Kryptos cracked?

For 16 years, the cryptographic sculpture in the courtyard of the CIA's headquarters has puzzled people both inside and outside the intelligence agency.

There are four coded sections on the giant copper scroll that makes up the center of "Kryptos," and in the late 1990s three of those messages were cracked -- although their actual meanings remain deeply esoteric.

The baffling final section has yet to be decoded at all.

But last week, the sculptor revealed a mistake in one of those decoded messages -- a mistake that sent codebreakers down a dead-end road for the past seven years.

In what he called "purely an act of aesthetics," artist Jim Sanborn didn't use an "X" to mark the last line break in the second panel's code as he had done earlier.

That changed the final clue from the intriguing "I.D. by Row S" to "Layer Two."
Because he believed that final line would come out as gibberish if decoded properly, he figured whoever cracked the code would understand a line break would have to be added -- misspellings and the occasional random or missing character are often intentionally used to make codes tougher to unravel.

But when a civilian cryptographer announced he'd figured out three of the four messages back in 1999, the last words of Section Two weren't the words Sanborn had hidden in the code. Instead of gibberish that would let the codebreaker know something was screwy with that final line, the phrase "ID BY ROW S" was found in those final eight characters.

That's not what Sanborn meant at all. With the line separator inserted as he intended, those eight characters say "LAYER TWO."

Last week, Wired News reported that Sanborn had finally done a careful line-by-line comparison of the decoded text and his original text. For years, he had assumed "ID BY ROW S" was a notation by the codebreaker and not a misreading of the last eight letters.

Finally realizing the mistake, he called Elonka Dunin, who runs an Internet forum devoted to the puzzling sculpture.

Jim Gillogly, the computer programmer who announced he'd figured out three sections back in 1999, told the New York Times this weekend that the news was "intriguing but scarcely definitive."

"Like much of the sculpture, it can be taken in many ways." Gillogly told the paper by e-mail.
The sculpture was dedicated in November 1990. Sanborn and retiring CIA cryptology expert Ed Scheidt worked together on the puzzle. The only other person who reportedly knows the complete answer is former CIA chief William Webster.

But Sanborn told Wired years later that he didn't really give Webster the complete solution.
"Well, you know, I wasn't completely truthful with the man," Sanborn said last year.
"And I'm sure he realizes that. I mean that's part of tradecraft, isn't it? Deception is everywhere. I had to leave an envelope at the agency saying what was on the [sculpture]. I gave it to William Webster at the dedication ceremony with a wax seal on it, but in fact I really didn't tell him the whole story. I definitely didn't give him the last section, which has never been deciphered."

Nothing is revealed

The decoded sections have been mundanely described by the New York Times as "poetic ramblings by the sculptor and an account of the opening of King Tut's tomb."

In fact, the three decoded messages hint at a terrible conspiracy involving the ancient Egyptians, disinformation and something powered by the Earth's magnetic field ... something invisible.

The first message reads, "BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION."

Section Two says, "IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO."
Finally, Section Three is a paraphrased version of archaeologist Howard Carter's opening of King Tutankhamen's tomb:

"SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?)"

Additionally, there are morse-code sculptures in the courtyard around the main sculpture. Those deciphered contain disturbing phrases such as "SOS, LUCID MEMORY, T IS YOUR POSITION, SHADOW FORCES," and VIRTUALLY INVISIBLE."

World's most baffling codes

The sculpture's final (?) unsolved puzzle has earned it a spot in the world's most famous uncracked codes.

Others on that list include the 600-year-old Voynich manuscript, a bizarre illustrated book filled with unknown plants, mysterious astrological charts and tiny humanoids bathing in subterranean ponds. The alphabet and language have never been identified, and many suspect it is a book of coded alchemy instructions.

Another is the Beale Cipher, supposedly the coded instructions to a massive buried treasure in Virginia, but just as likely a metaphorical text dealing with Masonic secrets.
(Best-selling author Dan Brown reportedly incorporates the Beale Ciphers mystery into his next novel, a thriller about the Masonic plot behind the American Revolution called "The Solomon Key." And those bits of cryptography on the cover flaps of his ubiquitous "The Da Vinci Code" are ... from the CIA's Kryptos sculpture.)

But the act of cracking a code doesn't guarantee you've solved the puzzle. One famous code was on a stone tablet buried 90 feet deep on Oak Island, the Nova Scotia isle that has defeated all attempts to dig up a treasure possibly hidden by the Knights Templar. For 211 years, all efforts to dig up the treasure have failed.