We get a monthly magazine from an investment firm and looking through the last issue, there was an article titled “The Mysteries of History.” It had brief paragraphs about a lot of “mysteries” both past and present. It mentioned things like Big Foot, The Lost Colony, the Lizzy Borden Home, Area 51/UFOs, the Escape from Alcatraz, and things like that.
I thought this might be a good time to talk about a present day mystery — one that’s a lot closer to my life than you might know….
Krypton is a sculpture located in the courtyard at the CIA’s headquarters. The sculpture is a 12-foot tall, S-shaped copper scroll supported by a petrified tree.The scroll is made up of four panels, stacked and welded together. The bend of the S and the position of onlookers determines how lines are read — left to right, backward and forward. The four panels contain four encrypted messages — altogether there are 1,735 letters on the scroll.
The sculpture is known as Kryptos — the Greek word for “hidden.” The letters look like gibberish because it’s a cipher. The sculpture was created by Washington native, Jim Sanborn. And it was his idea to place it in the courtyard at CIA — a very appropriate place considering CIA has some of the best cryptographers in the world.
The sculpture contains four encrypted messages. It was dedicated in 1990 by CIA Director William Webster and thirty three years later, only three of the messages have been decoded, or “solved.” NSA was able to decode the first three messages pretty quickly by using computers. Much more impressive is the fact that CIA employee David Stein decoded the messages by hand in 1999. He estimates that it took about 400 hours of painstaking, convoluted thinking to break the codes.
Something that isn’t well known about Kryptos is that the scroll isn’t all there is to it. Scattered around the courtyard there are shrubs, some polished granite formations, a koi pond, etc. — all part of Kryptos. Those granite structures can also be found elsewhere on the grounds — one has a Morse code motif, and another has a compass rose pointing at — the unknown?
Now here’s why I mentioned that I feel a bit of a connection to Kryptos — while Sanborn created the Kryptos sculpture, the task of writing the cipher fell to a CIA employee that I know very well, and served with on several assignments at various places in the world. We are both the same age and retired roughly about the same time. Sanborn contacted my friend and they met at secret locations in the Washington area and they wrote down almost nothing and didn’t use electronic devices. To Sunburn’s credit he was able to remember their conversations well enough to get back to his studio and hammer out the messages — that probably explains the few minor mistakes in the code on the panels.
The first three panels of the sculpture were designed not to last a long time, but with the fourth panel, the two wanted to “make it a challenge.” If you’re interested, you can find the encoded text of Kryptos on the Internet — including Section IV that ,as of today, remains a mystery.
The message of Kryptos, and a partial guide to its solution, is contained in the panels of the sculpture. The passages follow a theme of concealment and discovery — each more difficult to decipher than the last.
The first reads: BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION.” (The misspelling was intentional, according to Mr. Sanborn, to make it more difficult to decode — or, as he put it, “to mix it up.”)
The second includes the location of the CIA headquarters by latitude and longitude and then asks: “DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS? THEY SHOULD: IT’S BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE. X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION? ONLY WW.” (The WW is a reference to William Webster, the head of the CIA when the sculpture was unveiled. It’s said that Mr. Sanborn provided him with a key for deciphering the message.)
The third panel paraphrases, again with a bit of misspelling, the account by the Egyptologist Howard Carter of opening King Tut’s tomb: “SLOWLY, DEPARATLY, SLOWLY, THE REMINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED. WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT-HAND CORNER. AND THEN, WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE, I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN. THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER, BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST. XCAN YOU SEE ANYTHING? Q” (The enciphered texts didn’t include any punctuation — any punctuation was added after the text was deciphered.)
The fourth section is shorter than the others, it’s just 97 characters. That fact could, in itself, present a decryption challenge — common solution methods rely on the frequency of the most common letters. The last passage also uses what is known as a masking technique, a further level of obfuscation.
As I said, the fourth Section has not been solved. Over the years, Mr. Sanborn has offered “clues” to help unravel the mystery ‚ they are in the form of “cribs” that are words or phrases that appear in the decrypted text. In 2010, his clue was BERLiN. In 2014 he reveled the word CLOCK. His last clue was the word NORTHEAST.
Jim Sanborn is now 74 or 75 year old. What if Section IV isn’t solved before he dies? He has apparently decided that if the code is not broken when he dies, the secret will be put up for auction. He said the buyer could reveal the secret or perpetuate the mystery. The money raised would go to funding climate science. When asked why that particular cause, he said it “seemed like a no brainer to me.”
So maybe the fourth passage will turn out to be unsolvable, but probably sooner or later someone will figure out the plain text of that final passage. But — that won’t be the end of the mysteries of Kryptos. The full text contains a riddle. There will be yet another mystery that the four passages together have a meaning that’s greater than their individual pieces and there’s something more to figure out. The sculpture is more than the scroll — there are scraps of Morse code scattered through the elements around the scroll, as well as a pillar of petrified wood, a swirling pool, slabs of granite — and more. The full mystery of Kryptos could involve the broader assemblage of pieces and their relationships to each other.
So there’s sill lots and lots to learn about the mysteries of Kryptos — the sculpture that just keeps on giving….
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