Climbing Mount Kryptos, Falling into Truth

“The truth shall make you free.”

Just outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there’s a code that CIA codebreakers haven’t been able to crack. Known as Kryptos, it is a statue comprised of 865 characters of seemingly random letters punched out of the half-inch-thick copper structure. It’s given codebreakers more trouble than payday loans and credit cards could ever could achieve in budget-busting. They help rather than hurt; no mystery there.

Steven Levy writes for Wired that Washington D.C. artist James Sanborn named the CIA sculpture Kryptos after the Greek word for “hidden.” It has been described as “a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth,” and there is allegedly a message in the sculpture that is written entirely in code.

Cracking crazy code

That was nearly 20 years ago, and nobody has fully deciphered Sanborn’s message. Cryptanalysts from within and outside the CIA have solved three of Kryptos’s four sections. The resulting prose from the first three parts has not led to entrance into the code world of the final part (known as “K4“). There are 97 characters on K4, and it’s making the best code breakers crazy – because nobody knows the answer but Sanborn (as he says).

Sanborn says Kryptos is informed by “a coding system that would unravel itself slowly over a period of time.” He created the sculpture after studying cryptography with previous Langley Cryptographic Center head Ed Scheidt. “I assumed the first three sections would be deciphered in a matter of weeks, perhaps months,” Sanborn says. Scheidt figured the whole puzzle would be solved in less than seven years.

“Can you see anything?”

But the reality is that it took seven years for the best and brightest to decipher K1 through K3.  Sanborn has said the message there is not written in standard English and will “require a second level of cryptanalysis” to crack. Misspellings and various character motifs that appear in K1 through K3 are supposed to offer clues to cracking the previously unscalable K4.

Here’s what is known. The cracked K1 reads as follows: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.” “Iqlusion” is an intentional misspelling, according to Sanborn.

The second section reads like a telegraph transmission. It makes reference to a magnetic field and information transmitted to a specific latitude and longitude. They are coordinates for a location only a couple of hundred feet south of the sculpture. So far, nothing of interest has been discovered at that coordinates’ location.

Finally, K3 paraphrases a diary entry by anthropologist Howard Carter after his 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb. It ends with the question “Can you see anything?” Rumors persist that this reference to that wonderful discovery reflects on the wonder experienced by the codebreaker who sheds light on unknown secrets.

“I’m an agent of Satan”

But K4 remains locked, despite countless theories. Levy shares the stories of a handful of the many who have allowed Kryptos to control their lives. One man abandoned his business so he’d have more time to spend solving K4. Another group organized via Yahoo has advanced theories borrowing from disciplines ranging from math to astrology. Randy Thompson, a 43-year-old physicist who has devoted three years working on it, once said “I think I’m onto the solution. It could happen tomorrow, or it could take the rest of my life.”

And Sanborn isn’t talking answers. It would appear he’s enjoying the game and has even uttered misleading information on occasion. However, he has refuted the intentionality of it all: “It’s not my intent to put out disinformation. I’m a benevolent cryptographer.”

But for someone so benevolent, he certainly receives his share of hate messages. “It’s the fact that I have some sort of power,” he says. “You get stalkers. I don’t know how they get my cell numbers and everything off the Internet, but they do. People have called me and said pretty terrible things. There are some who say I’m an agent of Satan because I have a secret I won’t tell.”

The nature of mystery

And Satan admits he doesn’t “know the exact solution” anymore.”

“If somebody tried to torture me, I couldn’t tell them,” Sanborn says. “I haven’t looked at the plaintext of K4 in a long time, and I don’t have a very good memory, so I don’t really know what it says.” Perhaps not to be shown up or to have to admit defeat, the CIA has made its position clear. According to spokesperson Marie Harf, “those who need to know, know.”

But how can we be certain that cracking the code of K4 will reveal the truth about Kryptos, any more than unlocking all of DNAs evolutionary secrets will reveal the meaning of life? It’s moments like these when Douglas Adams’ answer to the latter question – 42 – is perhaps much more elegant in its ridiculousness than we realize. At what point did quality of life depend upon knowing the face of truth? We should feel compelled to search until all boats are undone from their moorings and set adrift. Then we search some more. The desire to search is the light of humanity; we should keep the lights on and never hold back.

Sanborn’s response to Kryptos’s “solution” is telling: “In some ways, I’d rather die knowing it wasn’t cracked. Once an artwork loses its mystery, it’s lost a lot.”

The truth is out there. That’s a good start and a fine destination, I say.

Related Video: