The “Central Intelligence Agency”, or the CIA, which we know for its raids and resolving events, is a non-state civilian foreign intelligence agency in the United States.
So how is it that the statue, which has been standing in front of such a serious and important intelligence center for 33 years, cannot be deciphered and is still standing there?
The statue of Kryptos is actually a 3.7-meter-long wave-shaped copper sculpture with 1800 letters on it, consisting of four different encrypted messages.
James Gillogly, a computer scientist, and several national security agency employees deciphered the statue’s three messages in 2010 and 2014 with two clues from the statue’s designer.
Although the designer gives clues about the last part of the sculpture, no one can decipher the last part, which consists of 97 letters.
So what was written in the deciphered messages?
While the designer of the statue carried out this project, the retired head of the CIA, Edward Michael Scheidt, was with him. While preparing the codes on the Kryptos statue, they decided that the first three parts should be easily deciphered, but the final part should be a real challenge.
In the first part of the statue, which was deciphered, “Among the lies of shadow and light, there were details of dreams.” he is writing.
In the second part, which is deciphered, the coordinates of a location near the statue are given.
It also contained a reference to William Webster, who was head of the CIA when the work was first exhibited. The cipher said that the designer had given him a key to decipher the code.
In the third part of the statue, which was deciphered, there is a section from the diary of Archaeologist H. Carter, who opened the tomb of the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922.
How did they decipher the codes on this “mysterious” statue?
To decipher the first two chapters, the cipher crackers used the Vigenère table based on Caesar cipher. In the Caesar cipher, the cipher alphabet replaces the plain alphabet letters with the third letter after it. The receiver of the ciphertext, on the other hand, replaces each letter with the third letter before it to obtain the plain text.
The difference of Vigenère cipher from Caesar cipher is that it is encoded using multiple alphabets. The logic is the same as the Caesar cipher.
So who is the designer of this mysterious Kryptos statue?
Resembling Dahmer at first glance, this man is the designer of the Kryptos statue; Herbert James Sanborn, known as Jim Sanborn. Kryptos is the artist’s first work. The artist graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 1969 with a double major in art history and sociology, and later earned a master’s degree in sculpture from the Pratt Institute in 1971.
Sanborn’s work has been featured in several prestigious museums, including the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Art Gallery. In addition to the CIA, Sanborn has also produced studies for various institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Another famous work by Sanborn: The Cyrillic Projector.
It was also Sanborn’s idea to place a cryptographic (encrypted) art installation in the courtyard of CIA headquarters.
Sanborn thought it would be a fun intellectual activity and the codes would be deciphered in no time.
Sanborn gives clues for the last password, but no one can figure it out.
Sanborn’s first clue came in 2010. Accordingly, in the last section consisting of 97 letters, the letters from 64 to 69 corresponded to the word “Berlin”. The second clue, revealed in 2014, stated that he had written “Hour” between the 70th and 74th letters. In the last clue in 2020, it was announced that “NORTH EAST” was written between the 23rd and 34th letters.
In the three years since Sanborn uncovered the clue, the puzzle is still unsolved. Already, Sanborn states that the real mystery in the sculpture will never be fully understood.
Sanborn says the following about the ciphers on the statue:
“They will be able to read what I have written, but they will not be able to understand what I have written. There are things they must discover after the mystery of the statue is solved, there are things that they will never discover its true meaning. People will always ask the question ‘what did he mean by that’.”
In addition, the artist says that it took longer than expected to decipher the secret in the sculpture, and that he is considering selling the secret at auction and donating the proceeds to a charity.
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