Pushkin. Hey, last Archive listeners, we have something special for you today. As you know, we love uncovering forgotten stories from history, and we wanted to share another podcast that has that same passion. The show is called click Here and it tells stories about the world of cyber and intelligence. Former NPR Investigations correspondent Dina Temple Raston is the host. The episode You're about to hear is about a group of American musicians who smuggled messages in and out of the former Soviet Union in an ingenious way by burying code in their music. Here comes the episode. You can find click here wherever you get your podcasts. It's nineteen eighty five and Soviet Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev is the head of the Communist part and his great opening to the West Glasnows and Parastroika is still just a glimmer in his i. Nineteen eighty five was still the time of that old Soviet Union, the one with defections and the KGB, And into this world stepped the most unlikely of people, four members of a klezmer ensemble from Boston. Klezmer is a kind of Jewish folk music. It's secular music and if you've heard Fiddler on the Roof, it's kind of in that style, but more authentic. Merril Goldberg is a professor of music at cal State sam Marcos and that's her on the saxophone. But back in the day she was part of a pretty famous Klesmer ensemble called the Klezmer Conservatory Band. And they had heard about a group in the Soviet Union that went by a very intriguing name, the Phantom Orchestra. So we first heard of the Phantom Orchestra through the network of people who were working in the eighties trying to help people escape from the Soviet Union. They were musicians like them. We started thinking we ought to find out about these people. These musicians were known as refuse Nicks because they wanted to leave the Soviet Union but the authorities refused to give them permission. They were called the Phantom Orchestra because they really had to play somewhat in secret, right, So if they had gone out and decided, oh, we're going to play in the park, they would have been picked up and arrested. Most of them had already been either imprisoned or beat up, or had a lot of issues already. They'd gotten fired from their jobs, drummed out of academic and professional associations, and would even get beaten up just for declaring openly that they wanted to immigrate. So when the opportunity of actually going to the Soviet Union presented itself, it all struck a chord with Merril and her friends in the Klezmer group. My friend hankas Nevsky, who is a wonderful musician and teaches at New England Conservatory of Music where I was a student, and he approached her with this crazy idea. The actual ask was to go over to the Soviet Union in secret essentially and meet with refused Nicks, mostly focus in on the Phantom Orchestra members, and to find out information about what they were doing, who they were, how they wanted their stories to get out. They were four simple musicians from Boston, a saxophonist, singer, a guitarist and accordion player, and they were going to go toe to toe with one of the world's largest secret police forces. So when he asked me, oh, my first reaction I think was that sounds crazy cool. I'm in. I'm Dina Temple arrested and this is click here a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. Today, at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron curtain, We're going to take you back behind it with a story about a very different kind of code than the Zeros and ones we usually talk about. This code was made of music, and it was used to smuggle distant messages in and out of the Soviet Union. I remember thinking, we're musicians, just creating a code in music would be the easiest way to go about this. Merrill will play us out. It's no small thing deciding to travel to the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties to secretly help people escape, even if you were a trained spy, much less a musician from Boston and you think they're professions, might actually be a liability. But in a weird way, it became a strength. It was the perfect cover story and innocent looking cultural exchange. We're just some American musicians trying to bridge the cultural divide in the eighties. At that time, the more publicity of rashiznik or dissident had, the more protection they would have from being imprisoned or beaten up or whatever would happen to them. But if the West knew about them, they had a better shot at getting out. So coding music to sneak out messages and details about people who are trying to escape wasn't a completely new idea. Marily and her friends had a model Josephine Baker table version that's Baker's singing. She was a Paris celebrity, a singer, a dancer at Bon Vivant in the nineteen twenties, thirties and forties. She was famous for walking her pete down the chains in Lize, and she also happened to be working for the French Resistance. She'd sing at parties, chat up important people, and then pass along what she'd learned to the Allies. Her dispatches were the stuff of legend. She'd learned details about German troop movements or supply lines, and then smuggled the information out to the Allies by writing messages in invisible ink. She wrote on Sheep music between the notes. In the nineteen eighties, when Merrill was trying to work out how to bring coded messages into the Soviet Union, she went a step further. Her code was embedded in the music itself. I studied music in school so I assumed she must have created something from the staff. Those five lines and poor spaces that are the basis of musical notation are represented by letters. The five lines are E, B, D, and F, and the four spaces represent the notes fac except that wouldn't get you the whole alphabet. You know, with the regular notes you only have eight through G, So then you have the problem of twenty six letters with you know, only eight notes. Although what I did, without giving it away, was I created a situation using chromatics. Chromatics the twelve half steps when you play the black and white keys on a piano, and using different notes, figured out all twenty six. I had three leftover ones like x y Z, but you don't use x y z all that much. So if someone knew music, they'd look at it and they'd think, uh, that's modern music. Is there anything that you have that you coded that you might be able to play for us so that we have some idea of what that would sound like. Yeah, sure, So Merril picks up her saxophone. Here, all play a little bit for you. Believe it or not. There's actually the name of a dissonant coded in those notes. This one was intro to a new person that they wanted us to meet and was a musician, and it was for someone in Moscow. Marilyn Hankis and the other members of the Klesmer Band spent months preparing for the trip. It was more than just inventing a new way to code messages, though they did that too. The people at the Action for Soviet Jewelry gave them a crash course in tradecraft. We had to have several months of kind of a learning curve and figuring out how we would go in without giving up who we were. And it didn't take long to put all that to use. In fact, the group needed it as soon as they landed. So we land in Moscow and we get off the plane. People are talking in little little microphones and we think, oh oh oh, because the authorities seem to have been expecting them. There were at least two of them, and they took us aside. That's hankas Netsky, the teacher who brought up this whole idea to Meryl, and they told us to get our luggage, but not go anywhere, to bring the luggage into the I guess interrogation room. Definitely we were flagged. There's no question about it and sit with an agent. They start going through everything, and I mean absolutely everything, opening up every single thing we have, including Meryll's music. They're going page by page by page. She held her breath, kept their gaze, and then after what seemed like an eternity, they just hand it right back to me. Oh, it was just really fantastic. It was seven hours before they were permitted to leave the airport. There was one guy who spoke only in Russian and banged his fist on the table the entire time. When they were finally allowed to go, they had this sense that while the first hurdle was behind them, what lay ahead would be much harder. The Phantom Orchestra was based in Tablusi, Georgia, which was still a Soviet republic at the time the mission Merril and Hankas and their friends had chosen to accept involved trying to meet up with four of its members. Two were from a well known family of Jewish dissidents, Grigory and Easie Goldstein, and the other two were calling for Georgian independence, Teenis and Eduard Gudava, both of whom had been sentenced two years of hard labor for their activism. All four were considered enemies of the state, which meant they were definitely being watched and their phones were tapped, so it would be tricky for Merril and her crew to make contact with them. I had the directions to their apartment actually encoded in my music, and that's how we were remembered how to get there. I'm sure we stuck out and we didn't know who to trust, who not to trust. What they did know was that someone was following them. We noticed, for example, that we would walk up the street and the last car on the block would flash its lights, and then we'd cross the street, and then the first car on the next block would flash its lights, and then the same thing would happen on the next block. So it sure seemed like there was something going on. So I remember we went to our hotel room and interestingly enough, the sink was leaking, and they said as much out loud that it was too bad the sink was leaking, and then when we got back from dinner, the sink was fixed. So that's how closely we were being monitored. Marilyn Hankis and the two other Klesmer band members, Jeff and Rosalie, found themselves in the middle of a Cold war thriller. They'd go to ballet and museums one day, hoping to throw the authorities off the scent, and then rush off to go and meet Dissonance the next, hoping their basic tradecraft wouldn't put their contacts in danger. We devised, in our young brains, which now seems kind of cuckoo, that all of us would get on the subway because we had to take a subway to get to the gold Steam's apartment first to make contact. The apartment was into Belize, Georgia, and the directions to get there were buried in their musical notation code. They didn't have a telephone. We couldn't call them. We had to just try to find them, so to lose whoever was following them. They came up with what they thought was an ingenious plan, and so we're all going to get on the subway, and then we're all going to get off, and Rosie and I are going to jump back on. Then the tail would have to choose between the two groups, and we thought it worked. They spent hours walking around buildings and doubling back and climbing dark and stairwells, until finally they find themselves at the door of an apartment and they knock and east Side Goldstein in the door. And the gods were the first family that we visited. First thing we say is we think we've outwitted them, but you know we've been interrogated. Tell us if you want us just to turn around and go away. Gregory Goldstein walks over to the window. There were four cars. He pointed too. He said, these are all KGB and they laughed at us, like, of course you're being followed, and please come in, because it's way more important for you to come in. We need you to visit. We need you to tell our story when we come back. A secret concert with a phantom orchestra, probably the most profound music making I have ever in my entire life made. The phantom orchestra, of course, couldn't play openly in a concert hall. I thought they'd be playing in some secret venue after hours. But they actually had their concerts in an apartment, the Gudava's apartment, typical small apartment. They had an upright piano and a couple of music stands, and the Goudavas had at least one guitar, maybe two. The musicians gathered along with an audience of neighbors. The chairs went into the other room, I remember, and the idea was, hey, look we have visitors. They're musicians. It's time for the Phantom Orchestra to come meet and play a concert in the room. There was a palpable mix of excitement, damned a little fear. It wasn't about playing music with the Phantom Orchestra that frightened them. They were all prose at that. It was about what might follow the consequences of an impromptu concert with a room full of dissidents. And I think making music in and of itself is not such a big deal. Of course, it was the people who they were making music with that made it into a really big deal. Were you waiting for the KGB to burst in any moment? What was going through your twenty six year old head. My twenty six year old head was like living in the moment. I will tell you that Merrill and Hankis remembered the whole evening as if it were yesterday. I do remember just being transported that it was this feeling perhaps of amazement, of relief, of immediate camaraderie. There was klezmer music and traditional songs, and then this moment when everything seemed to come together with the standard that everyone loved, and then everyone who was there, the members of the orchestra, the visiting musician, the audience, they all broke into song. What you're hearing now is actually a Phantom Orchestra recording. It touched us in a way that I hadn't been touched before. And I think because the whole feeling of the song somewhere over the rainbow and the hope in that and for an evening, the Soviet minders, the cloak and dagger, the coded messages, they all faded away and the music became all there was for the people there who had so much courage and you know, we're constantly battling, you know, whatever was going to happen to them for their activism, saying music was the time when in their brains they could be totally one percent free. There was a lot of emotion when we played with the Phantom Orchestra, not just from them but from the audience, and we were really floating when we left that room that night. As they went back out into the night, they tried to recall all the details that they would later code into their music. What they would eventually tell the world was going on behind the Iron curtain. A marriage announcement here, a family history there. And the hope was once the world knew they existed, they'd have the leverage they needed to force officials in the Soviet Union to let them go. And I think that's part of what the goal of many of the folks was is. You know, if your story is never told, it's like it hasn't happened. So it was really important to get stories out there. It means you exist and other people know you exist. As they left the Goudava's house that night, Merrily and her friends were more than just musicians. They were messengers and now they just had to get home. Not long after the Secret concert, the Boston musicians awoke to an early morning call at the hotel. We were told to be down in the office at you know, whatever time. It was pretty early, and they hand us a baggy they were the Soviet authorities, with a tea bag and a hard boiled egg and a piece of salami, I think, and maybe some crackers, and they keep us very separated from everybody else. Their minders made clear they knew that Merril and Hankis and the others had met with the Fantom Orchestra, and they weren't happy about it. They took their passports, put them into cars and just started driving. And then they drove us for what seemed to be like hours and hours, and I thought, oh, man, now they're really going to do it. They're gonna lock us up. Hours later, they ended up at the airport, and while they didn't end up in a Soviet prison, they were told they were going to be thrown out of the country deported. But before they could go, there would be one more search. Though this time the four actually had even more to hide, not just the names and addresses of contacts, but now they had their stories and messages for the West. I remember being surrounded by military and they go through all of our stuff again and again. They went through every single page in my music and eventually handed it right back. The stories they smuggled out went very public once they returned to the States. There were speeches and congressional hearings and calls to help the Goldsteins and Gudavas and other refusniks who wanted to leave the Soviet Union. Remember, the purpose of their trip was to draw world attention to the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, and it worked. The following year, the Goldsteins were allowed to immigrate to Israel, and while the Gudavas were initially jailed after the concert, accused of taking part in treason as activity and blame for the hearings that took place on Capitol Hill, the two were finally released in April nineteen eighty seven on the condition that they leave the Soviet Union. They arrived in Boston that September. The crazy thing is the more things change, the more they stay the same. Tens of thousands of Jews have left Russias since Putin's invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, and now Moscow is moving to close a nonprofit organization that helps them emigrate to Israel. It's called the Jewish Agency for Israel and it's operated in Russia since nineteen eighty nine. That story came to us from click Here, a podcast about the world of cyber and intelligence. You can listen to more episodes every Tuesday. Wherever you get your podcasts, just search for click here.

Pushkin. Hey, last Archive listeners, we have something special for you today. As you know, we love uncovering forgotten stories from history, and we wanted to share another podcast that has that same passion. The show is called click Here and it tells stories about the world of cyber and intelligence. Former NPR Investigations correspondent Dina Temple Raston is the host. The episode You're about to hear is about a group of American musicians who smuggled messages in and out of the former Soviet Union in an ingenious way by burying code in their music. Here comes the episode. You can find click here wherever you get your podcasts. It's nineteen eighty five and Soviet Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev is the head of the Communist part and his great opening to the West Glasnows and Parastroika is still just a glimmer in his i. Nineteen eighty five was still the time of that old Soviet Union, the one with defections and the KGB, And into this world stepped the most unlikely of people, four members of a klezmer ensemble from Boston. Klezmer is a kind of Jewish folk music. It's secular music and if you've heard Fiddler on the Roof, it's kind of in that style, but more authentic. Merril Goldberg is a professor of music at cal State sam Marcos and that's her on the saxophone. But back in the day she was part of a pretty famous Klesmer ensemble called the Klezmer Conservatory Band. And they had heard about a group in the Soviet Union that went by a very intriguing name, the Phantom Orchestra. So we first heard of the Phantom Orchestra through the network of people who were working in the eighties trying to help people escape from the Soviet Union. They were musicians like them. We started thinking we ought to find out about these people. These musicians were known as refuse Nicks because they wanted to leave the Soviet Union but the authorities refused to give them permission. They were called the Phantom Orchestra because they really had to play somewhat in secret, right, So if they had gone out and decided, oh, we're going to play in the park, they would have been picked up and arrested. Most of them had already been either imprisoned or beat up, or had a lot of issues already. They'd gotten fired from their jobs, drummed out of academic and professional associations, and would even get beaten up just for declaring openly that they wanted to immigrate. So when the opportunity of actually going to the Soviet Union presented itself, it all struck a chord with Merril and her friends in the Klezmer group. My friend hankas Nevsky, who is a wonderful musician and teaches at New England Conservatory of Music where I was a student, and he approached her with this crazy idea. The actual ask was to go over to the Soviet Union in secret essentially and meet with refused Nicks, mostly focus in on the Phantom Orchestra members, and to find out information about what they were doing, who they were, how they wanted their stories to get out. They were four simple musicians from Boston, a saxophonist, singer, a guitarist and accordion player, and they were going to go toe to toe with one of the world's largest secret police forces. So when he asked me, oh, my first reaction I think was that sounds crazy cool. I'm in. I'm Dina Temple arrested and this is click here a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. Today, at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron curtain, We're going to take you back behind it with a story about a very different kind of code than the Zeros and ones we usually talk about. This code was made of music, and it was used to smuggle distant messages in and out of the Soviet Union. I remember thinking, we're musicians, just creating a code in music would be the easiest way to go about this. Merrill will play us out. It's no small thing deciding to travel to the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties to secretly help people escape, even if you were a trained spy, much less a musician from Boston and you think they're professions, might actually be a liability. But in a weird way, it became a strength. It was the perfect cover story and innocent looking cultural exchange. We're just some American musicians trying to bridge the cultural divide in the eighties. At that time, the more publicity of rashiznik or dissident had, the more protection they would have from being imprisoned or beaten up or whatever would happen to them. But if the West knew about them, they had a better shot at getting out. So coding music to sneak out messages and details about people who are trying to escape wasn't a completely new idea. Marily and her friends had a model Josephine Baker table version that's Baker's singing. She was a Paris celebrity, a singer, a dancer at Bon Vivant in the nineteen twenties, thirties and forties. She was famous for walking her pete down the chains in Lize, and she also happened to be working for the French Resistance. She'd sing at parties, chat up important people, and then pass along what she'd learned to the Allies. Her dispatches were the stuff of legend. She'd learned details about German troop movements or supply lines, and then smuggled the information out to the Allies by writing messages in invisible ink. She wrote on Sheep music between the notes. In the nineteen eighties, when Merrill was trying to work out how to bring coded messages into the Soviet Union, she went a step further. Her code was embedded in the music itself. I studied music in school so I assumed she must have created something from the staff. Those five lines and poor spaces that are the basis of musical notation are represented by letters. The five lines are E, B, D, and F, and the four spaces represent the notes fac except that wouldn't get you the whole alphabet. You know, with the regular notes you only have eight through G, So then you have the problem of twenty six letters with you know, only eight notes. Although what I did, without giving it away, was I created a situation using chromatics. Chromatics the twelve half steps when you play the black and white keys on a piano, and using different notes, figured out all twenty six. I had three leftover ones like x y Z, but you don't use x y z all that much. So if someone knew music, they'd look at it and they'd think, uh, that's modern music. Is there anything that you have that you coded that you might be able to play for us so that we have some idea of what that would sound like. Yeah, sure, So Merril picks up her saxophone. Here, all play a little bit for you. Believe it or not. There's actually the name of a dissonant coded in those notes. This one was intro to a new person that they wanted us to meet and was a musician, and it was for someone in Moscow. Marilyn Hankis and the other members of the Klesmer Band spent months preparing for the trip. It was more than just inventing a new way to code messages, though they did that too. The people at the Action for Soviet Jewelry gave them a crash course in tradecraft. We had to have several months of kind of a learning curve and figuring out how we would go in without giving up who we were. And it didn't take long to put all that to use. In fact, the group needed it as soon as they landed. So we land in Moscow and we get off the plane. People are talking in little little microphones and we think, oh oh oh, because the authorities seem to have been expecting them. There were at least two of them, and they took us aside. That's hankas Netsky, the teacher who brought up this whole idea to Meryl, and they told us to get our luggage, but not go anywhere, to bring the luggage into the I guess interrogation room. Definitely we were flagged. There's no question about it and sit with an agent. They start going through everything, and I mean absolutely everything, opening up every single thing we have, including Meryll's music. They're going page by page by page. She held her breath, kept their gaze, and then after what seemed like an eternity, they just hand it right back to me. Oh, it was just really fantastic. It was seven hours before they were permitted to leave the airport. There was one guy who spoke only in Russian and banged his fist on the table the entire time. When they were finally allowed to go, they had this sense that while the first hurdle was behind them, what lay ahead would be much harder. The Phantom Orchestra was based in Tablusi, Georgia, which was still a Soviet republic at the time the mission Merril and Hankas and their friends had chosen to accept involved trying to meet up with four of its members. Two were from a well known family of Jewish dissidents, Grigory and Easie Goldstein, and the other two were calling for Georgian independence, Teenis and Eduard Gudava, both of whom had been sentenced two years of hard labor for their activism. All four were considered enemies of the state, which meant they were definitely being watched and their phones were tapped, so it would be tricky for Merril and her crew to make contact with them. I had the directions to their apartment actually encoded in my music, and that's how we were remembered how to get there. I'm sure we stuck out and we didn't know who to trust, who not to trust. What they did know was that someone was following them. We noticed, for example, that we would walk up the street and the last car on the block would flash its lights, and then we'd cross the street, and then the first car on the next block would flash its lights, and then the same thing would happen on the next block. So it sure seemed like there was something going on. So I remember we went to our hotel room and interestingly enough, the sink was leaking, and they said as much out loud that it was too bad the sink was leaking, and then when we got back from dinner, the sink was fixed. So that's how closely we were being monitored. Marilyn Hankis and the two other Klesmer band members, Jeff and Rosalie, found themselves in the middle of a Cold war thriller. They'd go to ballet and museums one day, hoping to throw the authorities off the scent, and then rush off to go and meet Dissonance the next, hoping their basic tradecraft wouldn't put their contacts in danger. We devised, in our young brains, which now seems kind of cuckoo, that all of us would get on the subway because we had to take a subway to get to the gold Steam's apartment first to make contact. The apartment was into Belize, Georgia, and the directions to get there were buried in their musical notation code. They didn't have a telephone. We couldn't call them. We had to just try to find them, so to lose whoever was following them. They came up with what they thought was an ingenious plan, and so we're all going to get on the subway, and then we're all going to get off, and Rosie and I are going to jump back on. Then the tail would have to choose between the two groups, and we thought it worked. They spent hours walking around buildings and doubling back and climbing dark and stairwells, until finally they find themselves at the door of an apartment and they knock and east Side Goldstein in the door. And the gods were the first family that we visited. First thing we say is we think we've outwitted them, but you know we've been interrogated. Tell us if you want us just to turn around and go away. Gregory Goldstein walks over to the window. There were four cars. He pointed too. He said, these are all KGB and they laughed at us, like, of course you're being followed, and please come in, because it's way more important for you to come in. We need you to visit. We need you to tell our story when we come back. A secret concert with a phantom orchestra, probably the most profound music making I have ever in my entire life made. The phantom orchestra, of course, couldn't play openly in a concert hall. I thought they'd be playing in some secret venue after hours. But they actually had their concerts in an apartment, the Gudava's apartment, typical small apartment. They had an upright piano and a couple of music stands, and the Goudavas had at least one guitar, maybe two. The musicians gathered along with an audience of neighbors. The chairs went into the other room, I remember, and the idea was, hey, look we have visitors. They're musicians. It's time for the Phantom Orchestra to come meet and play a concert in the room. There was a palpable mix of excitement, damned a little fear. It wasn't about playing music with the Phantom Orchestra that frightened them. They were all prose at that. It was about what might follow the consequences of an impromptu concert with a room full of dissidents. And I think making music in and of itself is not such a big deal. Of course, it was the people who they were making music with that made it into a really big deal. Were you waiting for the KGB to burst in any moment? What was going through your twenty six year old head. My twenty six year old head was like living in the moment. I will tell you that Merrill and Hankis remembered the whole evening as if it were yesterday. I do remember just being transported that it was this feeling perhaps of amazement, of relief, of immediate camaraderie. There was klezmer music and traditional songs, and then this moment when everything seemed to come together with the standard that everyone loved, and then everyone who was there, the members of the orchestra, the visiting musician, the audience, they all broke into song. What you're hearing now is actually a Phantom Orchestra recording. It touched us in a way that I hadn't been touched before. And I think because the whole feeling of the song somewhere over the rainbow and the hope in that and for an evening, the Soviet minders, the cloak and dagger, the coded messages, they all faded away and the music became all there was for the people there who had so much courage and you know, we're constantly battling, you know, whatever was going to happen to them for their activism, saying music was the time when in their brains they could be totally one percent free. There was a lot of emotion when we played with the Phantom Orchestra, not just from them but from the audience, and we were really floating when we left that room that night. As they went back out into the night, they tried to recall all the details that they would later code into their music. What they would eventually tell the world was going on behind the Iron curtain. A marriage announcement here, a family history there. And the hope was once the world knew they existed, they'd have the leverage they needed to force officials in the Soviet Union to let them go. And I think that's part of what the goal of many of the folks was is. You know, if your story is never told, it's like it hasn't happened. So it was really important to get stories out there. It means you exist and other people know you exist. As they left the Goudava's house that night, Merrily and her friends were more than just musicians. They were messengers and now they just had to get home. Not long after the Secret concert, the Boston musicians awoke to an early morning call at the hotel. We were told to be down in the office at you know, whatever time. It was pretty early, and they hand us a baggy they were the Soviet authorities, with a tea bag and a hard boiled egg and a piece of salami, I think, and maybe some crackers, and they keep us very separated from everybody else. Their minders made clear they knew that Merril and Hankis and the others had met with the Fantom Orchestra, and they weren't happy about it. They took their passports, put them into cars and just started driving. And then they drove us for what seemed to be like hours and hours, and I thought, oh, man, now they're really going to do it. They're gonna lock us up. Hours later, they ended up at the airport, and while they didn't end up in a Soviet prison, they were told they were going to be thrown out of the country deported. But before they could go, there would be one more search. Though this time the four actually had even more to hide, not just the names and addresses of contacts, but now they had their stories and messages for the West. I remember being surrounded by military and they go through all of our stuff again and again. They went through every single page in my music and eventually handed it right back. The stories they smuggled out went very public once they returned to the States. There were speeches and congressional hearings and calls to help the Goldsteins and Gudavas and other refusniks who wanted to leave the Soviet Union. Remember, the purpose of their trip was to draw world attention to the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, and it worked. The following year, the Goldsteins were allowed to immigrate to Israel, and while the Gudavas were initially jailed after the concert, accused of taking part in treason as activity and blame for the hearings that took place on Capitol Hill, the two were finally released in April nineteen eighty seven on the condition that they leave the Soviet Union. They arrived in Boston that September. The crazy thing is the more things change, the more they stay the same. Tens of thousands of Jews have left Russias since Putin's invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, and now Moscow is moving to close a nonprofit organization that helps them emigrate to Israel. It's called the Jewish Agency for Israel and it's operated in Russia since nineteen eighty nine. That story came to us from click Here, a podcast about the world of cyber and intelligence. You can listen to more episodes every Tuesday. Wherever you get your podcasts, just search for click here.