What is the Kryptos cipher?

By JOHN D. MCKINNON 
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 

LANGLEY, Va. -- The big mystery at the Central Intelligence Agency,
sitting in a sunny corner of the headquarters courtyard, begins this
way: "EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ."

That's the first line of the Kryptos sculpture, a 10-foot-tall, 
S-shaped copper scroll perforated with 3-inch-high letters spelling out 
words in code. Completed 15 years ago, Kryptos, which is Greek for 
"hidden," at first attracted interest mainly from government code 
breakers who quietly deciphered the easier parts without announcing 
their findings publicly. 

Now, many mystery lovers around the world have joined members of the 
national-security establishment in trying to crack the rest. So far, 
neither amateurs nor pros have been able to do it. 

The latest scramble was set off by "The Da Vinci Code," the thriller 
about a modern-day search for the Holy Grail. On the book's dust 
jacket, author Dan Brown placed clues that hint at Kryptos's 
significance. The main one is a set of geographic coordinates that 
roughly locate the sculpture. (One of the coordinates is off slightly, 
for reasons that Mr. Brown so far has kept secret.)

Gary Phillips, 27 years old, a Michigan computer programmer, started 
researching Kryptos last year, hours after learning about its Da Vinci 
Code connection. "Once it pulls you in, you just can't stop thinking 
about it," he says. Eventually, Mr. Phillips says, he let a struggling 
software business go under and took a construction job so he would have 
more time for solving Kryptos. 

The quest to solve the fourth and final passage of Kryptos's message 
has spawned several Web sites -- including Mr. Phillips's -- as well as 
an online discussion group that has more than 500 members. The 
discussion group was founded by Gary Warzin, who heads Audiophile 
Systems Ltd. in Indianapolis. He became fascinated with Kryptos after 
visiting the CIA in 2001. But after months of trying to crack the code 
on his own, Mr. Warzin -- whose other hobbies include escaping from 
straitjackets -- decided he needed help. 

Kryptos devotees are intrigued by the three passages that have been 
deciphered so far. They appear to offer clues to solving the 
sculpture's fourth passage, and possibly to locating something buried. 

Sculptor James Sanborn, Kryptos's creator, says he wrote or adapted all 
three. The first reads, "Between subtle shading and the absence of 
light lies the nuance of iqlusion." Jim Gillogly, a California computer 
researcher believed to be the first person outside the intelligence 
world to solve the first three parts, came up with the translation, 
which includes the deliberate misspelling of the word illusion. 

The second passage, more suggestive, reads in part, "It was totally 
invisible. How's that possible? They used the Earth's magnetic field. 
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown 
location. Does Langley know about this? They should: it's buried out 
there somewhere." That passage is followed by geographic coordinates 
that suggest a location elsewhere on the CIA campus. 

The third decoded passage is based on a diary entry by archaeologist 
Howard Carter, on the day in 1922 when he discovered the tomb of the 
ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamen. It reads in part, "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. Can you see 
anything?" Mr. Sanborn confirms that the translations are accurate. 

In addition to deliberate misspellings, there are letters slightly 
higher than others on the same line. Other possible clues are contained 
in smaller parts of the work scattered around the CIA grounds. Made of 
red granite and sheets of copper, these are tattooed with Morse code 
that spells out phrases like "virtually invisible" and "t is your 
position." In addition, a compass needle carved onto one of the rocks 
is pulled off due north by a lodestone that Mr. Sanborn placed nearby. 

Those poring over the puzzle these days are thought to include 
national-security workers as well as retirees, computer-game players 
and cryptogram fans. Some devotees believe Kryptos holds profound 
significance as a portal into the wisdom of the ancients. 

More typical is Jennifer Bennett, a 27-year-old puzzle aficionado who 
works as a poker-room supervisor near Seattle. She came across the 
Kryptos mystery last year while on maternity leave, as she searched for 
online games to play. Now back at work, she still spends an hour a day 
on Kryptos after her children have gone to bed. Like most would-be code 
breakers, she relies on pencil and paper. 

Others, like Mr. Gillogly, the California code breaker, are partial to 
computers. Semiretired, he spent 30 years at the Rand Corp., then had 
his own software business. He estimates that his computers have tried 
at least 100 billion possible solutions to the fourth passage over the 
years. His main computer these days, he says, is a 1.7 GHz laptop with 
a Pentium 4 processor. 

Experts say the fourth passage -- known to insiders as "K4" -- is 
written in a more complex and difficult code than the first three, one 
designed to mask patterns of recurring letters that code breakers look 
for. 

Efforts at finding a solution have grown increasingly elaborate. Elonka 
Dunin, an executive at St. Louis computer-game company Simutronics, has 
hunted down other encoded sculptures by Mr. Sanborn in search of 
recurring themes. Some, like researcher Chris Hanson, who runs a 
company that makes software for constructing 3D landscape models, have 
mapped the CIA's headquarters or built virtual replicas of Kryptos. 

Mr. Sanborn has grown uncomfortable with some of the attention his work 
is getting, particularly from those who see religious overtones. "I 
don't want my work manipulated in such a way that its meaning is 
somehow transformed," the Kryptos sculptor says. He dismisses any 
religious connotations or allusions to beliefs of the ancients. 

Mr. Sanborn, who lives and works in Washington, burnished his 
reputation with Kryptos. He has exhibited around the world, including 
at the Hirshhorn Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art. His more recent 
work has focused on the early development of atomic weapons, employing 
actual equipment from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

He had no formal training in cryptography when he created Kryptos, but 
worked with a retired CIA official, Ed Scheidt, who was starting up an 
encryption-software business, TecSec Inc. Mr. Sanborn says he withheld 
the full solution to the puzzle from Mr. Scheidt, as well as from the 
CIA itself. An agency spokesman says he isn't aware of anyone having 
solved the fourth passage. 

Despite the struggles of would-be code breakers, Mr. Sanborn insists 
the puzzle can be solved, and teases them by saying that one clue 
overlooked so far is sitting in plain view. "The most obvious key to 
the sculpture, nobody has picked up on."