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A C.I.A. Secret Kept for 35 Years Is Found in the Smithsonian’s Vault
Jim Sanborn planned to auction off the solution to Kryptos, the puzzle he sculpted for the intelligence agency’s headquarters. Two fans of the work then discovered the solution.
John Schwartz, a retired Times reporter, has been reporting on the quest to solve the code in the Kryptos sculpture at the C.I.A. headquarters since 1999.
The sculptor Jim Sanborn opened his email account one day last month expecting the usual messages from people claiming to have solved his famous, decades-old puzzle.
Mr. Sanborn’s best known artwork, Kryptos, sits in a courtyard at the C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia. A sculpture that evokes and incorporates secrets, Kryptos displays four encrypted messages in letters cut through its curving copper sheet. Since the agency dedicated it in 1990, cryptographers both professional and amateur had solved three of the passages, known as K1, K2 and K3.
But the fourth, K4, remained stubbornly uncracked.
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