In the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there's a 12-foot-tall, S-shaped copper sculpture covered in 1,800 hand-cut characters of encrypted text.
It's called Kryptos, installed in 1990 by artist Jim Sanborn, who spent four months working with a retired CIA cryptographer to devise the codes. The sculpture contains four encrypted messages. The first three were cracked by codebreakers over the years. The fourth, known as K4, a stubborn 97-character string beginning with "OBKR", defeated everyone for 35 years: amateur sleuths, professional cryptographers, and yes, the CIA itself.
Then, in September 2025, two journalists, Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne, found the answer in the last place anyone expected: a filing cabinet at the Smithsonian. Sanborn had accidentally included K4's plaintext in papers he donated to the Archives of American Art while undergoing cancer treatment about a decade ago. Byrne photographed the pages; Kobek realized that taped-together scraps revealed the solution, including the phrases "BERLIN CLOCK" and "EAST NORTHEAST."
Sanborn, not thrilled, asked the Smithsonian to seal the files for 50 years. They complied. Meanwhile, the solution's rights sold at auction for $962,500 to an anonymous buyer. And Sanborn has announced a fifth puzzle, K5, which he says will have "more global reach" and will be installed in a public space. The man clearly enjoys watching people squirm.
