credit: the Staff at CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency)
Merryl Goldberg knows nothing if not how to improvise. The 64-year-old could make music before she could walk. She started beating out rhythms on the bongos as a toddler and never stopped, eventually becoming a saxophonist who toured for 13 years with Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.
During her time on the road, she also moonlighted as a spy of sorts. At 26, she traveled to Russia in 1985 to meet with dissident musicians and hoodwinked the KGB by encrypting secrets in music. Along with her saxophone and sheet music, she packed stacks of spiral-bound notebooks crammed with handwritten notations embedded with hidden information.
“I came up with a code where different notes equal different letters and when it came to numbers, I would just correlate the numbers to notes in the scale and memorize the tune,” said Goldberg, an arts advocate and…
