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by
Judith Kane
For more than 15 years, amateur and professional code-breakers have been
baffled by Kryptos, a sculpture at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley,
VA, that features a nearly 12-foot-tall, copper scroll inscribed with
four long, coded passages. The coded passages remained unsolved for eight
years, until a CIA analyst cracked the first three in 1999. But the fourth
passage is still a mystery.
Interest in solving the final part of the puzzle has soared
after the publisher of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci
Code posted a game on www.thedavincicode.com, which states that numerous
encrypted messages on the book’s dust cover hint at the subject of
Brown’s next novel. The clues, which were not recognized until the
game was posted, include a set of geographic coordinates that roughly
locate the sculpture. Brown himself has recently hinted that the Kryptos
sculpture might play a role in his upcoming novel The Solomon Key.
Deciphering the Passages
Sculptor Jim Sanborn claims to be the only man alive who knows the solution
to the final passage. When Kryptos was installed in 1990, Sanborn was
required to hand a sealed envelope containing its solution to then CIA
Director William Webster. But Sanborn now says that the letter withheld
information critical to solving the puzzle.
Sanborn has confirmed the accuracy of the solutions to the
first three passages, which contain deliberate misspellings, letters carved
slightly higher than others on the same line, and other irregularities
that may themselves be clues to solving the fourth passage and possibly
for locating something buried. The first deciphered passage reads: “Between
subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iglusion [sic].”
The second passage, which is followed by geographical coordinates,
suggests a location elsewhere on the grounds of CIA headquarters and reads,
in part:
“It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the
Earth’s magnetic field. The information was gathered and transmitted
underguund [sic]to an unknown location. Does Langley know about this?
They should: it’s buried out there somewhere.”
The third passage is based on a diary entry made by archaeologist
Howard Carter in 1922, on the day that he discovered the tomb of Egyptian
pharaoh Tutankhamun. It reads:
“With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand
corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and
peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker,
but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. Can you
see anything?”
Experts say that the fourth passage is written in a more complex
code than the first three, one designed to mask patterns of recurring
letters that code-breakers typically look for. There are no breaks in
the 97-character sequence of the final passage, which begins with an initial
question mark.
Considering
the Entire Sculpture
Sanborn, who has had no training in cryptography, says that he collaborated
with a prominent fiction writer in composing the text to be encoded, and
then worked with a retired CIA encryption official for four months to
create the code. He insists that the code can be solved and says that
when he placed the sculpture at Langley, in the thick of the world’s
best code-breakers, he thought it would take only months for them to solve
Kryptos.
Part of the difficulty in solving the puzzle may be its location,
in the center of a high-security compound to which few people have access.
Another difficulty may be the failure to consider Kryptos in its entirety.
The inscribed scroll is only part of the sculpture, which is intended
as an interpretation of how information has been accrued throughout the
ages. In fact, Sanborn teases enthusiasts by saying that one clue, the
most obvious key to the sculpture, is sitting in plain view but has been
overlooked so far.
The sculpture actually begins with two red granite and copperplate
constructions that flank the walkway leading to the entrance of the headquarters
building, that appear as pages jutting from the earth and are inscribed
with International Morse Code and ancient ciphers that spell out phrases
such as “virtually invisible” and “it is your position.”
There is also a navigational compass carved into one of the rocks, with
its needle pulled off due north by a lodestone (a naturally magnetized
rock) that Sanborn placed nearby.
Then, in the courtyard of the headquarters, is a calm, reflective
pool that lies between two layered slabs of granite and tall grasses.
Directly across from this is the centerpiece, the copperplate screen carved
with thousands of three-inch letters and symbols.
The scroll is supported by a piece of petrified wood, symbolizing
the source materials on which language has been recorded throughout the
ages. It is then surrounded by a bubbling pool of water, which symbolizes
the dissemination of information to unknown destinations. On its left
is a cryptographic table for enciphering and deciphering code called the
Vigenere Method, after 16th-century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenere.
The Vigenere Method involves substituting letters while shifting
from one alphabet order to another with each letter of the key, and was
used to encode one of the four enigmatic messages on the right of the
scroll, which are each written in a different code. Another passage uses
the cryptographic method of transposing letters, or changing their position
within the message.
Sanborn says that even when the final passage has been decoded,
people will discover that what he wrote is only part of a larger puzzle.
from
issue #11
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