Inside the Messy, Accidental Kryptos Reveal
Jim Sanborn couldn’t 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, aspiring resolvers continued to pay him a $50 fee to offer their guesses on the remaining unresolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4 – false without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest candidate, Jarett Kobek, which began: “I believe the K4 text is as follows…” He had seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time the text was correct.
“I was in shock,” Sanborn told me. “A real serious shock. » The timing was horrible. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, sees the auction as a way for someone to continue his work of testing potential solutions while preserving the mystery of Kryptos. He also hoped to be paid for his work. What followed was even more shocking. He quickly called Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne, who stunned him by reporting that they had not found the solution by cracking the code. Instead, Kobek had learned through the auction notice that some Kryptos materials were housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Kobek, Californian novelist (one of his books is entitled I hate the Internet), asked his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the collections. To Kobek’s surprise, two of the images contained a 97-character passage with words that Sanborn had previously dropped as clues. He was staring at the words that CIA and NSA codebreakers, along with countless academics and amateurs, had been searching for decades.
The secret of Kryptos was slipping out of the artist’s hands, in the most humiliating way imaginable: Sanborn himself had mistakenly submitted it to the museum in readable form. For 35 years, the plaintext of Kryptos was a pinnacle that no one had reached. Suddenly, some people had made it, not by climbing to the top, but by hitchhiking to the top. Sanborn’s grand vision of a work of art that illuminated the very idea of secrecy was in peril, as was the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do.
Enter: the media
The first phone call was friendly. Kobek and Byrne insisted they didn’t want to spoil the auction. After hanging up, Sanborn called the auction house. That’s when things started to go off the rails. As Sanborn told me: “They said, ‘Look, see if the guys will sign NDAs and see if they’ll take some of the profits.’ And I said, “Oh gee, man, I don’t know.” But I suggested it.
Kobek and Byrne were uncomfortable with this arrangement and refused to sign. (RR Auction Executive Vice President Bobby Livingston would not comment on the legal matter but said of an NDA, “It’s something that would reassure our clients.”) Sanborn told them his intention was to get the Smithsonian to freeze the records, which it did. He assumed Kobek and Byrne would stay silent. “If you don’t publish it, you’re heroes to me,” Sanborn told them.
“I thought everything was fine,” he said, “And then all of a sudden [the journalist] John Schwartz calls me and tells me these guys want to publish it in the New York Times. Kobek tells me they contacted Schwartz in part to relieve some legal pressure. “The auction house’s lawyers sent us threat after threat, threatening to sue us for a multitude of things,” he says. (When I ask Livingston if his lawyers have contacted Kobek, he responds, “There are lawyers talking to each other” and adds that there could be copyright issues if Kobek and Byrne published the plain text.) On October 16, Schwartz published his scoop, informing the world that the plain text was out.
Sanborn tells me that Kobek shared the plain text with Schwartz over the phone. Asked about it, Kobek responds: “I can’t talk about it…I’m under significant legal risk.” » said Schwartz. “Once my editors decided he wouldn’t be revealed in the article, I deleted the text from my interview file. I don’t know him.” (So don’t bother him.)
