It took eight years after artist Jim Sanborn unveiled his cryptographic sculpture at the CIA’s headquarters for someone to succeed at cracking Kryptos’s enigmatic messages.
In 1998, CIA analyst David Stein cracked three of the sculpture’s four coded messages after spending 400 hours diddling over the problem with paper and pencil during many lunch breaks.
Though many people, on and off the CIA campus in Langley, Virginia, had tried to break the 865-character coded puzzle, Stein, a member of the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, was the first to succeed.
Only his CIA colleagues knew about his achievement at the time, however, because he wasn’t allowed to go public with the news. A year later, California computer scientist Jim Gillogly stole the spotlight when he announced that he’d cracked the same three messages, only he used a Pentium II to do it.
CIA analyst David Stein was the first to crack three of the four encoded passages in the Kryptos sculpture. Photo courtesy of CIA via Elonka DuninIn 1999, Stein wrote a fascinating account of how he cracked the messages. The suspenseful 11-page tale, which appeared in the CIA’s classified journal Studies in Intelligence, is one of perseverance and pluck, not unlike the epic story of Captain Ahab pursuing Moby Dick (Stein himself references the literary tale in his entertaining piece).
This week, the National Security Archive published the now-unclassified document after receiving it from the CIA. Though the article has been published publicly before, it’s never been widely disseminated.
An amateur cryptographer, Stein described how suddenly his breakthrough occurred after seven years of labor:
Like Ishmael, the narrator in Moby Dick, Stein waxed philosophical at the end of his journey — and took a slight dig at Gillogly for reaching the same destination using his Pentium II shortcut.
Not all of Kryptos has been solved. The last coded section, consisting of 97 characters, still awaits Ahab’s harpoon.
Enjoy the full article below. For an unredacted version of it (including missing images and figures) see Elonka Dunin’s comprehensive Kryptos page.