Jim Sanborn couldn’t believe it. He was just weeks away from auctioning off his answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had resisted dissolution for 35 years. As always, would-be solvers paid him a $50 fee to offer their guesses about the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message known as K4 – invariably wrong. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the final candidate, Jarett Kobek, that 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 shocked,” Sanborn says. “A really serious shock.” The time was terrible. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a chance to continue the work of vetting potential solutions while maintaining the secrecy of Kryptos. He was also looking forward to being paid for his work. What happened next was even more shocking. He quickly contacted Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne on the phone, who stunned him by saying that they had not found a solution by breaking the code. Instead, Kobek learned from the auction announcement that some Kryptos materials were stored at the Smithsonian Archive of American Art in Washington. Kobek, a Californian writer (one of his books titled I hate the Internet) persuaded his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the farms. To Kobek’s surprise, two of the images contained a 97-character fragment of words that Sanborn had previously abandoned as clues. He stared at the full, unencrypted text that had been sought for decades by CIA and NSA codebreakers, as well as countless scientists and hobbyists.
The secret of Kryptos got out of the artist’s control in the most humiliating way imaginable – Sanborn himself mistakenly donated it to the museum in readable form. For 35 years, plaintext Kryptos has been the pinnacle no one has reached. Some people managed to achieve it suddenly – not by climbing to the top, but by hitching a ride to the top. Sanborn’s grand vision for a work of art that would illuminate the very idea of mystery was put in jeopardy – and so was the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do with it.
Enter: Media
The first phone call was amiable. Kobek and Byrne insisted they did not want to spoil the auction. After hanging up, Sanborn called the auction house. Then everything started going sideways. As Sanborn tells me: “They said, ‘Listen, see if the guys will sign NDAs and see if they’ll take some of the proceeds.’ And I said, “Oh man, I don’t know anything about that.” But I proposed it.”
Kobek and Byrne did not agree with such an agreement and refused to sign it. (RR Auction executive vice president Bobby Livingston did not comment on the legal issue, but says of the NDA: “It’s something that would comfort our customers.”) Sanborn told them his intention was to get the Smithsonian to freeze its archives, which it did. He assumed Kobek and Byrne would remain silent. “If you don’t post this, you will be heroes to me,” Sanborn told them.
“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 ease the legal pressure. “There were threats we received from the auction house’s lawyers, threatening to sue us for a number of reasons,” he says. (When I ask Livingston whether his lawyers have been in contact with Kobek, he replies, “Lawyers are talking to each other,” and adds that there could be copyright concerns if Kobek and Byrne published plain text.) October 16, Schwartz published his curiosity, informing the world that the plaintext has been removed.
Sanborn told me that Kobek shared the plaintext with Schwartz over the phone. When asked about this, Kobek replies: “I cannot talk about it… I am at stern legal risk.” This is Schwartz. “When my editors decided not to disclose it in the article, I removed the text from the interview file. I don’t know that.” (So don’t upset him.)