Kryptos by Jim Sanborn / CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED.

Kryptos is a fascinating sculpture by the American artist Jim Sanborn. The sculpture is located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters, the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the four encrypted messages it bears.

The name “Kryptos” comes from the ancient Greek word for “hidden”, and the theme of the sculpture is “Intelligence Gathering”. The cost of the sculpture in 1988 was US $250,000 (worth US $501,000 in 2016).

About the Artist

Herbert James Sanborn, Jr., better known as Jim Sanborn, is a renowned American sculptor. He was born on November 14, 1945, in Washington, D.C. Sanborn’s father was the head of exhibitions at the Library of Congress, and his mother was a concert pianist and photo researcher.

Sanborn grew up in Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia, attending Burgundy Farm Country Day School, followed by JEB Stuart High School1. He then attended Randolph-Macon College, receiving a degree in paleontology, fine arts, and social anthropology in 19681. He further pursued his passion for art and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Pratt Institute in 1971.

Sanborn’s artwork has been displayed at prestigious institutions such as the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He has created sculptural works for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the CIA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Themes in his work have included “making the invisible visible”, with many sculptures focusing on topics such as magnetism, the Coriolis effect, secret messages, and mysteries of atomic reactions. Kryptos is his most famous work.

The Sculpture

The main part of the sculpture is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the Agency’s cafeteria. The sculpture comprises four large copper plates with other elements consisting of water, wood, plants, red and green granite, white quartz, and petrified wood. The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll or a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, half of which consists of encrypted text.

The characters are all found within the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, along with question marks, and are cut out of the copper plates. The main sculpture contains four separate enigmatic messages, three of which have been deciphered. In addition to the main part of the sculpture, Jim Sanborn also placed other pieces of art at the CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper sheets outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building.

Several morse code messages are found on these copper sheets, and one of the stone slabs has an engraving of a compass rose pointing to a lodestone. Other elements of Sanborn’s installation include a landscaped garden area, a fishpond with opposing wooden benches, a reflecting pool, and other pieces of stone including a triangle-shaped black stone slab.

Encrypted Messages

The ciphertext on the left-hand side of the sculpture (as seen from the courtyard) of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total: 865 letters and 4 question marks (spacing is important). In April 2006, however, Sanborn released information stating that a letter was omitted from this side of Kryptos “for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced”. There are also three misspelled words in the plaintext of the deciphered first three passages, which Sanborn has said was intentional, and three letters (YAR) near the beginning of the bottom half of the left side are the only characters on the sculpture in superscript.

In Conclusion

Kryptos is not just a sculpture, but also a mystery that continues to intrigue cryptanalysts, both amateur and professional, who are attempting to decipher the fourth passage. The artist has so far given four clues to this passage. Despite the efforts, the fourth message remains one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. Kryptos a living piece of art that continues to engage and challenge.

“Kryptos” © Copyright 1988 James Sanborn. All rights reserved.

Resource

Central Intelligence Agency
CIA.gov

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