Musical notation as a tool of espionage?

 

It sounds weird, but it actually happened in the 1980's.

Imagine this as the scenario for a thriller. Four folk musicians with a social conscience decide on a daring humanitarian mission. They'll visit a country famous for its cruel repression, and risk arrest and imprisonment by secretly meeting with persecuted individuals to smuggle out vital information about them disguised as musical notation.

It seems too outlandish even for a film. Yet it actually happened. Forty years ago, in 1985, when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was still freezing, and no one suspected the Soviet system would collapse within four years, a quartet of American Jewish musicians visited the Soviet Union. Their aim was to help some of the millions of Jewish people who wanted to leave but were being denied the necessary exit visas. One of the four was Merryl Goldberg, who in the mid 1980s was a keen student of the saxophone and passionate about a form of Jewish folk music called klezmer.

Now she's co-authored a book, Notes of Deception, that describes those extraordinary few days when she and her fellow musicians defied the might of the Soviet Union.

But how would the information be smuggled out under the noses of the KGB officers, who would be sure to confiscate anything they deemed suspicious? The answer was: convert the names, addresses, telephone numbers and other information into musical notation, via a secret code. Goldberg admits it wasn't complex. "The important thing was it just looks like music, though anyone who read music would see it's kind of strange. It sounds like bad Schoenberg."

Vince Houghton, whose expertise in the history of spying and espionage made him an ideal co-author for the book, says there are two reasons it worked. "One is that hopefully there would be no KGB officer who was a professional musician who might realise that this is just garbage. The other is that the people using it were musicians. The code was actually a form of steganography, which means something that hides in plain sight, that no one would ever think was code. So it didn't need to be complex. I asked a cryptologist colleague how long it would take him to crack it, and he said he could do it over lunch."

There's more at the link.

The full article makes a fascinating read, and includes an example of the musical code.  I love the ingenuity of mind that could think of musical notation as a hidden-in-plain-sight form of cryptography, one that the most draconian of security states in the world at the time would be unlikely to detect.  That's really thinking outside the (music) box!

Peter