The decades-old mystery at the heart of the CIA's Kryptos sculpture was finally solved—not by cryptography, but by library sleuthing and a bit of misplaced paperwork. For more than 30 years, Jim Sanborn's copper artwork outside CIA headquarters in Virginia has taunted codebreakers with its four encrypted passages. Three were cracked in the 1990s, the decade it went up, but the fourth, known as K4, remained unbroken until two journalists stumbled on the answer in the Smithsonian archives, the New York Times reports.
Sanborn had been preparing to auction off the solution for an estimated $300,000 to $500,000 to help cover medical expenses and support disability programs. But a Sept. 3 email from journalist-novelist Jarett Kobek—subject line: the first words of K4—upended those plans. Kobek, curious about the auction, had spotted a reference to coding charts in the Smithsonian. He enlisted DC-based friend Richard Byrne to sift through the archives. In Byrne's photos, Kobek spotted scraps of paper with clues Sanford released in 2010 and 2014 and eventually pieced together K4's uncoded message. He says cryptographic science couldn't solve Kryptos, "but library science could."
- The revelation threw the auction plan into chaos. Sanborn, blindsided, asked the pair to sign NDAs and stay quiet in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Kobek says they refused, fearing it would make them "party to fraud." Now, they're caught in a standoff: They don't want to publish the text, but they're not promising silence, either.
RR Auction has warned them about copyright and contract interference and told them "they will be looked upon as heroes to the cipher and intelligence communities" if they don't publish the text. Sanford says he mistakenly included the paper scraps in a folder he hastily gathered during cancer treatment 10 years ago. He says his initial reaction to the men was "frazzled" because he didn't know their motives, the Times reports. Kobek tells the Times that he has long been a fan of Sanford's work and he is devastated by how things have turned out. "If I had known, my God! I never would have sent Rich to this library," he says. The Smithsonian has now blocked access to the material until 2075.
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The RR Auctions listing stresses that the journalists do not plan to release the answer, and that auction materials, including the coding system, "provide the only authorized path to understanding how K4 functions as an artistic statement." Game developer and cryptographer Elonka Dunin, co-moderator of one the biggest Kryptos fan groups, tells Scientific American that many people over the years have claimed to have solved K4, "but if they can't show the method, they just get booted out of the room." She adds: "For a piece of art, if you can get someone's attention for 10 minutes, that's pretty good. Sanborn now has a piece of art that has held people's attention for 35 years."
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