\n<\/p>\n
Jim Sanborn couldn\u2019t<\/span> believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer<\/a> to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4\u2014wrong without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jarett Kobek, which started, \u201cI believe the text of K4 is as follows \u2026\u201d He\u2019d seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time, the text was correct.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in shock,\u201d Sanborn tells me. \u201cReal serious shock.\u201d The timing was awful. Sanborn, who turns 80 this year, saw the auction as a way for someone to continue his work of vetting potential solutions while maintaining the mystery of Kryptos. He\u2019d also been looking forward to getting compensated for his work. What came next was even more shattering. He quickly got on the phone with Kobek and his friend Richard Byrne, who gobsmacked him by reporting they did not find the solution by codebreaking. Instead, Kobek had learned from the auction notice that some Kryptos materials were held at the Smithsonian\u2019s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Kobek, a California novelist (one of his books is called I Hate the Internet<\/em>), got his friend, the playwright and journalist Byrne, to photograph some of the holdings. To Kobek\u2019s astonishment, two of the images contained a 97-character passage with words that Sanborn had previously dropped as clues. He was staring at the full unencrypted text that CIA and NSA codebreakers, along with countless academics and hobbyists, had sought for decades.<\/p>\n The secret of Kryptos was out of the artist\u2019s hands, in the most humiliating way imaginable\u2014Sanborn himself had mistakenly submitted it in readable form to the museum. For 35 years the Kryptos plaintext had been a summit that none had reached. Suddenly some had attained it\u2014not by climbing to the peak but by hitching a ride to the top. Sanborn\u2019s grand vision for a piece of art that illuminated the idea of secrecy itself was imperiled\u2014as was the auction. Now he had to figure out what to do about it.<\/p>\n The initial phone call had been friendly. Kobek and Byrne insisted that they did not want to mess up the auction. After he hung up, Sanborn called the auction house. That\u2019s when things started going sideways. As Sanborn tells me, \u201cThey said, \u2018Listen, see if the guys will sign NDAs, and see if they’ll take a portion of the proceeds.\u2019 And I said, \u2018Oh geez, man, I don’t know about that. But I offered it.’\u201d<\/p>\n Kobek and Byrne were uncomfortable with that arrangement and refused to sign. (RR Auction executive vice president Bobby Livingston didn\u2019t comment on the legal issue but says of an NDA, \u201cIt\u2019s something that would be comforting to our clients.\u201d) Sanborn told them his intent was to get the Smithsonian to freeze the archives\u2014which it did. He assumed Kobek and Byrne would stay silent. \u201cIf you don’t release it, you’re heroes to me,\u201d Sanborn told them.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought everything was OK,\u201d he says, \u201cAnd then all of a sudden [the journalist] John Schwartz calls me and says these guys want to publish it in The New York Times.\u201d Kobek explains to me that they contacted Schwartz in part to relieve some legal pressure. \u201cThere was threat after threat being sent to us from the auction house’s lawyers, threatening to sue us for a multitude of things,\u201d he says. (When I ask Livingston if his lawyers have been contacting Kobek, he says, \u201cThere\u2019s lawyers talking to each other,\u201d and adds that there may well be copyright concerns if Kobek and Byrne published the plaintext.) On October 16, Schwartz published his scoop,<\/a> informing the world that the plaintext was out.<\/p>\n Sanborn tells me that Kobek shared the plaintext with Schwartz over the phone. When asked about this, Kobek says, \u201cI cannot speak about that\u2026I am under significant legal peril.\u201d Schwartz says. \u201cOnce my editors decided it would not be revealed in the story, I deleted the text from my interviews file. I don\u2019t know it.\u201d (So don\u2019t bug him.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\nEnter: The Media<\/h2>\n