Carlsbad resident Merryl Goldberg spent 10 days in the Soviet Union in 1985, hiding intelligence inside sheet music and smuggling it past the KGB. Her new book tells the full story.

"Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB," released Tuesday, Aug. 25, recounts the secret mission Goldberg and three bandmates from the Boston-based Klezmer Conservatory Band carried out at age 26. Goldberg, a music professor at California State University San Marcos, co-wrote the book with Vince Houghton, director of the National Security Agency's National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland.

The American nonprofit Action for Soviet Jewry recruited the musicians to make contact with refuseniks, Soviet citizens, mainly Jews, who had been denied the right to emigrate. Their destination: the Phantom Orchestra, a group of dissident musicians, poets and activists in Tbilisi who had been barred from leaving the country.

Goldberg devised the cipher that made it work. In a 2022 interview with The Record, she described using chromatics, the twelve half-steps on a piano's black and white keys, to represent all 26 letters of the alphabet. Names, addresses and other intelligence went into the sheet music.

The KGB was not fooled by the cover story.

Goldberg was interrogated three times, briefly kidnapped twice and put under house arrest once during the trip, according to a review in the Union Leader. Still, the coded pages passed every search. "Even a musician wouldn't know that it was coded because it looked like 20th century music," Goldberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The musicians also played klezmer, Beatles songs and an emotional "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for the refuseniks they met. After returning to the United States, they held a concert and press conference on Capitol Hill with a congressional caucus and met with then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, who advocated for refuseniks and helped a family the band had met in the Soviet Union emigrate, the Union-Tribune reported.

Goldberg celebrated the book's release at Carlsbad Village Books on Tuesday, Aug. 25. The 304-page hardcover, published by Hanover Square Press, retails for $33 and includes 16 pages of archival photos. The Wall Street Journal has also reviewed the book.