At CIA, 1 secret still defies exposure

LITTLE ROCK — It is perhaps one of the CIA’s most mischievous secrets.

Kryptos, the sculpture nestled in a courtyard of the agency’s Virginia headquarters since 1990, is a work of art with a secret code embedded in the letters that are punched into its four panels of curving copper.

“Our work is about discovery - discovering secrets,” said Toni Hiley, director of the CIA Museum. “And this sculpture is full of them, and it still hasn’t given up the last of its secrets.”

Not for lack of trying. For many thousands of wouldbe code crackers worldwide, Kryptos has become an object of obsession. Dan Brown even buried references to it in some of his novels.

The code breakers have had some success. Three of the puzzles, together 768 characters long, were solved by 1999, revealing passages - one lyrical, one obscure and one taken from history. But the fourth message of Kryptos - the name, in Greek, means “hidden” - has resisted the best efforts of brains and computers.

And Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created Kryptos and its puzzles, is getting a bit frustrated by the wait.

“I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,” he said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected.

So now, after 20 years, Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture’s final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read N-Y-PV-T-T. When deciphered, they read “Berlin.”

But there are many steps to cracking the code, and the other 91 characters and their proper order are yet to be determined.

“Having some letters where we know what they are supposed to be could be extremely valuable,” said Elonka Dunin, a computer-game designer who runs the most popular Kryptos website.

None of this was really envisioned when the CIA planned the expansion known as the New Headquarters Building in the 1980s and asked artists to submit proposals to create a work of art for the courtyard.The broad principles it provided for the $250,000 commission included the notion that it should “engender feelings of well-being, hope.”

The winner was Sanborn, and the agency introduced him to Edward Scheidt, a retiring CIA cryptographer, who gave him a crash course in the arts of concealing text and helped devise the codes used in the sculpture.

One reason the fourth puzzle has proved so difficult is because, with just 97 characters, it is shorter than any but the first. Longer chunks of text are easier to crack because there is more information to study for patterns.

The messages form the two left-hand panels of the sculpture’s wall of text; the other two panels on the right side provide the key to cracking some of the text. Each is encrypted in a different way from the others.

The first reads: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.” (Sanborn admitted to introducing misspellings to add a degree of difficulty.)

The second passage includes the latitude and longitude of the CIA’s headquarters and asks, “Does Langley know about this? They should: It’s buried out there somewhere.X Who knows the exact location? Only WW.”

This is a reference to William Webster, the former CIA chief - Sanborn gave him a key to deciphering the messages.

The third passage paraphrases, with an intentional misspelling, the account of Howard Carter, the renowned Egyptologist, as he opened King Tut’s tomb. Sanborn has said the passage has inspired him since childhood.

“Slowly, desparatly slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q”