Solution goes on auction for CIA HQ’s ‘Kryptos’ sculpture

The solution for 'K4’, a source of fascination among thousands of obsessive ‘Kryptos’ fans, is being auctioned

- Agencies

When Jim Sanborn was commissioned to create a sculpture at CIA headquarters, he wanted to do something that to spoke to its world of spies and secret codes.

The result was a 10-foot-tall, S-shaped copper screen called Kryptos that resembles a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side features a series of staggered alphabets that are key for decoding the four encrypted messages on the other side. The paragraphs, he said, were “designed to unravel like a ball of string” or “nesting Russian dolls” and get increasingly difficult.

“At the time, codes and encoding was an esoteric subject,” Sanborn said. “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.”

Sanborn figured the first three messages on the 1990 sculpture, known as K1, K2 and K3, would be cracked relatively quickly, and they were. He came up with the texts, and a retired CIA cryptographer showed him systems for encoding them.

But 35 years later, the fourth, K4, remains a mystery and a source of obsessive fascination among thousands of “Kryptos” fans. One person has contacted Sanborn every week for the past 20 years trying to solve K4, and the artist was getting so many inquiries that he began charging $50 per submission to make it more manageable.

Now Sanborn, who at age 79 has had a series of health scares in recent years, is auctioning off the solution to K4, anointing a new Kryptos keeper who he hopes will keep its secret and continue interacting with followers.