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Jim Sanborn couldn\u2019t believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4\u2014wrong without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jarett Kobek, which started, \u201cI believe the text of K4 is as follows \u2026\u201d He\u2019d seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time, the text was correct.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in shock,\u201d Sanborn tells me. \u201cReal serious shock.\u201d The timing was awful. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way for someone to continue his work of vetting potential solutions while maintaining the mystery of Kryptos. He\u2019d also been looking forward to getting compensated for his work. What came next was even more shattering. He quickly got on the phone with Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne, who gobsmacked him by reporting they did not find the solution by codebreaking. Instead, Kobek had learned from the auction notice that some Kryptos materials were held at the Smithsonian\u2019s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Kobek, a California novelist (one of his books is called I Hate the Internet<\/em>), got his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the holdings. To Kobek\u2019s astonishment, two of the images contained a 97-character passage with words that Sanborn had previously dropped as clues. He was staring at the full unencrypted text that CIA and NSA codebreakers, along with countless academics and hobbyists, had sought for decades.<\/p>\n The secret of Kryptos was out of the artist\u2019s hands, in the most humiliating way imaginable\u2014Sanborn himself had mistakenly submitted it in readable form to the museum. For 35 years the Kryptos plaintext had been a summit that none had reached. Suddenly some had attained it\u2014not by climbing to the peak but by hitching a ride to the top. Sanborn\u2019s grand vision for a piece of art that illuminated the idea of secrecy itself was imperiled\u2014as was the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do about it.<\/p>\n The initial phone call had been friendly. Kobek and Byrne insisted that they did not want to mess up the auction. After he hung up, Sanborn called the auction house. That\u2019s when things started going sideways. As Sanborn tells me, \u201cThey said, \u2018Listen, see if the guys will sign NDAs, and see if they'll take a portion of the proceeds.\u2019 And I said, \u2018Oh geez, man, I don't know about that. But I offered it.\u201d<\/p>\n Kobek and Byrne were uncomfortable with that arrangement and refused to sign. (RR Auction executive vice president Bobby Livingston didn\u2019t comment on the legal issue but says of an NDA, \u201cIt\u2019s something that would be comforting to our clients.\u201d) Sanborn told them his intent was to get the Smithsonian to freeze the archives\u2014which it did. He assumed Kobek and Byrne would stay silent. \u201cIf you don't release it, you're heroes to me,\u201d Sanborn told them.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought everything was OK,\u201d he says, \u201cAnd then all of a sudden [the journalist] John Schwartz calls me and says these guys want to publish it in The New York Times.\u201d Kobek explains to me that they contacted Schwartz in part to relieve some legal pressure. \u201cThere was threat after threat being sent to us from the auction house's lawyers, threatening to sue us for a multitude of things,\u201d he says. (When I ask Livingston if his lawyers have been contacting Kobek, he says, \u201cThere\u2019s lawyers talking to each other,\u201d and adds that there may well be copyright concerns if Kobek and Byrne published the plaintext.) On October 16, Schwartz published his scoop, informing the world that the plaintext was out.<\/p>\n Sanborn tells me that Kobek shared the plaintext with Schwartz over the phone.. When asked about this, Kobek says, \u201cI cannot speak about that\u2026I am under significant legal peril.\u201d Schwartz says. \u201cOnce my editors decided it would not be revealed in the story, I deleted the text from my interviews file. I don\u2019t know it.\u201d (So don\u2019t bug him.)<\/p>\n RR Auction now has a disclaimer on the description of the Kryptos lot, noting the Smithsonian discovery. \u201cThe researchers have stated they do not plan to release the solution,\u201d it reads, though RR also acknowledges that there is no assurance that the solution won\u2019t spill at some point. \u201cIt certainly has an effect on the auction,\u201d says Livingston. \u201cBut we're moving forward with it, with the disclosure of what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n Livingston points out that the firm is auctioning off not just the K4 plaintext, but a set of objects that have worth on their own, including the coding charts, the original handwritten plaintext, a unique \u201cproof of concept\u201d copper plate, and Sanborn\u2019s CIA visitor badge. For collectors of cryptographic history, or even art fanatics, those goodies might be irresistible. Sanborn has also pledged to spend an afternoon walking the winner through the Kryptos story, with guidance on how to keep it going.<\/p>\n With the news that at least two people have the K4 plaintext, RR and Sanborn have shifted their focus to a different aspect of the Kryptos secrecy. In recent months, Sanborn has been talking more about the fact that the ultimate solution to Kryptos is not the decrypted plaintext but another mystery that will emerge when the plaintext is available. Kind of like finishing off the big boss in a video game and then finding out there\u2019s another villain to conquer. \u201cI said years ago, there's something after Kryptos,\u201d he now says. \u201c It's a riddle. It means something. It leads somewhere else. And then all of a sudden it started getting named K5.\u201d Sanborn is vague on the nature of K5. Is it one of the test passages Sanborn made in 1988 when he was trying to see what would fit on the face of the sculpture? Something that involves other parts of the CIA installation? Or a different Sanborn puzzle altogether? In any case, Sanborn and his auction house are now touting the K5 solution as part of the prize.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to belittle the fact that, despite Kobek\u2019s discovery, K4 is in no way solved. The Kryptos mystique has endured largely because for 35 years the ciphertext has confounded the world\u2019s best codebreakers. Elonka Dunin, a leader of the community devoted to endless speculation about the Kryptos solution, says she hasn\u2019t detected a slackening of interest after hearing about the Smithsonian discovery. She says that Kryptos-world is more upset about the fact that the solution will be auctioned off\u2014adding uncertainty to the 35-year-old chase\u2014than at the fact that two random researchers found a copy of the plaintext. (Pretty much everyone thinks Sanborn deserves a better retirement nest egg.) To her, the real quest is to actually crack the code, a sentiment that Sanborn avidly shares. \u201cThey only discovered it, they did not decipher it,\u201d he tells me.<\/p>\n Right now, the parties have reached an uneasy stasis. The auction is now open; as I write this, the high bid has topped $43,000. The auction house hasn\u2019t changed its estimated $300,000 closing bid. Kobek says he wishes he had never sent Byrne to the Smithsonian in the first place. \u201cIt\u2019s a sad story, in a way,\u201d he tells me. Sanborn is in agony.<\/p>\n Still, I don\u2019t think the Kryptos saga has been irrevocably tarnished. I always saw Sanborn\u2019s artwork as a brilliant commentary on the shadow world of spookdom, where nothing is as it seems and outcomes often come without clarity. To date, the machinations of solving Kryptos\u2014or even figuring out if it could<\/em> be solved\u2014have been on a high level, a complex web of shadows that John le Carr\u00e9 might have spun. The anticlimactic discovery of the plaintext, due to Sanborn\u2019s slip, has shifted the narrative to the tragicomic purgatory of Mick Herron\u2019s Slough House series.<\/p>\n There\u2019s still a chance for a satisfying ending. Sanborn\u2019s hope in auctioning off the solution has always been that the winning bidder will continue the process of vetting guesses until someone finally arrives at the answer via math and grit. To help his successor, Sanborn\u2019s been working with technologist and entrepreneur Igor Jablokov to build an AI system that can autonomously sift through the guesses. Jablokov described it to me as a virtual Sanborn.<\/p>\n Jablokov is a rabid Kryptos fan; he even owns a unique replica of the sculpture that was created for an episode of the TV show Alias<\/em>. He\u2019s also wealthy, having sold his first company to Amazon. He tells me that earlier this year when he heard of Sanborn\u2019s financial situation, he offered to buy the solution and take over the vetting. Sanborn could not explore that option because he\u2019d already agreed to do the auction.<\/p>\n Hearing this, it dawns on me that I might be talking to the eventual winning bidder for the Kryptos secret\u2014and the person who will continue to protect its remaining secrets. I ask Jablokov whether he is going to do just that. The pause after my question indicates I might have hit paydirt. \u201cI\u2019ll leave that to ambiguity,\u201d he says. \u201cBut obviously I'm an actor, an interested party.\u201d We\u2019ll see what happens on November 20 when the auction closes. I suspect that no matter the outcome, ambiguity and mystery will still pervade one of the greatest art projects of our time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Jim Sanborn couldn\u2019t believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36341,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36340","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Enter: The Media<\/h2>\n