Inside the Messy, Accidental Kryptos Reveal

Jim Sanborn couldn't believe it. He was gone for weeks auction off the answer to Kryptos, the image he made for the CIA that had prepared solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers continued to pay him a $50 fee to offer their guesses at the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4—wrong without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jarett Kobek, which began: “I believe the text of K4 is as follows…” He had seen words like these thousands of times before. But this time the text was correct.

“I was in shock,” Sanborn tells me. “Really serious shock.” The timing was terrible. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way for someone to continue his work of potential solutions while maintaining the mystery of Kryptos. He also looked forward to receiving compensation for his work. What came next was even more fragile. He quickly got on the phone with Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne, who gobsmacked him by reporting that they didn't find the solution through codebreaking. Instead, Kobek had learned from the auction notice that some Kryptos materials were held at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Kobek, a California novelist (one of his books is called I hate the internet), got his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the possessions. To Kobek's surprise, two of the images contained a 97-character passage of words that Sanborn had previously dropped as clues. He stared at the complete unencrypted text that CIA and NSA codebreakers, along with countless academics and hobbyists, had been seeking for decades.

The secret of Kryptos was out of the hands of the artist, in the most humiliating way imaginable – Sanborn himself had mistakenly submitted it to the museum in readable form. For 35 years, the plain text of Kryptos was a peak that no one had reached. Suddenly, some had achieved it – not by climbing to the top, but by hitching a ride to the top. Sanborn's grand vision for a piece of art that illuminated the very idea of ​​secrecy was in jeopardy—as was the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do about it.

Enter: The Media

The first phone call had been friendly. Kobek and Byrne insisted they did not want the auction. After he hung up, Sanborn called the auction house. Then things started to go sideways. As Sanborn tells me, “They said, 'Listen, see if the guys will sign NDAs, and see if they'll take a cut of the proceeds.' And I said, 'Oh, man, I don't know about that. But I offered it.'”

Kobek and Byrne were uncomfortable with that arrangement and refused to sign. (RR Auction vice president Bobby Livingston has not commented on the legal issue, but says of an NDA: “It's something that would be comforting to our clients.”) Sanborn told them his intention was to get the Smithsonian to freeze the archives — which it did. He assumed that Kobek and Byrne would remain silent. “If you don't let go, you're heroes to me,” Sanborn told her.

“I thought everything was fine,” he says, “And then suddenly [the journalist] John Schwartz calls me and says these guys want to publish it in The New York Times. Kobek explains to me that they contacted Schwartz in part to relieve some legal pressure. “There was threat after threat sent to us from the auction house's lawyers, threatening to sue us for a multitude of things,” he says. (When I ask Livingston if his lawyers have contacted Kobek, he says, “There are lawyers talking to each other,” adding that there might be copyright concerns if Kobek and Byrne published the plaintext.) On October 16, Schwartz published his scoop, informing the world that the plain text was out.

Sanborn tells me Kobek shared the plaintext with Schwartz over the phone. When asked about this, Kobek says, “I can't talk about that … I'm in significant legal jeopardy.” says Schwartz. “If my editors had decided that it should not be revealed in the story, I would have deleted the text from my interview file. I don't know.” (So ​​don't forget him.)