favorite interviews I think we've ever done. It's with a music professor named Merrill Goldberg. Story has Cold War Intrigue, Hidden Codes, Klesmer music. I want to make a movie about it. So if your 2025 wish list is to set a bunch of money on five. get at me. I hope you had a happy holidays and a festive new year. If you're still traveling, safe travels. If you're home, I hope you're relaxing. This episode is called the Phantom Orchestra. Excited to get back at you in 2025. Enjoy. Once you practice a code, you get pretty good at it.

It's 1985 and Merrill Goldberg, a saxophone player with a saxophone player with the Klesmer Conservatory Band is at a border, trying to cross the iron curtain into the USSR. And she was about to find out how well that code she'd been practicing had really worked. And then we were brought into a back room and had our first heavy-duty interrogation. So that was a little disheartening. It was a good cop, bad cop interrogation, and the bad cop... This big burly guy behind a big, big desk banging and kind of yelling at us and, you know, saying, why are you here? Who sent you? What does your father do? What is your mother do? You know,

how old are you? When were you born? And our translator who I nicknamed Kevin. Well, actually, I don't know if I nicknamed him, but we nicknamed him Kevin. Kevin was the good cop, translating for the angry soldier bad cop. Kevin would say, what he's asking you is, so he was kind of like good guy to Mr. Big Burley Russian yeller guy. Who was shouting at her and her bandmates as a bunch of other soldiers went through all their baggage. Thoroughly, page by page, through every single document, looking for something hidden inside.

And clearly we had already been flagged for one reason or another, and they searched every single thing of ours. I mean, like a thorough, thorough search. They took my music notebook. They opened up. Every single page went through it, but then just handed it back. And Merrill and her group crossed the border. into Moscow. Having successfully brought with them something they weren't supposed to.

This is a story about obfuscation and people encrypting information and navigating a system undetected. And in a first for this show, I don't think it has one computer in it. This is the Phantom Orchestra. here on Hacked. The year was 1985, and I had already been performing professionally for a couple of years. My undergraduate degree was from New England Conservatory of Music, and that's where I met my colleagues. We formed a band called the Klesmer Conservatory Band. Merrill Goldman is, amongst many other things, a Klesmer musician. Klesmer is this folk music that combines a bunch of different.

European musical traditions, but sort of the main one, the pillar in the middle of all of it, is Ashkenazi Judaism. In the West, Klesmer was imported by Jewish immigrants, many of whom spoke Yiddish, so a lot of the classics of the genre have Yiddish lyrics over these often uptempo bass and brass and string arrangements. Some of the stuff you'd know is the kind of thing you dance to at a wedding or a bar mitzvah, but as a genre, it goes way deeper than that. Merrill is a saxophone player, and in the 1980s, she becomes part of this Klesmer band at the New England Conservatory Music. They would go on to put out 11 records, all bangers, of Klesmer music. So that's Merrill.

Meanwhile, in the USSR. There's this term that Merrill used that I had to look up, refusnik. It was really difficult for Jewish people to leave the USSR. For several decades and for a bunch of different reasons, from about the late 1960s onwards, it was prohibitively difficult, if not impossible, to get an exit visa if you were Jewish in the Soviet Union. Refusnik was the unofficial name for Jews that couldn't leave the Soviet Union. People refused exit visas. And since then, the term has come to mean a dissident or rowlerouser,

probably because a lot of people refused exit visas, refusenics, would go and go. on to become dissidents, people that refuse to go along with something. And there were a bunch of different dissident groups in the USSR. There were the refusenics, Catholic groups, Helsinki monitor groups, folks essentially spying to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords. And they were all separate, operating in isolation. But eventually, this story starts coming out. Amnesty International first got out the word and then a guardian journalist wrote a story about it,

about this dissident group in the Soviet Union made up of musicians. At that time, it was very unusual for people who were part of different dissident groups to get together. And I think that was enormously threatening to the Soviets, that, you know, it's one thing, okay, the Jewish refusiniks are over in this corner. We can deal with them. The Catholic refusenics, they're over there. The Helsinki monitors, they're a pain in the neck, but, you know, they're in their lane. But in this case, they came together.

And I think that was one of the things that was quite powerful for people in the West to understand. So in the case of the Phantom Orchestra, they named themselves Phantom because they couldn't really exist. The Phantom Orchestra. So in the mid-1980s, Merrill is in this Jewish folk music band of renown in the U.S. And word of this group of at least partially Jewish musician dissidents in the USSR, dissidents who want to make contact with the West starts to come out. The Phantom Orchestra wants to make contact. They want to share their story with the world.

In some cases, they want to try and make contact with family in the West to help sponsor them for exit visas. In order to apply to emigrate, someone from the West needed to invite you. And if the people in the West had all your information, then they could ask for an invitation. So there were a lot of people who wanted to be invited and had family members somewhere in the West, but didn't have a way to get their request out. And eventually this advocacy group for Jewish Soviets based out of Boston, finds out about the Phantom Orchestra. And they come up with this scheme

to make contact. And they start having conversations with Meryl and the Klesmer Conservatory Band and the folks in Boston. We're like, geez, wouldn't it be cool if we could send in some musicians to go meet them, to support them, just to find out what's going on with them.

Until finally, four of them. Myself, Hankisnetsky, Rosalie, and Jeff Warshower. Say, okay, we're going to go. It's going to be an adventure. You know, at that time in my life, I was totally game for an adventure. It sounded like super cool, super undercover. And I thought, okay, why not?

We're going to get tourist visas. We're going to make contact with the Phantom Orchestra. We knew going into it, having about four months of prep, of learning both about the situation and the political situation, but also about the people we were about to meet. We had that very long learning curve, well, about four months. And through that, we understood that there were risks. So if we came in and we had their names and addresses written down

down where it was super visible, then we would be tagged and thrown out right away. And, you know, it would put them in jeopardy. It would put us in jeopardy. So we were trained, so to speak, and figuring out that we had to, in some way, sneak in, you know, stuff that we needed to remember. Imagine you're a musician, trying to make contact with a dissident group. You've got all of this information about the members. who they are, where they live, their addresses, their phone numbers.

But you don't have any computer to store it in. And if you cross the border with a list of names and locations of dissidents written down on a piece of paper, you're basically bringing that list directly to the KGB. So the question is, how do you smuggle that information in correctly? knowing that every page you bring with you might get read. Merrill used what she had and what she knew to encrypt this information. She is a musician, so she started there with sheet music. And if you use a chromatic scale, you could assign, I did assign, letters to each note.

In cryptography, this is called a substitution cipher. Each letter of the alphabet that you're writing in gets substituted for something else. Simplest version is another letter in the same alphabet, so A becomes R, B becomes S, and so on and so on. Some of the most complex substitution ciphers are mechanical, like the Enigma Machine famously used by the Germans in World War II, but it's always the same basic mechanism. You're just substituting a letter for something else. So in the case of Western music, of a Western chromatic scale, the letters range from A, B, C, D, E, F all the way up to G. When you add in sharps and flats, that gets you 12 notes. Still not enough to map a letter to each note to create a substitution cipher using Western music for English's 26-letter character set.

But on sheet music, you've got a bass and bass and. to treble clef, more than just one scale. So you can get to 26 just by assigning the letters to the notes, right? So if, you know, C, C sharp, D, you know, just keep going. And even though you've got like another C up there, you just keep the code going. Then what I did is I created, I guess a lot of things that would make it harder to break in. I used different clefts.

So like it looks like piano music. I have a G clef. I have an F clef. And, you know, I would put, I wrote it like it looks like piano music. But it's really just the same code. But even though it's in different clefts, and then I added rhythms. She could use the key signatures, temple markings. She could use indicators like slurs and ties to bake more information into her code.

Numbers are good. difficult, right? So I would just write in some numbers if I had to write in numbers. I would just put them in almost like, you know, on top, like you have dynamics. So that gets you a full alphabet encrypted into sheet music and numbers and other stuff, because the nice thing about sheet music as a code is sheet music can be messy. Here's the beauty of music, right? It's a continual invention. And And people invent notation and invent stuff to put in music all the time. So Merrill could kind of just mark it up after that point. Because who would notice if the word legato was spelled in kind of a funny way?

You know, words like legato or allegro or whatever. I wrote in little things like walk left almost like legato. And I figured, well, the Russians aren't going to, you know, the Soviets aren't going to speaking Russian aren't going to be able to read my little teeny notes that say, you know, whatever. And I titled the pieces like if people or directions were in Moscow, usually I would title the piece with an M, you know, like Moderado or in Riga. We didn't get to Riga or Leningrad because we were, which is now St. Petersburg, because we were thrown out before then. But, you know, I would, Rigoletto or, you know, I would just like name it.

So you've got this encryption system for letters, numbers, even little drawings and directions of where to go. All the information they could possibly need right there on the piece of paper hiding in plain sight. And there were certain points where only a little picture could show me, like I needed to know where an apartment was. And it was easier to draw a little tiny diagram. So I have like little diagrams embedded in the music, too, that if someone were really looking at it closely might say, what musical thing does that depict, right? Like what is that composer trying to tell the musician who's reading this music what to do? Instead of a composer, telling her what to do through the sheet music, she was telling herself and her bandmates what to do in the future once they got there.

Where to go, who to meet. Phantom instructions to meet the Phantom Orchestra. When we got to Moscow, I went with Rosalie, Hankis went with Jeff. We were on different planes. We arrived. and the guys were also interrogated, but separately. Rosalie and I were interrogated, and Hankus and Jeff were interrogated as well. And they actually did more kind of physical searches with them, not with us.

Their notebooks and documents read through word by word, page by page. But at that point, you know, we ultimately, we made it through. But Merrill's encryption worked. They smuggled the information. Anyways, we make it through that. They bring us, you know, because we're tourists and, you know, you can't, you really can't go anywhere on your own. And, well, you can. We did. But, you know, they took us to our hotel. Here's a funny story. We get to the hotel. And, you know, we get our stuff in the rooms and we go to have dinner. And some people come running at us. Are you the people from the Klesmer Conservatory Band? And we're like, oh my God, you know, trying to keep a low cover and we were recognized right away. And now for the easy part, ditching your escort and making contact with a dissident group of musicians in the Soviet Union. After the break.

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and into Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. They're going to end up going on this whole tour through the USSR, but that is step one. But again, the club. Cosmer Conservatory Band is being monitored. So before they could actually make contact, they had to at least try and ditch their tail. Here's a crazy story.

I was only 26 years old, so keep that in mind. We think, okay, let's out with the KGB. We created a scenario where it looked like all four of us were getting on the subway in order to, you know, go to where we were going to. And by the way, you know, the directions to get to where we were going to, which was the gold family called the gold scenes to their apartment, we couldn't call them. They didn't have a telephone, but we had directions to get to their apartment, which meant getting on a subway and, you know, like turning right on this street and left on this street and finding this apartment, blah, blah, blah, we all get on the subway. But after the first or second stop, we all get off. But Rosalie and I get right. back on. So if there's only one person following us, they'll probably follow Jeff and Hank as, and they won't be able to follow all of us, right? In hindsight, they were following us no matter

what, but of course, we didn't know that. Rosalie and I make it to the place we're supposed to go to, and we get off the subway. We actually make our way to the building. Someone approaches us, And we don't know if we should trust this person, not trust this person, but they were speaking English. And they knew a couple of words in Yiddish. Ultimately, we decided to trust them, and they led us to the Goldstein's apartment. You know, we knock, knock, you know, we're musicians. We're here to meet you. We know we're being followed.

Do you want us to come in? Or would you like us just to turn around and go away? And they're like, no, come in, come in. And they start to exchange information like they'd been sent. to do. We need not to be afraid. This is our only way to essentially survive and get the word out and hopefully change things. And in general, the plan is working, but also they're band kids. So they do pretty much exactly what you'd guess after all the subterfuge for the evening is done. We play music that very first night. It was amazing. You know, in the meantime,

poor Jeff and Hankis are like, oh my God, what happened to Marilyn Rosalie? Because we're gone for hours and they're, you know, back at the hotel. We didn't make it back probably till, I don't know, after midnight. So those poor guys had no idea what was going on. You can imagine how relieved they were when we got back and, you know, yeah. And, you know, weren't, didn't land in a jail, at least not yet. And as more of the Klesmer band was able to join in on the meetings, the rest of the crew, the Phantom Orchestra started tapping their networks too.

And more of their people started coming to these nightly meetings, where they were swapping information about aid campaigns and encrypting details about the membership seeking exe visas back into the sheet music code to smuggle it back out. And in general, it sounds like, is playing a lot of music together. When we were there, the playing of music together was this space of camaraderie, of power, of empowerment, of feeling free, and of bonding. You know, musicians can really bond together just by playing, right? It's this kind of communal thing that you do and you can get lost in that space. And, you know, it's like the whole world around you just doesn't.

exist. And in this situation where members of the Phantom Orchestra had already been arrested and imprisoned and beaten and, you know, they had gone through already horrible, horrible things because of their outspokenness. But when they played music, they were free. But meanwhile, over at the KGB, they're like, we're not dumb. We do see you. We lost just for a minute there on the train, but we found you. We kind of know about some of these folks, these dissonants. We're starting to see what this is. You're not tourists.

You're making contact with dissonant groups. Also, you're playing klezmer music, which I imagine is not quite. So the KGB starts sending folks by. The first night they send someone, it's a subtler message. They shut off the power to the apartment where the Phantom Orchestra and the Klesmer Conservatory Rewkson. meeting. But eventually it escalates. First to officers showing up at the apartments to ask questions, next to an interrogation. And over the week that follows, it keeps escalating.

But the Klesmer band keeps meeting every night. After that, after a couple nights of playing and more interrogations, so we were called in and, you know, more interrogations. And, you know, more interrogations and yelling and screaming and they told us they could not guarantee our safety anymore that you know we took it a little bit with a grain of salt then you know at the time I remember okay I was kind of expecting that to come and in our prep for going there they told us they might tell us that but I thought what are they really going to do you know No, they could make life pretty miserable for us, but, you know. So we tell this to the Phantom Orchestra members,

and they immediately knew, okay, they might be in a little bit of trouble themselves. So let's give them some tips on what to do if you actually get under house arrest. Here's the thing about all this. The Klesmer band has American. tourist armor. If you're the KGB, you don't want to have to mess with the tourists you let in because that's messy, Cold War diplomatically speaking. But by the time the KGB says, okay, shut this down, the band is in Yerevan and Armenia,

so pretty far from Moscow. So even though the orders are coming from the KGB, the Armenian officials that were actually doing the footwork enforcing it didn't like the KGB intrusion. into their turf. So even though the band ended up under house arrest and they had their passports taken away, which is bad and scary, they could still kind of move around a little bit. What Merrill didn't know is that the Phantom Orchestra had found out about the house arrest. They really didn't like where this is going. What we didn't know was after we left Tbilisi, they contacted Reuters, which was such a good idea because to let them know.

know to be on the lookout that we might be in trouble. So the Phantom Orchestra is able to go through some folks and eventually make their way to a journalist at Reuters. And they tell the journalist what's happened about these musicians that have come to make contact with them and have had their passports taken away and put under house arrest. And this proved to be really smart because for however much the KGB wanted to avoid a diplomatic spectacle, having contend with a media spectacle was nearly just as bad. They already had kind of gotten the word out to the west, which was a very good thing because we land in Armenia.

As we get on the plane, Kevin from our first interrogation, Mr. Nice Guy, is on the plane. And we get into, we land in Yerevan in Armenia and they do not let us go into the terminal. there are two, maybe three cars on the tarmac. And, you know, we go from the plane to the tarmac to these cars. They don't tell us where we're going. They start driving us around. You know, all you can think of in your head is, you know, oh, my God, where are they taking us? They didn't tell us anything.

You know, what's going to happen? They didn't put us all together. Fortunately, Rosalie and I were together and Hankus and Jeff were together. Ultimately, the next morning we were called down. again to the office of, you know, office in the hotel. And at this time, we were told we were being deported. And then, you know, that our trip was over. And that, you know, we needed to gather our stuff.

And they gave us this little bag. I'll never forget it with a tea bag and a boiled, hard-boiled egg, and a piece of salami and a piece of cheese, and maybe a piece of bread, I don't know. But this little baggy, and then they bring us to the airport. And Kevin is with us at this point. And Kevin speaks English, great. And Kevin says, well, they were gonna send you to Beirut,

but we're gonna bring you back up to Moscow. And you know, four Jews, 1985, going to Beirut. That would have been like a total death sentence. but, you know, clearly a bluff. They didn't do that. And then the funny thing was on, going back to Moscow, Kevin said, here's the deal. There are three seats together,

and there are two seats together. One of you needs to sit with me. And so we drew lots. I lost, so I ended up next to Kevin, which was actually, the most interesting thing. As you can see, I probably, my 26-year-old self was also pretty, you know, vibrant and, you know, curious. And I remember, you know, Kevin, you know, had said to me he had gone out drinking the night before he was a little hungover. And he was

sorry. He said if it was up to him, he would let everybody go. There were at least four pieces of internationally published coverage about the trip. The first headline read, four Americans expelled after Soviet meeting. The next, Boston Band expelled after meeting activists. And the last read, Soviets expel four Americans for contact with rights group. The Phantom Orchestra across this coverage was described as human rights organizers, dissidents, and refusenics. In each article about the Klesmer band, a story about the Phantom Orchestra, who they were, what they were trying to do.

We get back to Moscow, and at this point, in hindsight, we know that, but we didn't know it at the time, but since Reuters had gotten the story out, the U.S. Embassy was on the lookout for us. And so what the KGB did, or the officials, is they put us again in two cars, and they drove us for hours. At this point, we don't know, again, where we're going. Could have been to Siberia, could have been to a prison. But after a couple of hours, we land at what I would consider kind of like a dormitory. and they put us all in the same room.

It was like up on the ninth floor or something. The reason why I say that is because outside our room, there's a Russian soldier with a machine gun. And downstairs, when we look out the window, as if we would jump eight or nine flights, right? There's all sorts of guards with machine guns. And then, you know, and they don't tell us what's going on. We're just, you know, confined to that room.

Kind of like I said, maybe like a hotel room or a dormitory. And we do what the phantom orchestra folks recommended. We played music. You know, we did that. And then we did a really kind of, I guess, nodded. I don't know how to say it, but it was a little bit mean-spirited. We played a super famous Russian folk, beloved Russian folk tune, but we played it purposely out of tune. It gave us kind of a sense of empowerment to do that and maybe gave us a little levity among this, you know, like, oh my God, what's going to happen to us?

Is this just a waste station? Are they going to throw us into a jail cell? We don't have our passports. Ultimately, Kevin comes back to us and says, you're being deported to Sweden. We're going to take you to the airport. They bring us to the airport. We are surrounded by military. There's no way anybody is going to get to us.

And we go through security. We're brought to this Swedish plane. The port pilot has been, and crew, it's an empty plane because they had just brought tourists over and they were going back empty. The poor pilot and the crew were only told that they had no choice to accept for deported Americans or they were not leaving, you know, the Russian airspace, the Soviet airspace. So we get up to the plane and the poor captain, he looks at us like, what the heck did you do?

You know, we tell them the story, they took care of us. When we landed in Sweden, the U.S. ambassador to Sweden was ready for us because we had several debriefings once we landed in Stockholm. You know, there were several protocols, obviously, that were broken. I mean, you're not supposed to take away people's passports. I guess that was probably the biggest one. Locking us up was also not such a great thing. But in any case, it took us a while to debrief. And it took us a while, I would say, also to kind of feel like we weren't being followed.

From the second this project started, the Klesmer band knew that for however much they were taking a risk, the Phantom Orchestra members were taking a way bigger one. The orchestra understood the risk. They wanted to make contact and share their story. And with the Reuters coverage and the subsequent articles off of that, they got their story out in arguably a way bigger way than the Klesmer Conservatory Band could have. ever hoped to. But after the band's plane takes off, the Phantom Orchestra is still there. We came back, we really worked on behalf of everybody. And, you know, sadly, most of the people

in the Phantom Orchestra were arrested, were beaten, they were ultimately let, you know, out. And ultimately, most of them emigrated. So, you know, in the end, it did work. So the orchestra got what they wanted, but it came with a cost. And the Klesmer band got what they wanted. And they were on a plane home. I got on this weird Google rabbit hole thinking about Merrill's code. This question of, you know, what is sheet music? And the part about the secret code is that it really worked.

And not only did we, you know, have the code in order to remember a whole bunch of stuff That would have been too hard to memorize, ultimately. But we were able to take out invitations, people's information, birth dates, and names, and, you know, stuff they needed to get invitations out. And a couple of stories of people who, you know, their plight hadn't been known to the West yet. So we coded that again in music and took it right out. Music is not a natural language. I can't use it to describe an idea.

or give you directions to the store. But it is a language. It's a programming language. You're giving instructions to be executed, and the machine in question just happens to be a human. Michael Mucciaroni writes about this idea that written music is a way of programming a human, and giving them object-oriented instructions that they can execute.

And Meryl figured out how to encrypt natural language into this analog programming language because she could read both. It's funny because with my college students, I teach them how to read music. And even though regular music only goes from the notes, ABC, D, E, F, G, it still can spell a lot of words. And so in the beginning of every class, my music class,

I call it the secret code, and I write a word, you know, like baggage or cabbage or dad, or, you know, whatever. And I have my students break the secret code. So I still do it, but on a much simpler level. Thanks for listening, everybody, to this J.B. Solo Adventure. My co-host, Scott Sends His Love, couldn't make it for this one. So you just, you got me with my narrator voice.

I hope you liked it. Hope you enjoyed the story. Patreon.com slash hacked podcast. If you did, it's the best way to support the show. Big shout out this episode to Neofir. Thank you for supporting hacked at patreon.com slash hacked podcast. Thank you to Merrill Goldberg for hopping on the surprise interview. I hope I captured everything accurately. The Klesmer music in this episode is not from the Klesmer conservatory band. The music we had was not as good as their music, but I didn't want to dip my tow that aggressively into the copyright infringement pool.

If you are interested in very, very good classroom music, I highly recommend you give them a listen. This wasn't a story about computers, but I found out about it through the RSA conference where Merrill was invited to speak about her experience encrypting stuff into sheet music. I thought it was interesting. I hope you did too. If you did like this kind of a, you know, cast in a wider net type story, feel free to reach out. Send us a message. hit us up on Twitter. We love feedback. And if you have a pass to RSA, I highly recommend you give the video of her talk watch.

That is another one in the bucket. Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you in the next one.