Anonymous bidder pays nearly $1.2 million for secret to decode CIA sculpture
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The artwork, sculpted by Jim Sanborn and dedicated by the agency in 1990, has four passages of text cut into its winding copper sheet.
PHOTO: DREW ANGERER/NYTIMES
John Schwartz
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NEW YORK - A price has been set for one of the biggest secrets kept by the United States’ top spy agency: US$962,500 (S$1.2 million).
That was the price reached at an auction of the solution to the last bit of the persistently uncrackable code in the Kryptos sculpture at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Nov 20.
The company running the sale, RR Auction, said the winning bidder wants to remain anonymous.
The artwork, sculpted by Jim Sanborn and dedicated by the agency in 1990, has four passages of text cut into its winding copper sheet. Three of them have yielded to decryption by amateur and professional cryptographers over the years.
But the fourth passage, which is 97 characters long, has resisted the best efforts of brain and silicon.
Mr Sanborn, who recently turned 80, decided to sell the final passage, known as K4, earlier in 2025.
He had wearied of dealing for decades with fans who wanted to know whether they had solved the puzzle.
He hoped to pass on to others the tasks of keeping the secret and responding to queries.
RR Auction estimated that the solution, along with other artifacts related to the sculpture, would bring in US$300,000 to US$500,000. Some expected that the auction would lift the price even more.
Then things threatened to go awry.
In early September, two men contacted Mr Sanborn to say they had discovered the solution to K4, or the plain text.
They had not done it through methods of decryption, but by checking materials that Mr Sanborn had donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in Washington.
Mr Sanborn had accidentally left scraps of paper containing the words of the final passage in a folder, and Mr Jarett Kobek, a journalist and novelist, pieced them together.
Mr Sanborn initially asked Mr Kobek and the other man involved in the find, journalist and playwright Richard Byrne, to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and even offered them some of the proceeds from the auction.
The two men declined, though they ultimately decided not reveal the plain text themselves.
RR Auction disclosed the discovery and proceeded with the offering. But a question loomed over the sale: Would the auction still draw big bidders?
The answer appeared to be yes: By the morning on Nov 20, the high bid had passed US$300,000.
As the auction company closed the initial bidding at 7pm local time, the high bid was US$432,669‚ not far from the company’s upper-end estimate of US$500,000.
But those who had registered one of the 29 bids that had come before had another 30 minutes to place their final offers, in increments of at least 10 per cent more than the previous bid.
The 30-minute clock restarted with each new tender.
Someone had paid US$770,000 to become the keeper of Mr Sanborn’s secret when the virtual gavel came down.
With the auction house’s premium tacked on, the total becomes US$962,500.
Mr Sanborn said he was “pleased” by the result: “We did OK.”
Beyond that, he joked about no longer feeling responsible for fielding queries from would-be solvers of his cryptographic puzzle.
“Believe it or not, it’s a relief not to be glued to my phone for an hour or more a day reading e-mails and sometimes giving people bad news,” he said.
“So that’s a good thing.” NYTIMES
