Jim Sanborn couldn't believe me. He was a few weeks away auction with response Kryptos, a sculpture he created for the CIA that defied solution for 35 years. As always, those who wanted to solve the problem continued to pay him $50 to offer their guesses about the remaining unsolved part of the 1,800-character encrypted message known as K4 – all of them were wrong. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jaret Kobek, which began with the words: “I believe the text of K4 is as follows…” He had seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time the text was correct.
“I was in shock,” Sanborn tells me. “A real serious shock.” It was a terrible time. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way to continue his work testing potential solutions while maintaining the secret of Kryptos. He also hoped to receive compensation for his work. What came next was even more devastating. He quickly got on the phone with Kobeck and his friend Richard Byrne, who stunned him by revealing that they had not found a solution by cracking the code. Instead, Kobek learned from an auction announcement that some of the Kryptos materials were being held at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Kobek, Californian writer (one of his books is called I hate the Internet), asked his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of his stock. To Kobeck's surprise, the two images contained a 97-character passage of words that Sanborn had previously used as a clue. He was looking at the complete plaintext that CIA and NSA codebreakers, as well as countless scientists and hobbyists, had been searching for for decades.
The secret of Kryptos escaped the artist's control in the most humiliating way imaginable: Sanborn himself mistakenly transferred it in readable form to the museum. For 35 years, the open text of Kryptos was a pinnacle that no one had ever reached. Suddenly, some people got there—not by climbing to the top, but by hitchhiking to the top. Sanborn's grand vision of a work of art that illuminates the very idea of secrecy was in jeopardy, as was the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do about it.
Enter: Media
The first phone call was friendly. Kobeck and Byrne said they didn't want to ruin the auction. After he hung up, Sanborn called the auction house. That's when things went wrong. As Sanborn told me, “They said, 'Look, let's see if the guys will sign nondisclosure agreements and see if they'll take a cut of the proceeds.' And I said, “Oh my god, man, I don’t know anything about this.” But I suggested it.”
Kobek and Byrne did not like this arrangement and refused to sign it. (RR Auction executive vice president Bobby Livingston would not comment on the legal issue, but said of the NDA, “It will provide some comfort to our clients.”) Sanborn told them his intention was to force the Smithsonian to freeze the archives—which it did. He assumed that Kobek and Byrne would remain silent. “If you don't let him out, you're my heroes,” 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 explained to me that they contacted Schwartz in part to relieve legal pressure. “We've had threat after threat from the auction house lawyers, threatening to sue us for a lot of things,” he says. (When I ask Livingston if his lawyers have contacted Kobeck, he says, “Lawyers talk to each other,” and adds that there may well be copyright issues if Kobeck and Byrne published the plaintext.) October 16 Schwartz published his sensation, telling the world that the plaintext is missing.
Sanborn told me that Kobek shared the clear text with Schwartz over the phone. When asked about this, Kobek replies: “I can’t talk about it… I’m in serious legal danger.” says Schwartz. “Once my editors decided it wouldn't be covered in the story, I deleted the text from the interview file. I don't know it.” (So don't bother him.)
