Within the chaos, an accidental Kryptos is revealed

Jim Sanborn couldn’t Believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off his solution to Kryptos, the statue he created for the CIA that had been challenging the solution for 35 years. As always, problem solvers continued to pay him a $50 fee to submit their guesses for the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4, which is wrong without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the newest applicant, Jarrett Kubiak, which began, “I believe the K4 text 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 told me. “Real serious shock.” The timing was terrible. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way for someone to continue his work examining potential solutions while preserving the mystery of Kryptos. He was also looking forward to receiving compensation for his work. What happened next was even more devastating. He soon telephoned Kubik and his friend Richard Byrne, who astonished him by informing him that they had not found the solution by breaking the codes. Instead, Kubiak learned from the auction notice that some of the Kryptos materials were held at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. Kubiak, a novelist from California (one of his books is called I hate the internet), he asked his friend, playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the collectibles. To Kubiak’s surprise, two of the images contained a 97-letter clip with words that Sanborn had previously dropped as evidence. He was staring at the complete unencrypted text that CIA and NSA cryptanalysts, along with countless academics and amateurs, had sought for decades.

The secret of Kryptos was out of the artist’s hands, in the most humiliating way imaginable—Sanborn himself had accidentally submitted it in readable form to the museum. For 35 years, Kryptos plaintext was a pinnacle that no one had reached. Suddenly, some people had reached that goal, not by climbing to the top, but by riding to the top. Sanborn’s grand vision for a piece of art that highlighted the very idea of ​​secrecy was at risk, as was the case at the auction. Now he had to know what to do about it.

Enter: the media

The initial phone call was friendly. Kubiak and Byrne insisted they did not want to spoil the auction. After he hung up, Sanborn called the auction house. That’s when things started going sideways. As Sanborn told me, “They said, ‘Listen, let’s see if the guys will sign nondisclosure agreements, and then let’s see if they’ll take a cut of the proceeds.’” I was like, ‘Oh my God, man, I don’t know anything about that.’ But I offered it.

Kubiak and Byrne were uncomfortable with this arrangement and refused to sign. (Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, would not comment on the legal matter, but said of the nondisclosure agreement: “It’s something that will be a relief to our clients.”) Sanborn told them his intention was to convince the Smithsonian to freeze the archive, which it did. He assumed Kubiak and Byrne would remain silent. “If you don’t shoot him, you’re heroes to me,” Sanborn told them.

“I thought everything was fine, then suddenly,” he says [the journalist] John Schwartz called me and told me that these people wanted to publish it in the New York Times. Kubik explains to me that they contacted Schwartz in part to relieve some of the legal pressure. “There was threat after threat sent to us from the auction house’s lawyers, threatening to sue us over all sorts of things,” he says. (When I ask Livingston if his lawyers have contacted Kubiak, he says, “There are lawyers talking to each other,” and adds that there may be copyright concerns if Kubiak and Byrne had published the clear text.) On October 16, Schwartz published his scoop, informing the world that the clear text was finished.

Sanborn told me that Kubiak shared the plain text with Schwartz over the phone. When Kubik was asked about this matter, he said: “I cannot talk about it… I am under great legal risk.” Schwartz says. “Once the editors decided not to reveal that in the story, I deleted the transcript from my interview file. I don’t know about it.” (So ​​don’t bother him.)