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How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB
by Merryl Goldberg
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.
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This information about Notes of Deception was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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