Sculptor Jim Sanborn opened his email account last month expecting the usual messages from people claiming to have solved his famous, decades-old riddle.
Sanborn’s best-known work, Kryptos, is in a courtyard at the CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA. A sculpture that evokes and embodies secrets, Kryptos displays four messages encrypted in letters cut into its curved copper plate. Since the agency opened it in 1990, professional and amateur cryptographers had deciphered three of the sections, known as K1, K2 and K3.
But the fourth, K4, remained stubbornly indecipherable.
FREE TOOL
XP simulator
Find out in 1 minute how much your money can yield
Sanborn, 79, was in the final stages of auctioning off the solution to the riddle. The auction house estimated that the text of this excerpt, along with other papers and artifacts related to the sculpture, would fetch between US$300,000 and 500,000. He said he plans to use the money to help cover medical expenses in potential health crises and to fund programs for people with disabilities.
But the email he received on September 3 threatened that plan. The subject contained the first words of the final excerpt of K4. The body of the email showed the rest of the deciphered text.
What led to this moment was a mix of mishandled documents and a nerdy spy investigation. An amateur cryptographer and his friend discovered that the solution was there for all to see, for anyone willing to dig through the archives of the Smithsonian Institution.
Continues after advertising
The hidden text had been discovered, with potentially damaging effects on the sale — what value is a secret that someone else already knows?
The person who found the solution, Jarett Kobek, is a journalist and writer, and has long been fascinated by Sanborn’s work. In the advertisement for RR Auction, the company running the auction, he saw a reference to copies of the “coding charts” used to encrypt the message; the originals, it said, were in the Smithsonian.
Kobek lives in California. So he asked a friend in the Washington area, Richard Byrne, a journalist and playwright, to request Sanborn’s papers from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Byrne spent hours photographing documents in the archives on September 2. That night, Kobek, while reviewing the images sent by his friend, saw pieces of paper, some held together by yellowish tape, and was startled: “Hey — that says ‘BERLIN CLOCK’!”
Those two words were clues to K4 that Sanborn had released in 2010 and 2014. Another piece had more of what appeared to be the original, unencoded message, known in cryptography as “plaintext,” including the words “EAST NORTHEAST” — two clues released in 2020. Together, they were 97 characters, the number of characters in K4, which he assembled into a readable snippet.
“This is a problem that everyone has attacked as a STEM problem,” Kobek said in an interview, referring to the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics that underlie cryptography. Cryptographic science, he argued, could not solve Kryptos — “but library science could.”
Continues after advertising
Byrne likened their discovery to open source intelligence.
On September 3, the men sent an email to Sanborn, including the assurance that their “primary concern” was “moving forward without jeopardizing their upcoming auction.” They had a half-hour call in which Sanborn confirmed they had the solution.
Kobek remembered it as “a perfectly pleasant conversation.”
Continues after advertising
But later that night, a second conversation took a sobering turn, Kobek recalled. He said Sanborn proposed that they both sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and then they could receive a share of the auction proceeds.
Both Kobek and Byrne said they had to reject the bid, in part out of fear that it would make them “fraud participants” in the auction, Kobek said.
Kobek and Byrne suggested that there should be a way to publicize the fact that the last panel’s solution had been discovered while keeping the auction going.
Continues after advertising
The call ended in a stalemate: Sanborn didn’t want them to talk, and they were offended by the suggestion that they sign an agreement to remain silent. The offer of money was also displeased.
“It’s a complete red line,” Byrne said. “No way. It won’t happen.”
Sanborn explained in an interview that he created the pieces of paper the men found to share the text with the CIA. He mistakenly included them in the folders he put together about 10 years ago.
Continues after advertising
This happened during his treatment for metastatic cancer. “I didn’t know how much time I had left and I hurriedly gathered all my papers” for the archives, he said. He was shocked to realize, years later, that the pieces had ended up in the collection.
Since then, Sanborn has exchanged messages with Kobek and Byrne, but they have not reached a resolution.
At the same time, on the internet’s largest forum for Kryptos enthusiasts, the auction catalog sparked a discussion about the Smithsonian treasure. On September 5, a member noticed that the documents had been sealed and were no longer accessible. This was the work of Sanborn, who, after talking to Kobek and Byrne, managed to get the institution to block access to the material until 2075.
Sanborn said his initial reaction to the email and calls from Kobek and Byrne was confusion. “I didn’t know what their intentions were,” he said. He remembered telling them: “If you publicize this, the auction is over.”
Kobek, a longtime fan of Sanborn’s work, said he was devastated by the events of recent weeks.
“If I had known, my God! I would never have sent Rich to that library,” he said.
Kobek and Byrne initially told Sanborn they were willing to keep the text private to avoid disrupting the auction. But in interviews, they have said that the burden of keeping the secret in the overexposed world of Kryptos fans is too great, and they fear that they may be forced to release the plain text.
Sanborn acknowledged that keeping the secret could be a burden: His computer had been hacked repeatedly over the years, he said, and obsessive fans of the work had threatened him. “I sleep with a shotgun,” he said.
If the two men reveal the text, he warned, “it will be much worse,” he said. “The world of Kryptos will attack you,” he said. “They will be pariahs for disclosing it.”
The auction house is not standing still.
Last week, Kobek and Byrne received an email from RR Auction’s lawyers threatening legal action if they published the text, citing copyright infringement and interference with contracts.
In a very different tone, the letter also stated that if the two did not publish the text, “they will be seen as heroes by the cipher and intelligence communities,” a “story” that their client “would gladly help promote.”
Both find the legal argument dubious and have hired lawyers. But they also recognize the crushing cost of defending themselves.
They say they do not plan to publicize the solution. But they are also not inclined to sign a legal document promising not to do so.
Bidding began on Thursday and runs until November 20th. The auction house announced the discovery of the solution on its website.
Thomas C. Danziger, a lawyer who represents clients in the art market, said that as long as the message remains secret, such disclosure is “the best practice.” And while “this will presumably impact the value” of the sale, “it should still be cheaper than facing litigation with an unhappy buyer later.”
Danziger said revealing the plain text could have a profound impact on the auction. But while it may dampen bidders’ enthusiasm, he said, “the auction room is a strange place.”
He cited a famous example: a Banksy work that was destroyed after initially selling for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s in London, which “only served to substantially increase its value.”
In the case of Kryptos, “the secret is being destroyed before the eyes of the world,” he said. “Does that mean it has less value? Or more value? I don’t know.”
Elonka Dunin, a game designer who helps lead the most active online discussion about Kryptos, said in an interview that she hopes the text is not released. But for true lovers of cryptographic skill, he said, the real challenge is not having the answer, but knowing how to get to it. “That’s the exciting part for me,” and, he proposed, “the true value” in the auction.
“If they don’t have the method,” he said, “it’s not solved,” he said.
c.2025 The New York Times Company
