Artist Jim Sanborn is auctioning off the complete solution to one of the world's most famous unsolved puzzles - the fourth encrypted message of his Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters. The 79-year-old sculptor, facing recent health issues, has decided to pass the secrets of the cryptographic artwork to a new keeper through a Boston-based auction house.
The Kryptos sculpture, a 10-foot-tall S-shaped copper screen installed at CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia in 1990, has captivated puzzle enthusiasts worldwide for over three decades. Resembling a piece of paper emerging from a fax machine, one side features staggered alphabets that serve as keys to decode four encrypted messages on the reverse side. While the first three sections, known as K1, K2, and K3, were solved relatively quickly as Sanborn had anticipated, the fourth message K4 has remained an impenetrable mystery.
"At the time, codes and encoding was an esoteric subject," Sanborn explained. "I wanted it to be less so, and I wanted it to be fun. Any artist's goal when they make an artwork is to have the viewer's attention for as long as possible." The sculpture has certainly achieved that goal, becoming a global phenomenon that has inspired obsessive dedication among thousands of followers. One particularly devoted fan has contacted Sanborn weekly for the past 20 years attempting to crack K4, and the artist received so many solution attempts that he began charging $50 per submission to manage the overwhelming volume.
RR Auction launched the bidding last month, with the auction running through November 20. The current top bid stands at $201,841 for the complete Kryptos archive. "Since its installation in 1990, Kryptos has become a worldwide phenomenon," said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction. "K4 has stumped professional cryptologists and code breakers as well as amateurs who have tried to solve it and read the message. The winner of this archive is now going to possess the secrets of Kryptos."
The comprehensive archive includes everything necessary to solve K4, along with an additional encrypted paragraph that Sanborn calls K5. Also included are the original coding charts for the previously solved K1, K2, and K3 sections, plus the original scrambled texts that Sanborn showed to the CIA's Department of Historical Intelligence to ensure the agency understood there was nothing problematic on the sculpture. Sanborn, who has created approximately 50 public sculptures including a memorial for a 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas, is best known for Kryptos. The sculpture has achieved popular culture status, with snippets appearing on the dust jacket of Dan Brown's bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" and being mentioned in his novel "The Lost Symbol."
The auction nearly faced derailment in September when writer and researcher Jarett Kobek and playwright Richard Byrne made a startling discovery. Tipped off by the auction listing, they examined Sanborn's papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and found the original scrambled texts for K4. "I had hoped to discover a document that had some vague hint about how K4 was encoded, but was astonished to realize we had stumbled upon the text itself instead," Kobek said.
Sanborn was initially devastated by the discovery. "We just sort of put our heads in our hands," he recalled about his reaction with his wife, artist Jae Ko. "It was miserable, and it's still miserable. It's very difficult. There's a lot of regret and anguish." He has since sealed his papers at the Smithsonian so they cannot be accessed for the next 50 years, and RR Auction removed any mention of the Smithsonian from the auction description.
Despite initially considering canceling the auction, Sanborn decided to proceed, expanding it from just offering K4's secrets to including the entire archive. He maintains that discovering the scrambled text is fundamentally different from actually solving the puzzle. "The important distinction is that they discovered it. They did not decipher it," Sanborn emphasized. "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."
Elonka Dunin, co-moderator of the largest group of Kryptos enthusiasts, reports that most community members want K4 kept secret even after the auction concludes. "There is a very strong desire that we would like to know whether K4 is even solvable," she said. Sanborn designed the encrypted paragraphs to increase progressively in difficulty, "like a ball of string or nesting Russian dolls," with assistance from a retired CIA cryptographer who taught him various encoding systems.
The situation has created tension between the parties involved. Sanborn unsuccessfully asked Kobek and Byrne to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would have included sharing auction proceeds with them. RR Auction sent the pair numerous emails threatening legal action for various claims including trade secret violations and defamation. Despite the controversy, Kobek, who describes himself as a fan of both Kryptos and Sanborn, has no plans to release the text publicly, though he did share it with a New York Times journalist who first reported their discovery. "I'm the first person to say that it was not a mathematically cryptographic solve. One hundred percent," Kobek acknowledged. "But to pretend that this has no connection to the history of cryptography is little more than advertising for an auction."
