BOSTON — When Jim Sanborn was commissioned to create a sculpture at CIA headquarters, he wanted to do something that spoke to the world of spies and secret codes.
The result was a 10-foot-tall, S-shaped copper screen called a “Kryptos” that resembled a piece of paper sticking out of a fax machine. One side features a series of interlocking alphabets that are key to decoding the four messages encoded on the other side.
“At the time, codes and cryptography were an esoteric topic,” Sanborn said. “I wanted it to be understated, and I wanted it to be fun. … The goal of any artist when they create a work of art is to hold the viewer’s attention for as long as possible.”
Sanborn expected that the first three letters on the statue, dedicated in 1990 and known as K1, K2 and K3, would be resolved relatively quickly, and they did.
But 35 years later, the fourth installment, K4, remains a mystery and a source of morbid fascination among thousands of Kryptos fans. One person has contacted Sanborn every week for the past 20 years, trying to solve the K4 problem, and the artist received so many inquiries that he started charging $50 per submission to make it more manageable.
Now, Sanborn, who is 79 and has had a series of health scares in recent years, is auctioning off the solution to K4, appointing a new guardian of Kryptos who he hopes will safeguard its secrets and continue interacting with followers.
Boston-based RR Auction launched the auction last month. It runs until November 20, and the current highest bid is $201,841 for the Kryptos Archive.
“Since its installation in 1990, Kryptos has become a global phenomenon,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction. “K4 has puzzled professional cryptographers and code-breakers as well as amateurs who have tried to solve it and read the message. The winner of this archive will now receive the secrets of Kryptos.”
The archive includes everything needed to solve K4, plus an alternative paragraph that the artist calls K5. The original coding schemes for K1, K2 and K3 will also be on the table, along with the scrambled original texts, which Sanborn said he showed to the CIA’s Historical Intelligence Division to ensure the agency understood there was nothing “undesirable” about the statue.
Sanborn has created about 50 public sculptures, including a memorial to the 2019 mass shooting in Odessa, Texas, but is best known for “Kryptos.” Over the years, excerpts of the mysterious statue have appeared on the cover of Dan Brown’s best-selling book “The Da Vinci Code” and were mentioned in a chapter of Brown’s book “The Lost Symbol.”
In September, Sanborn received a phone call from two Kryptos investigators. Based on auction listing information, writer and researcher Garrett Kubiak asked playwright and journalist Richard Byrne to take photographs of the Sanborn Papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Among the papers were Sanborn’s original scrambled texts.
Kubik said he had hoped to discover “a document containing some vague hints about how K4 was encrypted,” but was astonished when he realized they had found the text itself instead.
Sanborn was initially “shocked” by the call, and he and his wife, Jay Kuo, “kind of put our heads in our hands.” He was mostly annoyed with himself for having placed the texts in the archive, and has since sealed his papers so that they are inaccessible for the next fifty years. RR Auction has also deleted any mention of the Smithsonian in connection with the auction.
“It was miserable, and it’s still miserable,” Sanborn said. “It’s very difficult. There’s a lot of regret and pain.”
Sanborn initially thought the discovery meant the auction could not continue. But he decided to go ahead anyway, changing the order from simply providing the secrets to K4 to offering the entire archive. RR Auction also acknowledged the discovery of the pair in the auction description, though Kubik said that came weeks later.
“The important difference is that they discovered it. They didn’t decode it,” Sanborn said. “They don’t have the key. They don’t have the method by which it’s decrypted. For the entire crypto community, this method is the real deal, and no one has the method but me.”
Most people she spoke to wanted to keep K4 a secret, said Ilonka Donen, co-moderator of the largest group of Kryptos enthusiasts. “There is a very strong desire to know if K4 is solvable,” she said.
Sanborn accessed the texts, and a retired CIA cryptographer showed him several systems for encrypting them. He said the vertebrae are “designed to unravel like a ball of string” or “nesting Russian dolls” and are getting more difficult.
However, Sanborn and RR Auction aren’t taking any chances. Sanborn unsuccessfully asked Kubiak and Byrne to sign a non-disclosure agreement that included giving them a portion of the auction proceeds. RR Auction also sent the pair dozens of emails threatening legal action for everything from trade secret violations to defamation.
Kubiak, who describes himself as a fan of Kryptos and the artist, has no plans to release the text publicly, although he read it over the phone to a New York Times journalist who first reported its discovery. However, he wants the auction house and others to respect their discovery, noting that the Allies during World War II used weather reports to help solve encrypted messages.
“I’m the first person to say it wasn’t a mathematical cryptographic solution. One hundred percent. It can’t be that way,” Kubiak said. “But pretending this has nothing to do with crypto history is nothing more than an advertisement for an auction.”