Informants

James Sanborn "I have to preface this by saying that I was born in Washington, D.C., and I am very familiar with government agencies. In my first walk-through at the CIA I was stunned.  They had built a new building, and it was still painted institutional green on the inside. I was very surprised that this building, which was supposed to be state of the art in 1990, still had a lot of the old governmental vestiges.  The hallways were warrenlike for obvious security reasons.  The windows were partially blocked, and a large part of it was underground. I decided to do the commission because I felt as if I might be able to make some sort of difference, in that I could work from the inside and somewhow affect the thinking of the CIA. As naive as it seems, I attempted to do that.  What I chose for the piece was to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics.  Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles.  I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded.  I wrote a fairly extensive text, then encoded it into a matrix system, which seemed to me, as an artist, to be fairly simple.  I figured it would take the agency a year or two to decode, when, in fact, it took them almost eight years to get part of it.  To date, they haven't cracked the other part.  It ended up being something of a challenge for them to do.  Physically the piece sits in the absolute center of the agency, in a courtyard, and perhaps it taunts them every day to think about something other than the document they are working on at any given time." - Excerpt from interview in Atomic Time, a book released as part of Sanborn's new gallery show. "I adapted fairly quickly to [the idea that merging politics with art is another way of communicating with the world] and discovered an underlying political motivation that I didn't know existed before that time.  What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant pure sciences.  I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant." - Excerpt from interview in Atomic Time. "The fact that my earlier work didn't include cryptography doesn't mean it excluded things dealing with secrecy.  The work that happened before the CIA, and the reason I was chosen [to design the art], dealt with invisible forces -- albeit natural invisible forces.  I built pieces about the Coriolis force that makes whirlpools in the Northern and Southern hemispheres turn in opposite directions.  I also worked with the Earth's magnetic field and worked with lodestones... from which we derived our knowledge of electricity.  It was all involved in the secrets of nature before the agency chose my work to deal with the secrecy of man." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "For the student of cryptography it's always helpful to gather as much information as possible when zeroing in on and encoding a system." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Well, I'm not going to answer that question." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked if it is necessary to view his other works of art to solve Kryptos. "Well, all I'll say is basically I designed the piece to act [in a way that] this part is easy, the next part is less easy, the next part is the most difficult.  So if you consider the entrance to the new CIA building the entrance to the agency, the piece that's out front is the most simplistic, basic code that there is.  Then they get more sophisticated the further you [go onto the campus]." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "No." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked if it was required to be physically at the sculpture to solve the puzzle. "Well, yeah.  That doesn't mean that what I've said in the piece doesn't do something physically there at the agency.  So the effect of the piece might affect something at the agency so that you'd have to see what I did at the agency." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked if the puzzle could be solved by a text transcript alone. "In part of the code that's been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that's on the grounds of the agency.  So... you have to decipher the piece and then go to the agency and find that place.  There are, for example, longitude and latitude coordinates on the piece, which refer to locations of the agency.  ...an act that I could have carried out.  I refer to something I'd done out there." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I made reference in the encoded text to something I could have done there." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I would think five or six." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked how many cryptographic techniques were used. "Mr. Scheidt basically gave me an outline of historic and contemporary ... encoding systems that have been formally used by the agency and were still used by the agency and other people [in 1990].  He gave me a whole variety of possible systems to use and ways to modify all of those systems.  But as a visual artist, I like to rely on systems that include visual as well as digital material that can be deciphered by machines.  It's also well-known that I did use some matrix codes Ed gave me, and I have also designed visual systems for encoding, which are much harder for cryptographers to crack because they're individualistic." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "No, [Sheidt] doesn't know the solution.  I made that very clear that I didn't want him to be able to decipher what's going on ... that I'd be modifying systems and developing my own, which would make it virtually impossible for him to decipher all of it.  I intended the 80 percent (of the text) that's been deciphered to be deciphered and to be deciphered in stages and relatively quickly.  The final part is obviously the, you know, the apex of the pyramid there." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "No, [Kryptos does not deal with covert obsolescence].  Not that it doesn't say something about clandestine trade craft.  A lot of the work deals with secrecy and ... the modus operandi of spies -- how they operate, how they turn sources and things like that.  Even the [other] pieces at the agency that are in the courtyard -- stone layers that have encoded text on them -- sort of dealt with secrecy as an entity, which has existed through time for eons and generations.  Cave people [for example] keeping secret their methods of killing a mammoth or something like that." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "It's a very different animal [from the Cyrillic Projector].  The answer will be far more ambiguous.  Of the part that's been decoded already there is certain ambiguity in the last few sentences and it's been open to interpretation, as has the whole piece." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "If you make a body of work over many years so that anyone will know that it's your art, you have a common denominator, which means you leave clues.  You don't just sign every artwork.  There's something about that particular artwork that you say, 'Oh, that's a Sanborn.'  And [the coding] was one of the common denominators that I chose to leave in.  Just like my lodestones.  I brought my lodestones forward 10 years and used them at the agency.  Then I brought Kryptos forward five years and used them after that.  And I will continue to bring work back and carry ideas forward in order to get a continuum for the body of work." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Oh, I won't say." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked if anything planted at the CIA is buried. "Well the new [CIA] building was being built while I was there and at night there were teams that used, I believe, a neutron scan [on] everything that went into the agency so that they could find any bugs or anything that had been planted.  [They] used ground-penetrating radar and various other means to see and find everything that was there.  And I would suppose they did that with my piece as well, which makes it difficult to do whatever you'd like to do -- not in an espionage way, but whatever you want to do." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I didn't say I was unable to do it, I just said it makes things difficult.  When somebody comes in and X-rays everything you do every night, it makes it tough doesn't it?  [laughs]" - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I'm inclined to not comment [on proposed solutions].  If a person deciphers and sends me the exact decipherment -- if it can be deciphered exactly, considering most of my things are rife with mistakes on purpose -- I'd probably let them know that they got it if they did.  I will say that I have left instructions in the earlier text that refer to later text. That's as far as I'll go." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Uhhh ... I certainly want it to be considered. I had figured that the parts that have been solved already would have been done a lot quicker than they were. But that might just have been a question of focus of the cryptography community." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked if he wants Kryptos to be solved. "William Webster." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked who WW is. "Well, you know, I wasn't completely truthful with the man. 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." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "That's his problem!  [laughs]" - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when told Webster thinks he was given the solution. "No... No. I've got it hidden someplace but I'm not going to read it.  I have done everything I can to forget [it], because I don't want to slip and give somebody information about it.  I mean, you read the piece of paper, you burn it, and you forget it.  That's the only way information is kept secret.  It's very difficult not to give clues.  In the early days, anything I said was a clue.  Now things are getting more and more refined the more people [are looking into] this.  They are looking for shreds, tiny little slivers of information.  So I have to be very careful not to go any further." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I have the solution hidden someplace.  So if somebody cracks it I can cross-check it." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "The secret will probably pass away." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Well, actually I have [left the solution in my will].  I think it's important that whoever says that they cracked it will in fact find out whether they actually did.  So from that standpoint, there does have to be some sort of historic record of what it says." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Maybe the Israelis. Maybe the Russians? Just go over to the embassy – wouldn't they love that?" - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post when asked who he had considered for training on encryption methods. "About every couple of months, sometimes more [often], somebody would call me up. ...I had nothing whatsoever to do with any of these people." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "It's about the thrill of discovery." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "I think all art should be subject to as many interpretations as possible. ...If there's nothing more to discover about it, then it's not a very interesting artwork." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "Something hidden, something secret, was the distilled CIA... and the thing that struck me the most significantly with these people, a tremendous number of people at the agency live their whole lives with a secret, that they can never tell anyone.  I was never able to keep a secret very well at all, so I figured that the best way for me to do a project for the CIA was perhaps to become privy to information which I then had to keep secret for the rest of my life, and that's what I did..." - Excerpt from interview in NPR's All Things Considered. "There are encoding systems which use pattern, light and shadow, and it's those kinds of systems that I was most interested in using, because I'm an artist... and I chose not to use, in at least what's been deciphered already, perhaps what has not been deciphered... I like to use spatial systems of encoding and decoding." - Excerpt from interview in NPR's All Things Considered. "It's possible, anything's possible." - Excerpt fro interview in NPR's All Things Considered regarding the deciphered text of the first passage being a clue. "Once the plate is deciphered I'm not convinced the true meaning will be clear even then.  There's another deeper mystery." - Excerpt from interview in World News Tonight. "The Kryptos puzzle is a layered puzzle, and we may find that it has layers within layers within layers." - Excerpt from interview in New York Times.r." "It could corrupt somehow. It might cause... that people at the agency to perhaps think of things a little bit more, less seriously." - Excerpt from interview in World News Tonight. "A lot of strange things happened while I was doing the piece.  There were people caught on ladders trying to look in my window and photograph the piece through my windows and they were run off by the police." - Excerpt from interview in World News Tonight. "Sure somebody will figure it out eventually and then personalities will change, you know. Ten years will go by, 15 years will go by and they'll forget what it says again." - Excerpt from interview in World News Tonight. "Metaphor has always been important to me. Petrified trees and fossils were once moving, growing, and living, but have been somehow transfixed, turned to stone." - Excerpt from article in Covert Obsolescence Installation exhibition catalog. "The words and paragraphs that I selected are very straightforward; I've hidden them from view because I am deliberately secretive about the content of my work.  In a lot of ways I am describing the process of the CIA, of what intelligence agencies do and the process of subverting something, the process of encoding and decoding.  It becomes about how that process fits into our lives, rather that the details of what is encoded or decoded.  What the CIA is encoding and decoding, is, in some ways, less important that how they're doing it, and how that process applies to us." - Excerpt from article in Covert Obsolescence Installation exhibition catalog. "The greatest chart we have for decoding is the Rosetta Stone.  Cracking that code gave us the ability to understand an ancient language.  What the CIA does now, as far as encoding and decoding, is a very similar kind of sleuthing: word sleuthing as opposed to physical sleuthing.  The method of encoding and decoding that I use, called Vigenere Tableau, is ancient. It was invented by the French diplomat Blaise de Vigenere in 1525.  It isn't as simple as Morse code and it isn't as complex as Sanskrit, but it's still very well loved by contemporary cryptographers because it's a classic, elegant system." - Excerpt from article in Covert Obsolescence Installation exhibition catalog. "When one has a secret, one has power.  It might not be negative power, it could be positive.  You keep a secret from someone because you don't want to hurt them.  Or, you keep a secret because you do want them.  Keeping a secret has many aspects." - Excerpt from article in Secrets Passed exhibition catalog. "This is a person -- I am a person who has zero mathematical ability, took tutoring for algorithms in high school." - Excerpt from NPR. "I'm finding that it's increasingly difficult to keep that kind of information secret because the closer people get to cracking the last 97 characters, the more difficult it is to say absolutely nothing about what it does or does not say, and so it's tough." - Excerpt from NPR. "I don't really believe I gave them the entire code. So, you know, if it was a deception on my part, hey, so be it. You have to play the game the way everyone else, you know, at the agency plays the game." - Excerpt from NPR. "It is composed of four parts with, for deciphering, an increasing difficulty. For the first three sections, easiest, I thought that it would be the business of a few weeks." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "There is nothing any more in my house and in my studio." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "A starts from rare cases, the artists like well that their work is known." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "I never spoke to [Dan Brown]. That surprises me, at the very least." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "I am rather scientist-darwinien kind." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "There are many people who became obsessed by this code, and any obsession goes hand in hand with a certain social disconnection." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "K4 can be decoded. One can arrive at a text as good English." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "If I start to answer this kind of questions, I am likely to give the solution small end by small end. All that I can say, it is that it is décodable." - Translated excerpt from Libération. "I don't want my work manipulated in such a way that its meaning is somehow transformed." - Excerpt from The Wallstreet Journal. "The most obvious key to the sculpture, nobody has picked up on." - Excerpt from The Wallstreet Journal. "I don't think so." - Excerpt from CNN when asked if anyone besides Sanborn knows what the last passage says. "I don't presume to think that 'Kryptos' sculpture has the import that finding Tutankhamen's tomb would have, but it's that same magic of finding something, finding a fossil or finding an Indian arrow head or something like that.  It's magical, because it's something that was made in the past.  So I wanted to somehow demonstrate that magic, for everyone, once it was cracked." - Excerpt from CNN. "We all have codes.  What's your ATM PIN number?  So this was just one that I did, and I don't think it's unusual to design a code that's difficult to crack.  I don't think it's hard, either." - Excerpt from CNN. "A long viewing existence. I mean, any artist wants to make a piece that endures. I made it out of copper and stone, basically. But what seems to have endured is the content and the code, and I mean, in that respect it's succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, because as the code is disclosed slowly -- which was a plan -- it seems to be staying in the spotlight, which is great." - Excerpt from CNN televised interview when asked what he was trying to achieve. "I had tremendous interests in making things which are invisible visible. All through the 1980s what I was working with at that time was things called load stones, and the Earth's magnetic field. Basically, the Earth's magnetic field is an invisible natural force, and I chose to show it visually by setting up large arrays of hundred and hundreds of compass needles that were all aligned north and south. Instead of a small little compass that gives you very small information, I tried to demonstrate the large power the Earth's magnetic field has. So I was selected based on that work, of dealing with invisible forces. So, the invisible forces of nature was what I was dealing with, so there was a conceptual leap in that I could work equally well with the invisible forces of mankind." - Excerpt from CNN televised interview. "When I conceived of the idea to do an encoded piece for the CIA, I was determined to keep it absolutely secret from the agency and everyone else. Then I thought about it, and I said well, you know, the agency's going to want to know what I said for obvious reasons. You know, did I write something pornographic, did I write something that absolutely torpedoed the agency? And so I offered it -- actually, the agency suggested that I give it to the Department of Historical Intelligence. So I, with trepidation, said OK, how am I going to do this without giving them something tangible to remember? And so I went into the office of Historical Intelligence, which at that time was comprised of three people in a fairly dark room. And I had three pieces of paper with me, and I asked, 'Listen, who has the best memory? I really want to entrust this code with the person with the best memory.' And two of the people pointed to one person and said, 'She has an institutional memory. She remembers everything.' And I asked her to leave the room. So then I had two pieces of paper with the same thing on it. Which basically had the code, the plain text, but it was scrambled in such a way that you could read sentences, but you wouldn't get the whole picture. Sort of a need to know situation. So they, the two people, started reading it, and I realized quickly, and they realized quickly, the import of what they were doing. Because frankly, if I had deceived them in some way, and they had read this and said, 'Oh, this is fine,' and then the sculpture had gone up and it wasn't fine, then it was their job on the line. It was a tremendous responsibility that they ended up not being able to accept. So at that time it was decided that I would give the code to William Webster at the dedication ceremony, which I did. In a sealed envelope, as carefully masked in such a way that you couldn't see inside as I could do at the time." - Excerpt from CNN televised interview. "Well, [Kryptos] was an obsession of mine, and when I designed the piece, I said to myself, you know, when an artist does a public artwork, which is -- this is sort of the quintessential public artwork because it's in the public eye in a large way -- you want to do artwork which will retain interest. I did know there was something special, certainly, about the site. You don't do something for the CIA and expect it just to go away, and nobody ever hears about it again, because it's for the CIA. So I took out all the stops. I mean, I gave the agency as much as I possibly could, physically, and as the number of objects I put there. And I made nothing from the project. So I put all my eggs in that basket, assuming that it would work for me in tangible ways later. And it has. I mean, the commissioned work and the success I've had in doing large-scale artworks outdoors, or public artwork, has been significant. And so a lot of artists do artwork just for the resume, and just to have photographs of it and say they did it. This is one of those pieces where I made very little monetary ... I made nothing monetarily from it, but I knew that the PR would certainly help my future work." - Excerpt from CNN televised interview. "You know, I've done my best to distance myself, actually, from what I wrote. And when the passages that were deciphered already were cracked, I had to go back to my notes to figure out what I'd written. And it's the same with this most recent code as well. When it's cracked, if it's cracked, in my lifetime, I'm certainly going to have to refresh my memory as far as what I wrote. Which is my only way of keeping a secret, frankly. I'm not good at it." - Excerpt from CNN televised interview. "Well the reality is that I'm in a unique position: I'm an artist, OK? I'm not a mathematician, but I do have other skills, more visual skills, that were brought to bear in designing the code. Ed Scheidt, the cryptographer who I worked with, who's retired from the agency, gave me an overview of encoding systems, and worked with me. We met in secret locations at the time. It seems ridiculous, but we felt it necessary to develop something. Then he gave me the systems. I was able to modify them to my own ends." - Excerpt from CNN televised interview. "Let's just think of the last passage of the "Kryptos" as being like sand in an hourglass. At this point in time, every little grain of sand that leaves that hourglass is a clue, right? And so, the further along we go, and the more the layers of the onion are unraveled, and the closer we get to cracking the 'Kryptos' sculpture, the tinier the grain is that would be responsible for cracking that code. So I've had to be very careful about the wording, what I say at any given time over all the years. I was very glib in 1990, '94, when these stories first broke about the 'Kryptos' sculpture. I am far less glib now. Loose lips, you know?" - Excerpt from CNN televised interview. Ed Scheidt Ed Scheidt is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency's Cryptographic Center.  He aided Jim Sanborn with cryptographic traning for use in Kryptos. "I provided the cryptographic process as well as worked with him with what he was looking to do as far as the story [the sculpture would tell]. We came up with a methodology using some of the known cryptographic solutions [at the time]." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "There are four different processes [used to decipher the sculpture].  Two of them are similar and the other two are different things.  The first three processes were designed so that a person could, through cryptographic analysis, have access to the English language.  And the last process, I masked the English language so it's more of a challenge now.  It's progressively harder in the challenges." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "All four [passages] are done in the English language.  The message could have been in another language.  This particular puzzle is in the English language.... The techniques of the first three parts, which some people have broken, [incorporated] frequency counting and other techniques that are similar to that.  You can get insight into the sculpture through that technique because the English language is still visible through the code.  [But with] this other technique, I disguise that.  So ... you need to solve the technique first and then go for the puzzle." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "The masking technique may not be [a known technique]...  That's part of the puzzle I told [Jim] I would keep secret." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Well, [Kryptos] has been around about 15 years." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked how difficult the final passage would be to solve. "Ah hah.  I can't respond to that one.  I haven't heard him say that before.  It's possible I guess.  I haven't talked to Jim on what he did, but I do know... there was some masking techniques that were used and that's about it." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when told Sanborn said even he wouldn't know the solution. "The last [passage], I don't know what Jim did, and I obviously haven’t gone back to see if there were changes and things like that.  I know what we talked about." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Obviously there could be a possibility.  I know what the message was to be.  Since he's the one who had the chisel in his hands, there could be some changes." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when asked if he knew the final solution. "I'm not aware of anything being buried [on location], no." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Well, the idea of encoding a message is not only to encode the externals of a message, but the message itself.  Once it is readable, it may have other encoding that's involved in it.  That's something that would show up in secret messages.  If I wanted to, for instance, say you and I are going to meet at 1 o'clock on Friday.  We may establish a code that 1 o'clock on Friday is equal to 'cake.'  So in my message I would say how about you and I meeting at a convenient place for cake?  Then you and I really know that cake means the time." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "That's right. And that's where the masking and all these other kinds of techniques can come into play." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine when ask if the deciphered text's meaning may not be understood. "I haven't talked to anyone [at the agency] about it.  I would have to believe somebody would, at lunchtime, want to take a look at it.  I think there are 98 characters left.  That's not a lot of characters.  It's a question of how would you approach it.  Would you approach it mathematically?  Would you approach it in the context of secret writings or symbols?  There's a whole array of things which offer a challenge." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I can only say the intent was to have a larger meaning...  Well, if I can remember right, intelligence gathering was one of the meanings that was wanted to be portrayed.  Now intelligence gathering can take on a lot of meanings in its own self.  It could mean the techniques of intelligence gathering. It could mean the process of intelligence gathering.  It could be the result of intelligence gathering.  It could take on a larger role.  My understanding from a while back was that was the intent." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "Knowing Jim, he would think along those lines.  And just seeing it in some of his other work I think he would want to portray things of that nature.  Philosophical things." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "So I would have to believe [philosophy like nature's secrets] would come out in his work in time.  Another way of saying it is that as one peels the onion away, or the various cloaks, you come closer to the truth from a philosophical sense.  And then where does it take you down that path?  Well I would assume that the path will lead you down different ways, depending on your philosophical perspective.  So it's again back to is it a black-and-white answer or is it an answer that has a lot of gray areas?" - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I don't think [you will be disappointed].  Just knowing Jim -- in talking to Jim, he has philosophies that he would like to portray and this is a medium for him to do that.  And also this is a project that has a lot of depth to it.  It would give an artist a good opportunity to do a lot of things as opposed to be narrow in their approach." - Excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine. "I could use methods to encrypt it that had a historic basis – that didn't compromise any current methods [of cryptography used by the government]." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "[Sanborn and I wanted] to make something that could eventually be deciphered or extracted, rather than something that will never be done, ever." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "Most people talk about cryptography, they remember it in the context of the cryptoanalyst.  Very few people actually talk about the person who designs the thing." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "[The last 97 characters?  Don't hold your breath.]  I saved the best for last.  No clues, sorry." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "I used a bit of stego when designing the fourth part of Kryptos." - Excerpt from cryptography discussion. "In the first 3 parts, I gave anyone attempting to break the code the advantage of the English language with all its known patters(sic), but I removed that advantage in the fourth part." - Excerpt from cryptography discussion. "There were a string of questions for which I was focusing on how other folks did their analysis relying on the English language and resulting in three parts being deciphered. I did say that in the last part the advantage of the language was taken away. I also stated that there was a piece relating to Stego, but did not state how or in what context." - Excerpt from cryptography discussion. "For instance, if you could determine that, the number of E's vs. the number of Z's in the English language, then you would have some insight into the potential words that they made up, because there are more E's in the English language than there are Z's." - Excerpt from NPR, commenting on how the frequency of some letters occurs more often than others in the English language. William Webster "Kryptos speaks to a sense of place.  [Sanborn has] captured much of what this agency is about." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "I have zero memory of this -- it was philosophical and obscure." - Excerpt from article in New York Times regarding the final solution. "Who set the rules here?  This is precisely what the agencies do when they try to break codes." - Excerpt from article Gillogly Cracks CIA Art regarding Gillogly's use of computers to solve the code. David Stein David Stein is a physicist who works at the CIA building.  In February of 1998 he realized he had begun to decipher some of the code.  Within months he had cracked all but the last 97 characters of the passage, which at the time received little outside publicity. "Kryptos was meant to be solved with pencil and paper." - Excerpt from interview in New York Times. (note: incorrectly appeared as Sanborn quote on this page before 12-29-2006) "I'd have to call it like a religious experience." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "There's probably a thousand things to do – I probably did 900 of them." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "Sunday afternoons, things like that... It's sickening, but it gets to the point that you're lying in bed and playing with this in your mind.  That's the 'get a life' part, I guess." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post when asked how Stein found time to work on the puzzle. "I felt I was close to it ... It's hard to describe the feeling of the breakthrough." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "I actually had a hard time calming down enough to proceed... I was a little disappointed. ...It was like [finishing] a good book." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "Ed came up to me after the briefing and said, 'the solution is correct, but you didn't do it in the way I intended you to do it.'" - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "Even if it's solved, I won't look." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. Jim Gillogly Jim Gillogly is a former president of the American Cryptogram Association who solve all but the remaining yet undeciphered passage of Kryptos with a computer. "For part four, I would say I probably have put in several hundred hours over the course of -- I guess it's been six years now." - Excerpt from NPR. "The first step is to go at it with a mindset that it's going to be breakable.  The second step is to go at it 'til you get something." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "As far as I'm concerned a crack is where you find it. The choice of tool isn't the important part, but rather the decisions about how to use the tools." - Excerpt from article Gillogly Cracks CIA Art. "The sculpture is, in some sense, a history of cryptography." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "It's very easy to say, 'Throw one of the ...NSA supercomputers at a problem and it will be solved.' [However], computer programming and computer solving are not as easy as that ...there was quite a lot of skull work... I think best with a computer in my hands." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "I've tried on the order of 20 billion trial decryptions spread over two dozen different systems with perhaps 5 or 10 variations each, on average. ...It's all pretty much shooting in the dark, since you don't know you've gotten close until you hear a scream." - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. "There was a fair amount of skull sweat.  You work on it and you see something that is a little out of whack and you start pulling on it to see what unravels." - Excerpt from article Gillogly Cracks CIA Art. "There're still those last few lines waiting to be decrypted." - Excerpt from article Gillogly Cracks CIA Art. "I'll review the 'Mission Impossible' movie for tips on getting into the vault, if all else fails." - Excerpt from article Gillogly Cracks CIA Art. "Please give Jim Sanborn my regards and let him know I'm still plugging hard on the last 97 ...and pump him for clues for all you're worth!" - Excerpt from article in The Washington Post. > Observation: American Stone CNN: Cracking the Code -- Mysterious 'Kryptos' Sculpture Challenges CIA Employees http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/19/cracking.the.code/ CNN Televised: Sanborn: 'Kryptos' Sculpture was 'An Obsession' http://premium.cnn.com/2005/US/06/17/sanborn Time Magazine Archive Article: Grapevine -- Mar. 18, 1991 http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1101910318-156636,00.html Elonka's Web Site: Jim Sanborn and Kryptos on World News Tonight - April 2, 1991 http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/mirrors/WNT.html New York Times Article: CIA's Artistic Enigma Reveals All but Final Clue June 16, 1999 http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/crypto/general.crypt.info/Kryptos/solution NPR - All Things Considered: Kryptos Sculpture http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/1999/aug/990826.kryptos.html NPR - CIA Experts Still Spooked by Kryptos Puzzle http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4684720 WashingtonPost.com: Cracking the Code of a CIA Sculpture http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/july99/kryptos19.htm Patrick's Kryptos Quotes http://www.geocities.com/pf008/kryptos/kquotes.htm Kryptos: The Sanborn Sculpture at CIA Headquarters - Johns Collected Kryptos Hints http://members.aol.com/SciRealm/KryptosHints.html Libération: Da vinCIA Codes... http://www.liberation.com/page.php?Article=307161 Gillogly Cracks CIA Art http://www.ussrback.com/crypto/nsa/kryptos/cia-art-jg.htm Wired News: Inside Info on Kryptos' Codes http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66359,00.html Wired News: Questions for Kryptos' Creator http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,66333,00.html The Wall Street Journal: CIA Sculpture "Kryptos" Draws Mystery Lovers http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05147/511693.stm