Jim Sanborn has kept a big secret for 35 years. Now he’s ready to sell it to the highest bidder.
The secret that will be headed to auction later this year: a coded message within Kryptos, a sculpture stationed in a courtyard at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va. The piece, a meditation on secrets in a house of secrets, has fascinated and bedeviled professional and amateur cryptologists since its dedication in 1990.
The message is contained in Kryptos’s four panels of letters hand-cut through curved copper sheets. The sculpture’s name, from the Greek, means “hidden,” holding connotations of cryptography and mystery. Along with its panels of encrypted text, elements of the sculpture also incorporate petrified wood, water and stones.
Over the years, the first three panels yielded their plain text to code breakers within the C.I.A., a California computer scientist and the National Security Agency.
The first panel, K1, has a deliberate misspelling in the word “illusion.” Mr. Sanborn inserted it as a red herring.
K2 includes the location of C.I.A. headquarters by latitude and longitude. The W.W. is for William Webster, who once led the C.I.A. and was given a key for deciphering its message. Mr. Webster died last week at 101.
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