The Mystery of “Kryptos”

At the entrance to the New Headquarters building, the sculpture begins with two red granite and copperplate constructions  which flank the walkway from the parking deck.  These stones appear as pages jutting from the earth with copperplate ‘between the pages’ on which there are  International Morse code and  ancient ciphers.  There is also a lodestone (a naturally magnetized rock) co-located with a navigational compass rose.

In the courtyard, a calm, reflective pool of water lies between two layered slabs of  granite  and tall grasses. Directly across from this is the centerpiece of “Kryptos,” a piece of petrified wood supporting an S-shaped copper screen surrounding a bubbling pool of water.

• The petrified tree symbolizes the trees that once stood on the site of the sculpture and that were the source of materials on which written language has been recorded.
• The bubbling pool symbolizes information being disseminated with the destination being unknown. 
• The copperplate screen has approximately 2,000 alphabetic letters cut into it.

The sculpture is like a history of cryptography. The left side of the copper screen, the first two sections, is a table for deciphering and enciphering code, a method developed by 16^th century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenere.  The Vigenere method substitutes letters throughout the message by shifting from one alphabet order to another with each letter of the key.  Part of the right side of the sculpture uses the table from the left side, and another portion uses the cryptographic method of transposing letters or changing their position in a message according to whatever method the writer devised.  

  The sculpture has been a source of mystery and challenge for Agency employees, other government employees, and interested people outside of government.  In early 1998, a CIA physicist announced to the Agency that he had cracked the code for three of the four sections. This was followed a year later by a public announcement from a California computer scientist that he had done the same.  As varied as the codes in the sculpture are, so were the methods to crack them.  The Agency employee used pencil and paper, and the computer scientist used his computer.  No one has yet to break the code for the remaining 97-character message which utilizes a more difficult cryptographic code.

James Sanborn once said “They will be able to read what I wrote, but what I wrote is a mystery itself.” Only time will tell if the final message to this multi-layered puzzle is ever revealed.  If you want to try to break the code, here are the letters from “Kryptos.” 

Much more information about the Kryptos Sculpture

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