The long sought-after solution to the fourth passage of “Kryptos,” artist Jim Sanborn’s secret-code-bearing sculpture at CIA headquarters, sold at auction Thursday night for a final price of $962,500, blowing past its $300,000 to $500,0000 estimate and placing the 35-year-old enigma in new hands.
It’s an unexpected success for the 80-year-old artist, who feared the sale would not happen at all after a pair of researchers discovered the plain, written text solution at an archive in Washington in September.
The buyer, who Boston-based RR Auction said wished to remain anonymous, will receive the full method and solution to the unsolved passage of “Kryptos,” as well as a trove of documents and objects related to the creation of the sculpture, which stands at CIA headquarters and has stumped code-crackers since it was completed in 1990. (They will not get the sculpture itself.)
It was not immediately clear how the new owner would vet solutions to the code if they remain anonymous, but the auction house said the buyer “is preparing a long-term stewardship plan” and that “details will be shared when ready.”
Sanborn, who has fielded failed solutions to sculpture’s unsolved passage for decades and is prone to talking about the piece as if it were his child, said Thursday in an email that the auction was “a fun and stressful night” and he was “so happy it turned out as it did.”
“It will go a long way toward future well-being,” he added. He previously said the proceeds would go in part toward programs to help the disabled.
RR Auction’s executive vice president, Bobby Livingston, said that the sale “represents one of the most significant transfers of cryptographic knowledge in auction history” and that the winner will possess “what the CIA, NSA, and thousands of codebreakers worldwide have pursued since 1990.”
“Kryptos,” which is not visible to the public, is composed of a wave-shaped copper screen that curves around a pool of water and bears four encoded messages. The first three, known as K1, K2 and K3, were solved years ago, but the fourth — a 97-character-long passage dubbed K4 — has remained stubbornly out of reach for the world’s most persistent coders. Its lingering mystery has powered a community of devoted, hopeful code crackers, who have held meetings about it and maintain an active online group.
Many, especially Sanborn, are hoping the winner keeps the solution to themselves. On Thursday night, Sanborn said he didn’t know who bought it yet, but “fingers crossed.”
Sanborn announced the auction in August, writing to “Kryptos” fans in a letter that the decision had “not been an easy one,” but he no longer had “the physical, mental or financial resources” to maintain the code.
He told The Washington Post in an interview at the time, “I could keel over at any minute and I’d rest easier if I knew that things were in control somehow.”
But shortly after the auction listing went up, that is precisely what he lost.
Jarett Kobek, a writer and researcher who is a fan of the work, had noticed that the auction website said copies of coding charts used to make “Kryptos” were in a Smithsonian archive. He asked his friend, playwright and journalist Richard Byrne, who is based in the area, to take a look.
When Byrne sent Kobek photos from the archives, Kobek, using clues Sanborn had released previously, picked out the written solution to K4.
Kobek sent the words of the solution to Sanborn, who was stunned. He had not meant to include those particular papers in the archive. “I was like, ‘“Kryptos” is being kidnapped,’” the artist told The Post. “I was in save-the-child mode.”
Communications between the two sides eventually broke down, and Kobek and Byrne were subject to extensive legal communications, they said. Kobek said that while he had no intention of interfering with the auction or making the solution’s text public, he and Byrne would not sign a nondisclosure agreement, as Sanborn and the auction house had wanted. Sanborn said he was convinced the auction would not go forward.
But the auction house shifted their tactics — they talked up K5, an extension of K4 that Sanborn has alluded to for years and which the artist says is included in the auction. They stressed that the sculpture’s secret code had not been solved; it had just been found.
This view was echoed by Elonka Dunin, an authority on “Kryptos” and a leader of an online community devoted to it. She told The Post that when people say they have found a solution to the work, “if they don’t have a method, they just get booed right out of the room.”
At a bittersweet news conference at the International Spy Museum in D.C. last week, Sanborn stressed again that “the method of decryption, also known as the key, is in this auction, and is still very much a secret, as is the discovered plaintext, which is still unpublished.”
Sanborn, cryptic as ever, also left some more breadcrumbs for “Kryptos” enthusiasts, noting that his time was running out to do so.
He alluded to something he may have buried, possibly on CIA grounds. “If I were to leave something there on-site, it would have to be semi–ephemeral, undetectable by scanning and carefully hidden,” he said. “That’s all I’m going to say about that part.”
Sanborn said he had created multiple alternate scenarios to the ending of “Kryptos,” only one of which survives today. K5, which he said is also 97 characters long and has a similar coding system to K4, will have “more global reach,” and a copy of it will “be located in a public space.”
Sanborn made the extensions years ago because he didn’t want the artwork to lose “its verve,” he said.
He was thinking, “Do I want the artwork to lose that thing which hooks the viewer and keeps them interested?” he said. “Of course not. I didn’t want it to end.”
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