Boston-based RR Auction is selling the archive that contains — maybe — the solution to a secret message. That message has befuddled thousands since it was installed 35 years ago in the form of an intriguing, ornamental sculpture in the central plaza of the CIA campus in Langley.
Sculptor Jim Sanborn created the four panels of 1,735 perforated letters that spell out an invisible message right in the faces of some of the world’s best code breakers.
Two of the Kryptos (Greek for “hidden”) panels were cracked pretty quickly by National Security Agency employees using computers. A third was deciphered by hand in 1999 by a CIA employee who spent an estimated 400 hours trying to figure it out.
The Key to K4
But the fourth panel, known as K4, has remained a secret — and has persisted as a burden for the 79-year-old Sandborn. He decided to finally offload the solution at auction after a pair of Kryptos fanatics (Sanborn charges $50 to take calls asking for clues) uncovered Sanborn’s original scrambled texts he used as proofs for the wary CIA in an obscure archive at the Smithsonian.
“The important distinction is that they discovered it,” Sanborn told the Associated Press. “They did not decipher it. They do not have the key. They don’t have the method with which it’s deciphered. To the entire cryptographic community, that method is the real deal, and nobody has the method but me.”
But someone else does have the key — the person who helped devise the method.
Lost amid all of this is the fact that there is one person besides Sanborn who has kept the Kryptos message hidden all these years: Ed M. Scheidt. The longtime McLean resident is the former chair of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center. He retired in 1989, but was lured back into action to help Sanborn devise the befuddling code.
So the key is for sale. But in the end, even if the fourth panel is deciphered, does it make a difference?
Spirit of Discovery
“Kryptos has long been part of the campus landscape — a reminder of the craft, not a test anyone is graded on,” says Larry Pfeiffer, former CIA chief of staff and now executive director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and National Security at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
“I think most CIA officers will take it in stride if the final Kryptos code becomes public. Solved or unsolved, it will still speak to the quiet persistence and curiosity that define the place.”
Kryptos, he says, “has never been just about the answer — it’s been about the spirit of discovery. Making the solution public doesn’t diminish that. It simply adds one more chapter to a story that has been part of the Agency for decades.”
If you can keep a secret, the auction ends Thursday, November 20.
Feature photo courtesy Jim Sanborn
