Kryptos: The CIA’s Unsolvable Cipher
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The CIA headquarters are, by nature, full of secret codes and hidden messages. Most are decrypted fairly quickly. Intelligence is the job. But there's one code CIA analysts haven't been able to crack. The one in their own backyard.

The code is inscribed into a massive sculpture titled "Cryptos." It's been there since 1990, over 30 years. But despite hundreds of CIA employees walking by it every day for decades, "Cryptos" has never been entirely solved. What's even wilder is that the agency admits to it. They could easily say, "We figured it out, but we're not telling you." But they don't.

As of early 2024, the party line is that Kryptos remains encoded, safe from even the world's top spies. Unless, of course, they've cracked it and aren't sharing. But why would the CIA want us to think there's a code they can't crack?

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday and be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. We would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

Today, we're exploring Kryptos, a sculpture at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The statue has four encoded messages written on its surface, one of which has remained unsolved for over 30 years. Today, we'll cover what we know about the code, the people who've tried to crack it, and theories as to why the CIA keeps it up. Stay with us.

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- Bocas del Toro, Panama.

Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

In the late 1980s, the CIA added a new headquarters building to their complex in Langley, Virginia. To complete it, they wanted an outdoor art installation, and they had a very specific design brief. According to released CIA files, they required that, "Art at the CIA should reflect life in all its positive aspects. It should engender feelings of well-being, hope,

It should be forceful in style and manner. It should be worldly yet have identifiable American roots in concept, materials, representation, and so forth. After a long search for the perfect artist, they awarded a $250,000 commission to sculptor Jim Sanborn. Sanborn was known for creating puzzling, interactive art.

His previous sculptures featured cosmic images, compasses, and hidden meanings. Like all the best artists, he hoped his work would issue a challenge, though this one would be quite literal. Sanborn wanted his sculpture to contain a series of secret messages, and he wanted the codes to be incredibly difficult to crack. So difficult, he'd stump seasoned CIA vets,

So Sanborn contacted Edward Scheidt, the head of the CIA's cryptography department. The two met in secret, and Scheidt taught Sanborn how to create ciphers, a method of hiding a message by replacing or shuffling around its letters. With Scheidt's help, Sanborn wrote and encrypted four messages. Then he started construction.

The sculpture began with a large copper sheet over 12 feet tall and 20 feet wide. Sanborn sawed about 1,800 capital letters into the metal, interspersed with the occasional question mark. While Sanborn worked on his installation, he attracted spies, which he probably should have expected given the job was for the CIA.

Police caught intruders climbing ladders and attempting to photograph the unfinished artwork. But no one succeeded in getting a good photo, so the project remained under wraps as Sanborn worked for the next two years. In 1990, the statue was finally unveiled. The piece was titled "Kryptos," the Greek word for "hidden." It looks like an ancient scroll unfurling,

It's text in an unknown language, Sanborn's unique cipher. To a casual observer, the text reads as gibberish. For example, E-M-U-F-P-H-Z. There are no spaces and question marks appear at random. Natural stone benches surround the scroll, inviting the curious to sit and ponder the code.

Sanborn's challenge was issued. And of course, CIA officers set about solving it in their free time. Among them, analyst David Stein. Within a few months, Stein made a breakthrough. He found that only half of Kryptos was a code. The other half was a clue. Stein figured the text of Kryptos was split into four quadrants. The two left-hand quadrants were encoded.

But the two right-hand quadrants held a decryption key. To decode an encrypted message, you need a key. The simplest example of this kind of messaging is called a substitution cipher. Those date all the way back to the height of the Roman Republic. In the 50s BCE, General Julius Caesar used substitution ciphers to fool his enemies.

When sending sensitive information, he replaced every letter in his messages with one several positions away in the alphabet. For example, if the alphabet was shifted three times, A would become D, D would become G, and so on. A simple message like "Good morning" would look like complete gibberish. But with a bit of time and patience, the intended recipient could decode it easily, if they knew the key.

Nowadays, substitution ciphers are so well known that practically anyone can crack it. So modern code makers, like Jim Sanborn, are forced to use other more complex forms of substitution, like visionaire ciphers. Stick with me, this gets a little complicated. A visionaire cipher is a type of encryption grid.

The alphabet is written along the X and Y axis, with A closest to the origin point on both axes, creating a 26x26 table. On each row of the grid, the alphabet is written again, beginning with the letter A on the Y axis. This means that the first row begins with the letter A, the second begins with the letter B, and so on.

Once you have this grid, you need a message and a code word. Now let's say our message is "bingo" and our code word is "score". To create the encryption, you begin with the first letter of each word: B and S. Then you find where these letters intersect on the grid. To visualize this, imagine a graph like in high school algebra.

The letters of your message and your code word serve as coordinates, which will lead you to a point on the graph. This point contains the encrypted letter. Sound complicated? Well, yeah, that's the point. Unless you have the code word, untangling this kind of code can be nearly impossible. Even worse, if you use two code words, which is what Jim Sanborn did. So picture two graphs.

But he didn't leave codebreakers completely helpless. As we mentioned, he included the Visionaire cipher on the statue. But figuring out what kind of code it was was only step one. Next, CIA analyst David Stein had to start decoding. He tried another decryption strategy: letter frequency. Think of it like Scrabble. You have a lot of S's worth one point and fewer Q's worth ten points.

because in English it's much easier to make a word with an S than a Q. So when decoding an English passage, a good rule of thumb is to assume that whichever letters appear most often in the code actually represent letters that appear most often in English. They're the ones that aren't worth much in Scrabble, like S, E, or T. In the case of Kryptos, David Stein noticed that the letter J appeared most often.

However, J also varied in frequency from line to line. Since the pattern was inconsistent, Stein reasoned that the two left-hand quadrants of Kryptos didn't contain just one code. They held four. Using the frequency of the letter J as his guide, Stein split up the 800 odd characters into four distinct sections. He called these K1, K2, K3, and K4.

With the visionaire ciphers and the sectioned-off codes, cryptos began to make sense. By 1998, David Stein felt certain that he'd solved K1, K2, and K3. And he'd done it all by hand, using nothing more than scratch paper, a pencil, and his own mind. But for some reason, Stein kept his discovery a secret. While he pored over the still unsolved K4,

A military computer scientist transcribed the encoded text of Kryptos and made it available to the public. Suddenly, the sculpture wasn't just a CIA obsession. It was open to everyone. Mere months after Stein decrypted K1, K2, and K3, he found himself competing against the entire world. In 1998, CIA analyst David Stein was about to crack a code.

But this time, he wasn't on the clock. He was trying to solve the cipher artist Jim Sanborn had installed at the CIA headquarters eight years earlier, one that was officially still unsolved. But unbeknownst to Stein, a military computer scientist had leaked the statue's text on the internet, making cryptos puzzles available to the world.

Before long, amateur codebreaker Jim Gilligly came across the encryption. He became obsessed with cracking the codes. And he used something David Stein didn't: a computer. Gilligly created a program specifically designed to decode ciphers. This was very new technology.

It definitely didn't exist when Jim Sanborn created the cipher in the late 1980s. And seemingly, no one in the CIA had tried this yet. In 1999, Gilligly input Kryptos' bizarre encoded text into his new decryption program and out popped the answers. Or rather, the answers to K1, K2, and K3. Just like David Stein,

The computer couldn't decode K4. Still, Gilligly was proud. He wrote to the New York Times. He'd done it. He decoded 75% of cryptos. Shortly after, the Times published Gilligly's proposed answers to cryptos. When David Stein read the article, frustration bubbled up inside him. He'd solved the first three quadrants a year earlier using only his mind.

Now, Gilligly's computer was getting all the credit. But as it turned out, Gilligly and Stein weren't the only ones working to crack Kryptos. And Stein wasn't the first to crack the codes. Not long after the New York Times article, the United States National Security Agency, the NSA, made an announcement.

Their codebreakers had solved K1, K2, and K3 over five years earlier, in the early 1990s. Like Stein, they had kept their results secret until now. Competitive spirits aside, this was an important revelation. Three independent codebreakers using vastly different methods came up with the exact same answers. This meant their solutions were almost certainly correct.

But that didn't make them easy to understand. Decrypted, the first section, K1, read, quote, between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of occlusion, end quote. Sanborn later confirmed that he intentionally placed typos in the cipher to throw people off. The word occlusion is meant to be illusion, right?

But he didn't say much more than that, or cast light on what the phrase meant. K2 was significantly longer. For those curious, the whole text is online, but it includes passages like, "Does Langley know about this?" They should. It's buried out there somewhere. Who knows the exact location? Only WW. It also includes the coordinates of the CIA headquarters.

Phrases like buried out there somewhere led some to think Kryptos is a complex map pointing to buried treasure. K2 also mentioned WW, the initials of William Webster, the head of the CIA at the time. Sanborn has since confirmed this is the correct interpretation.

Lastly, there was K3. This section is the most dramatic. It describes breaking open an ancient tomb and entering a misty chamber filled with flickering candles. King Tut's tomb. Sanborn paraphrased an archaeologist's first-hand account for this section. All in all, Kryptos feels like a treasure map, one that's impossible to follow without K4.

So here's what we know about K4. It contains 97 characters. Every human and computer that's tried to solve it has come up short. It seems so unsolvable, people think it might contain a mistake. Sanborn was a novice in crypto, and he was carving hundreds of letters into copper. At some point, he could have transcoded a letter wrong, or several letters.

He'd already copped to including a typo, saying the Q in "eclusion" was intentional to make things more confusing. But maybe that typo wasn't intentional, and Sanborn was just covering for his mistake. But unlike a single wrong letter, the errors in K4 might make it impossible to decode. And sure enough, Sanborn soon revealed he did make another mistake. He forgot to add an S toward the end of K2.

But Sanborn claims the missing S is his one and only mistake. And K4 is entirely solvable. And if people don't believe him, he has an expert to back him up. Edward Scheidt, the former CIA director who assisted Sanborn's cryptography, vouched for him. Scheidt insisted that the code was crackable. The sculpture wasn't the problem.

The problem was, nobody had solved it yet. Enter Alanka Dunin. In 2000, she was walking around DragonCon, a pop culture convention, and came across a competition. The first person to solve a cipher would win a free trip to another convention, this one for hackers. In over a year, no one had solved this code.

Alonka was a 41-year-old video game developer, so pretty experienced in both creating and solving puzzles. She took the cipher home and gave it her best shot. The cipher had multiple layers, codes within codes, red herrings, and dead ends. One dead end led to the CIA's website and their information about cryptos. This was the first time Alonka ever heard about the enigmatic sculpture.

After ten days of work, Alonka solved the cipher and won the prize. Even though the reference to cryptos had been nothing more than an inside joke for the cipher writers, Alonka found herself engrossed by the CIA's sculpture and the challenge it posed. Like everyone else, Alonka couldn't make heads or tails of K-4, so she looked into the man behind the mystery, the artist Jim Sanborn.

And she found something that feels like a clue. Sanborn made two encrypted pieces after Kryptos. One is called Antipodes, and the other is titled the Cyrillic Projector. Both were made in 1997, and they're basically Kryptos the sequel. Antipodes is a large scroll made of copper and petrified wood.

But unlike Kryptos, half the text is in the Cyrillic alphabet. That's the one used in Russia. Meanwhile, the Cyrillic projector is entirely in the Cyrillic alphabet. Instead of a scroll, it's a giant copper cylinder with a light in the middle. So the letters are also projected onto the walkway around it.

And remember how I said Antipodes has two halves? Its Cyrillic alphabet half matches the text on the Cyrillic projector, and the Latin alphabet half matches Kryptos. At the time, the Cyrillic projector cipher was unsolved, just like K4 on both Kryptos and Antipodes. So maybe the Cyrillic projector held the clue to solving Kryptos.

Alonka created a website where she could share her theories and talk to anyone else trying to solve Kryptos and the Cyrillic Projector. Over time, Alonka's site gained a small following, including Jim Sanborn himself. Sanborn eventually reached out to Alonka, but even after becoming friendly, Sanborn remained tight-lipped. He didn't want to play favorites. So Alonka tried a different tack.

In 2001, she went directly to the CIA headquarters at Langley. See, when Sanborn installed Kryptos, he didn't only install a statue and some benches. He also placed a reflecting pool, large rocks, and pieces of metal around the CIA campus.

Some of those contain inscriptions, including Morse code and a compass rose. So while everyone else focused on the sculpture's text, Alonka thought there might be a clue in its surroundings. Especially because part of the decrypted code includes latitude and longitude coordinates, which line up with the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. So Alonka made the trip.

Once there, Alonka asked several guards if there were any public tour days or if she could enter with the permission of a congressperson. But security officers refused to grant entry to anyone without official business. Which, yeah, makes sense. Alonka left disappointed, but immediately started formulating a new plan. If she didn't have any official business with the CIA, she could simply invent some. Enter Alonka.

Al-Qaeda. Sort of. At the time, it was rumored the terrorist group was using a form of encryption called steganography. So, Alonka became an expert on steganography. For everyone who isn't a spy, steganography involves hiding messages inside other non-secret text or data. The goal is to obscure the fact that the message is being sent at all.

For example, a seemingly normal computer file might reveal a secret if a user right-clicks in a certain spot, or examines the file's source code. For more detail, you'd have to ask a lonka. Which is exactly what conventions and universities started doing.

She gave professional lectures, hoping to catch the eye of someone in the CIA. During one talk, she even included a slide of Kryptos and mentioned wanting to speak at the CIA headquarters. Afterward, a guest approached her with life-changing news. He worked at Langley. He could get her in. Arriving at CIA headquarters with a guest pass in hand was a dream for Alonka.

She could see Kryptos with her own eyes. She took her own photographs and traced the statue's design. And she examined the grounds and saw three mysterious Morse code phrases: "virtually invisible," "shadow forces," and "lucid memory." It was a thrilling day. But it didn't yield new answers.

After her trip, Olonka added all her images to her website, which wasn't just a win for her. By 2002, over 2,000 hobbyists were active on the site, determined to decode K4. They called themselves the Cryptos Group. And they made progress. In 2004, Frank Kaur and Mike Bales both independently solved the Cyrillic Projector,

The message was in Russian, so Alanka and the Kryptos group raced to translate it perfectly. This could be the key to Kryptos. What they found appeared to be two quotes. One seemingly from a spy manual discussing methods to gain psychological control over sources. The other is from KGB documents discussing a defector named Sakharov.

The Kryptos group puzzled over it for two more years. They couldn't quite fit the pieces together. So, in 2006, Jim Sanborn finally decided to help. After 16 years of waiting for someone to crack his code, artist Jim Sanborn was getting impatient. He'd already provided an extra clue, explaining a typo on the Kryptos sculpture's unsolved fourth panel, but that hadn't gotten anyone anywhere.

Part of the problem was that K4 is the second shortest quadrant at only 97 characters. The shorter an encoded phrase, the harder it is to pinpoint patterns and the more difficult it is to solve. Using tricks like letter frequency didn't work on K4 because no clear pattern stood out. That said, K1 was even shorter and was solved by three independent parties within a few years.

So Sanborn started dropping more clues. In 2006, he stated that the last few words were "X Layer 2." X is the single letter. Think "X" marks the spot, not "X girlfriend." In theory, this should have brought everyone closer to cracking the code, but in practice, it didn't. Hobbyists continued their quest for answers.

Jim Sanborn and Alonka Dunnan both received countless calls and emails from people claiming they'd solved K4, but nobody could prove it. In 2010, Alonka filed a Freedom of Information request to get the NSA's notes on Kryptos. When she finally got the files in 2013, she learned that even they hadn't solved K4 yet.

So our only hope for an answer was working with Sanborn. Every now and then he met with Alonka's Kryptos fan club to field questions about the sculpture. He'd answer the questions, selectively. In 2010, he stated that certain letters decrypted meant Berlin. In 2014, he said that the word after Berlin is clock. Finally, in 2020,

He revealed that a portion of K4 read East-North-East. Once again, it seems to be signaling a map. East-North-East and Berlin Clock might point to a location. Some keen-eyed cryptographers took this even further. They suggested that this wasn't a reference to just any Berlin Clock, but to the Berlin Ua.

This specific clock measures time using set theory, which is the mathematical practice of subdividing numbers into groups of objects. The Berlin Ueh is made up of a series of blinking lights. Two rows of lights represent hours and those underneath represent minutes.

When codebreakers asked Sanborn about the Berlin Uhr, the artist reportedly sounded pleased. He replied, "There are many interesting clocks in Berlin."

He's right. Besides the Berlin Ura, there's the Clock of Flowing Time. It looks like a cross between an hourglass and a mad scientist's lab and runs on moving green-colored water. It's also three stories high and in the middle of a shopping mall. It's the kind of contemporary art piece Jim Sanborn would be well aware of. But it's also possible that Berlin Clock is a red herring.

It might make more sense to pair Berlin with the other words. Sanborn has said that Germany was on his mind as he created the sculpture, though to be fair, that was in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. Germany was on everyone's mind that year. But by including East and Berlin in the same segment, he may have been making a political statement about East Berlin.

Or just marking the time the sculpture was made. Either way, it brings Jim Sanborn's other piece, Antipodes, back into focus. Remember, Antipodes is the piece that matches Kryptos and Sanborn's other piece, the Cyrillic Projector. Antipodes links a Russian text about the KGB to the headquarters of the CIA, its rival.

And the way it's divided, with one half of the scroll in Russian and one in English, matches the Cold War division of Berlin between the Russians and Americans, a time when Berlin was crawling with members of the CIA and KGB. To me, that's confirmation that Kryptos is a commentary on Cold War espionage, though what that commentary is remains a mystery.

Jim Sanborn has said that the sculpture's true meaning can only be known once all four ciphers are solved, then considered as a whole. And last we checked, he's still not talking. But there is one other person with the answer to Kryptos: William Webster. William Webster was the director of the CIA in 1990. He's also the WW referred to in Quadrant K2.

According to Kim Zetter's reporting for Wired, Sanborn said the CIA wouldn't install the art unless they had confirmation the answer wouldn't embarrass them. However, in 2005, Sanborn said he'd given incorrect answers to both Webster and Eric Scheidt, the agent who helped him create the cipher.

Whether that's true or just another clue, Webster is keeping the solution he has secret. He's only said K4 is hard to understand. And maybe that's the point. Sanborn didn't create Kryptos to start a treasure hunt or pull one over on the CIA. He wanted to make a compelling puzzle. The thrill of unraveling ciphers is something both he and the Kryptos group do for fun.

As for the CIA brief requested, the sculpture is designed to engender feelings of hope. Maybe that's the hope of one day solving the puzzle. And if that's the case, Sanborn more than earned the quarter million dollars the CIA paid him. That leads into the final theory: that the puzzle has no solution. It's an endless fountain of hope with a dark side.

Remember how Antipodes, the sequel sculpture, includes a section on psychological control? Maybe that's the key. Maybe Kryptos and the hope it brings are simply a distraction. Because when people's minds are focused on the sculpture outside the CIA headquarters, they aren't thinking about what's going on inside the buildings at Langley. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast.

We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Send a short audio recording telling your story to conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.

And the official story isn't always the truth.

Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Matthew Teamstra, edited by Karis Allen, Andrew Messer, and Maggie Admire. Fact-checked by Kara Mackerlein, researched by Bradley Klein, and sound designed by Sam Baer. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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