INTERVIEW: Kryptos K4 Uncovered- Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne on discovering the answer to a decades-long mystery

An answer to a puzzle that cryptologists and CIA agents have failed to solve for 35 years was unexpectedly uncovered by novelist Jarett Kobek and playwright Richard Byrne.

Jarett Kobek—writer for Zona Motel, under-sung genius, and the author of several books, including the viral Do Everything Wrong! and two books about the Zodiac Killer—was in deep grief in 2023. His dad had just died, and the grief pushed him into a focus on Kryptos, a sculpture that has been in front of the CIA headquarters since 1990, created by artist Jim Sanborn. The sculpture spans the courtyard but its heart is a wave of metal with 2,000 letters stamped into it. These letters include four different encrypted messages. The first three were solved in the ‘90s. The fourth, known as K4, has remained a mystery ever since. It was one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world.

In August, Sanborn sent a letter to the Washington Post, announcing that he would auction off the solution to K4 this November, in time for his 80^th birthday. It was expected to sell for somewhere around $500,000. In its auction notice, there was a mention of the existence of copies of Sanborn’s coding charts in the archives at the Smithsonian.

This information about the Smithsonian piqued Kobek’s interest, but he lives in L.A. He has a friend, though, who lives in D.C.: the playwright, journalist, and writer Richard Byrne. Not only that, but Byrne has a wealth of experience in the art of archival research. He has spent years working in libraries and archives for various projects, including his forthcoming book Beauty Doesn’t Reach Me.

On September 2nd, Byrne went to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art at Kobek’s request. Dispirited by the disorganized state of the Sanborn papers, Byrne nevertheless diligently photographed anything he thought might be useful and sent the images to Kobek in a ZIP file.

In those photos, among receipts for sculptural materials and scraps of cut-up paper, Kobek stumbled on the answer to K4. Specialists could not crack K4, computer programs could not crack K4, but a metro ride to the Smithsonian and a depth of experience in archival research broke the secret wide open.

Kobek and Byrne decided the most respectful thing to do would be to contact Sanborn to let him know. These good intentions led to an unexpected mess, the boring legal version of a Pandora’s Box. The news story about it broke yesterday at the New York Times by John Schwartz, a reporter who has written about Kryptos since 1999.

The story of the discovery of the plaintext of K4 is a very human story—a story about friendship, trust, curiosity, greed, and folly. The Jim Sanborn papers had been at the Smithsonian for approximately eighteen months but Kobek and Byrne were apparently the first to take the hunt for K4 into the physical world.

Kobek and Byrne talked to Zona Motel founders Juliet Escoria and Mesha Maren about what went down behind the scenes, Kryptos’ relationship to writing and words, and that yes, there are actually people out there who are interested in things with no ulterior motives to get rich. Those people are called writers and they habitually make poor financial choices—something we know a lot about at Zona Motel.

Plus, behind the paywall, Kobek gives us an update on what he’s been thinking about with the Zodiac case, and Kobek and Byrne tell us what type of movie the Kryptos story would be.

You can also listen to this interview on Spotify.

The following is an excerpt from our full conversation.

Jarett Kobek: I think the conclusion that I came to is that if people much smarter and much better than me at this were working on computers that were exponentially faster than they were when people were unable to solve this at the end of the ‘90s. Realistically speaking, this is not necessarily something that’s ever going to be solved by cryptanalysis or STEM or math.

Richard Byrne: So I went to the archive and went through it and looked at what I could, what I thought Jarett would be interested in, and then time’s up, pencils down, [so I] went home. It wasn’t a long metro ride. And I just said, hey, I got other stuff to do. I’m just going to bang this stuff out to Jarett right now. I’m going to code the files so he knows what he’s looking at and which folder and whatever. And then I sent it to him and I’m like, “I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for. There’s some interesting stuff in here.” And then I passed the baton.

JK: Yeah. And Rich is being modest here because he’d asked me to, like he said, give him a cheat sheet. The cheat sheet I gave him told him to ignore the folder in which he found the offending material because I assumed that the finding aid was relatively, and again, I’m not trying to shit on the person who did it, relatively accurate to what the contents would be. And so I don’t know what my email said. It said something like, “This is the lowest priority file.”

It’s only because Rich is good at library science and is, like me, one of these people who haunts these archives like a specter. He knows what to do and has trained himself in how to feel his way through. Because, you know, often when you go into these places, you have a time crunch. How do you find the right material? How do you do this? Rich is enormously talented at this. And he was talented enough to ignore my shitty instructions.

RB: Well, I ignored the micro direction in favor of the macro direction that you had laid out. So it wasn’t really like you were wrong about it. It was like you literally couldn’t tell from the finding aid what precisely was in a folder, in a number of cases. And yeah, I could go on and on and on about it. But the main thing is that it wasn’t something that couldn’t be navigated, but there was that crunch of time. And also, the Smithsonian’s rules are that when you take an image, they have a slip of paper that’s a copyright identifier paper that you have to put on every image. And that really slows you down because a lot of archives don’t make you do that. The other thing that I would just say is this is not a mystery. I mean, in our relations of this story thus far, including to the artist himself, we have laid out exactly what we did. So while I think it will be a reveal for your audience, it’s not a reveal to the people who we felt obliged to communicate it to.

JK: So I’m looking at the images and then I get to say, I don’t know, the 33rd or the 34th image. And the handwriting on it wasn’t very good. So it took a second or two to realize, oh, this is in English. And then I noticed that some of this was the text of the known parts of Kryptos that have been decoded, not the full text, but like, this is a weird piece. And there was a piece of paper where different things have been cut up and put together. And then I look at the bottom. And because Sanborn, in the New York Times, over the last 15 years has been releasing portions of the plaintext of K4, I see the words, you know, “Berlin clock.” And I’m like, hey, whoa. Buddy, what the hell is this?

And I’m familiar enough with where “Berlin clock” should be positioned in K4 to eyeball that the remainder here seems to be the same number of characters. I think at that point, I called Rich, and I was like, “Hey, whoa, buddy. I think half of K4’s plaintext might be here. I’m not sure.” I then typed it out while I’m on the phone with Rich.

It’s exactly the right length. It makes semantic sense. And at this point, I’m like, I guess it’s just half of K4. Rich is like, “Well, that’s weird.”

We get off the phone. So I’m like, I guess I should look at the rest of the images. Go to the next image. And again, because Sanborn had released quite a bit of the plaintext, there’s the next known plaintext on the next piece of paper. It looks right.

It looks like it would fit together. So I typed that out and it’s exactly right. And these plaintexts, the known plaintexts are exactly in the right position.

I would say the best way to describe it is that Rich and I recovered the plaintext. There’s no way on earth that this is a cryptographic solve, and we have not claimed that. I think some of the language in the New York Times article is a little confusing about that. But this is, you know, it’s not as if Rich went in and the people at the Smithsonian brought him a box, and he opened the box, and at the bottom of the box, there was just one piece of paper that had the plaintext of K4, and then above it, it said “K4” with an arrow pointing to it. Rich had to do a lot of work.

Paid subscribers can watch a bonus clip where Kobek gives us an update on what he’s been thinking about with the Zodiac case, and Kobek and Byrne tell us what type of movie the Kryptos story would be.