BOSTON — The information needed to decipher the last unsolved secret message contained in a sculpture at CIA headquarters in Virginia sold at auction for nearly $1 million, the auction house announced Friday.
The winner will receive a private meeting with the 80-year-old artist to review codes and diagrams in hopes of continuing what he has been doing for decades: interacting with potential cryptanalysis investigators.
the Archive owned by the artist Jim Sanborn, who created Kryptos, sold to an anonymous bidder for $963,000, according to RR Auctions in Boston. The archive includes documentation and coding diagrams for the statue dedicated in 1990.
Three of the letters on the 10-foot (3 m) statue, known as K1, K2, and K3, have been solved, but the solution of the fourth letter, K-4, has frustrated experts and enthusiasts who have tried to decipher the S-shaped copper screen.
The artwork looks like a piece of paper coming out of a fax machine. One side contains a series of interlocking alphabets that are key to decoding the four messages encoded on the other side.
Someone has contacted Sanborn regularly over the past two decades trying to solve the K4 problem, and Sanborn has received so many inquiries that he has begun charging $50 per submission. Sanborn decided to sell the solution to K4, putting it in the hands of someone he hoped would keep its secrets and continue to engage with followers.
RR Auction said the winner will get a private meeting with Sanborn to review the symbols, charts and technical intent behind K4 and the replacement vertebra dubbed K5.
A “long-term stewardship plan” for the buyer is currently being developed, according to the auction house.
Sanborn’s approximately 50 public sculptures include a memorial to the 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas.
An archive auction was nearly derailed in September when two Cryptos investigators found Sanborn’s original scrambled texts in the artist’s papers at the Smithsonian.
The sale continued but was changed from offering only secrets to K4 to selling his entire archive.
“The important difference is that they discovered it. They didn’t decode it,” Sanborn told the Associated Press. “They don’t have the key. They don’t have the way to decode it.”