The CIA’s 35-Year-Old Puzzle Was Cracked by Accident

For 35 years, one of the world’s most famous puzzles sat in plain sight at CIA headquarters.

In the courtyard of the agency’s campus in Langley, Virginia, stands Kryptos, a 12-foot-tall, S-shaped copper sculpture covered with about 1,800 hand-cut characters of encrypted text. Installed in 1990, the sculpture was created by artist Jim Sanborn with help from a retired CIA cryptographer.

“Kryptos” by James Sanborn is one of three sculptures on the grounds of the George Bush Center for Intelligence. It runs a theme of information gathering and includes an encoded copper screen. 

It was designed to tease the minds of the very people who walked past it every day.

Kryptos contains four encrypted messages. Over the years, codebreakers solved the first three. The fourth section, known as K4, proved far more stubborn. It is a 97-character string beginning with “OBKR,” and it resisted everyone: amateur puzzle solvers, professional cryptographers, and even people inside the CIA.

Then, according to reports, the answer turned up by accident.

In September 2025, journalists Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne reportedly found the solution not in a secret codebook or classified vault, but in a filing cabinet at the Smithsonian. Sanborn had donated papers to the Archives of American Art years earlier, and those papers apparently included the plaintext for K4.

Byrne photographed the documents. Kobek later realized that taped-together scraps revealed the long-hidden answer, including the phrases “BERLIN CLOCK” and “EAST NORTHEAST.”

For a puzzle that had baffled codebreakers for decades, it was a wonderfully strange ending. The code was not cracked by a supercomputer or a spy agency. It was found in archived paperwork.

Sanborn was reportedly unhappy with the discovery and asked the Smithsonian to seal the files for 50 years. The institution complied. Meanwhile, the rights to the solution were sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for $962,500.

The story may not be over. Sanborn has announced plans for a fifth puzzle, known as K5, which he says will have a broader public reach and be installed in a public space.

After three decades of frustration, false starts, and obsession, Kryptos finally gave up its secret.

Or perhaps more accurately, someone left the answer in a folder.