Re: Langley Visit
Elonka Dunin
03/03/19   #20384
Day 3 - Kryptos weekend

Lots to report!

Several of us did the 2-hour drive down to Piney Point for an afternoon with the CNN crew.

Attendees:

Jim Sanborn
Ed Scheidt
Jae Ko
Elonka Dunin
Drew Beebe (producer)
Jon O'Beirne (producer / cameraman)
Andy Lampard (cinematographer / cameraman)
Dennis "Denny" McDaniels, retired NSA (from 1992 team)
Bob Mang
Carl Ellis
Richard Santa Coloma
Mike Godwin

Jim's studio was full of all sorts of goodies. Various shapes and sizes of Kryptos miniatures, plus samples of artwork from all other parts of his career: Atomic Time, Covert Obsolescence, projected light photographs, and his newest work about the black market sculpture trade in Cambodia.

We plied everyone with sushi and munchies and chatted for hours while the crew filmed away, then they kicked most of out so they could do about 45 minutes just with Jim, then they spent more time getting various shots, such as one of the cameramen went outside to get a shot through the windows of Jim looking at some of his crypto (Cyrillic) matrices.

We did a lot of Kryptos Q&A, here are the high points:

* When asked about the out-of-alignment letters and whether they had anything to do with K4, Jim kind of glanced at Ed and asked/considered whether it was time, and then told us that no, those letters were intended to refer to "1-2-3". That they'd been commonly perceived as misaligned, but their intent was actually much more subtle than that.

* When asked whether it was necessary to know the solutions to 1-3 in order to solve 4, Jim said no.

* Jim referred often to the fact that he had done the encryption on his drive back across the country, that it hadn't been fun. While he was talking, I noticed his body language, he would glance down next to him as though remembering seeing the text on the seat next to him. He said that for 1-3 he had used matrices which had to be turned, like "right-right". He didn't quite say that he'd used matrices for K4, but used verbs such as turn and flip, and that he had put it "through the washing machine".

* We asked him if he'd be willing to go off with Ed and just run through K4 as a test, and he said no. When I asked him if he would be able to describe K4's method to Ed, Jim said he didn't know.

* Jim said he's going to offer another clue in 2019, "a year ahead of schedule" and that this would be "the last one".

* When asked about his favorite Berlin clock, he said he likes "both Berlin clocks". He emphasized the word "both".

* When asked about the solutions that have been sent to him, and whether any of them were close, Jim said he got one from Germany about a year ago that was "kind of scary", that the first part had started to look right, but then the rest didn't.

Other notes:

Jim made it clear that encrypting Kryptos was something he did decades ago, and he's done his best to actively forget it. Forget the plaintext, forget the methods.

He also made it clear that he didn't like math, it was "anathema", he called himself something like a "math-anathema", but I don't remember exactly.

When he's told that Kryptos is in people's Algebra textbooks, he finds it funny. Especially when it's near the algorithm sections. That he absolutely is not a cryptanalyst. When people write to him and ask him this question or that question about different techniques, he's just lost. He knew how to make a code, but not how to take them apart, so it's never any good for us to ask him those kinds of questions.

Some of Jim's answers were not consistent with things he's said in the past. For example, in one of my first conversations with him many years ago I asked him about the Q in "iqlusion", and he said that it was deliberate, but it's not what it was that was important, it was the orientation or positioning. Today though he said that it was probably an error, that when he compared his two matrices, he saw a Q on one but not on the other. He also admitted the error in K2. But he did refer today to other "deliberate" errors. The topic clearly made him uncomfortable, like he was embarrassed to make a mistake, and he even started to get rattled and confused about whether "ID by Rows" or "Layer Two" was the correct plaintext, so I didn't want to push it too hard.

When asked whether it's necessary to know anything about the Kryptos surroundings to solve K4, Jim said that surroundings would of course change, so it would have been kind of dumb (silly?) to do that.

If he does have someone send him the correct answer, his first call will be to John Schwartz at the New York Times.

It's not necessary to have a particular book to solve K4, just "to be able to read".

Around the time that he was creating Kryptos, Jim was reading a Tom Robbins novel, "Still Life with Woodpecker", one of Jim's favorites. (note from Elonka: isn't there a hidden message on a pack of Camels in the book, which comes out to "CHOICE"?  Which of course may or may not be related to K4)

The front entrance pieces with the Morse code messages were meant, artistically, to represent that stone strata with messages had been there before the CIA, and we were seeing them as stone outcroppings. And that as we got deeper and deeper into CIA, the messages were intended to become more and more complex.

When asked about Star Trek (TNG started in the late 1980s), Jim said he has watched the show, but he doesn't remember episode names so couldn't say what his favorite was.

We spent quite a bit of time asking Jim about the correlation between the plaintext BERLIN and the ciphertext such as NYPVTT. Specifically, we were trying to find out if there was a 1:1 relationship from NYPVTT to BERLIN, or there was some other step, the masking technique. Jim was confused when we mentioned masking technique, evidently it's something that Ed said that Jim didn't understand. Jim said that yes the ciphertext and plaintext were connected, but when I tried to explain what exactly we were asking, like that in K1 EMUFPH is exactly BETWEE, but in K3 ENDYAH does not map exactly to SLOWLY, Jim backed off and said he would only commit to the fact that K4 is exactly 97 characters long, and that BERLIN is plaintext that starts at exactly the 64th character, but he wouldn't go further than that.

Jim spoke a bit about the people who are writing to him via jimsanborn.net, with $50 and a request for correspondence. He says he gets one person writing to him every week, at the same time, with a potential solution, that it's basically the same but shifts one letter each time!

Some other bits and pieces I learned about Ed Scheidt, from his 30-odd years in the CIA.

In his early years he was stationed in Laos, "seeing the countryside" meaning that he was out in the fields as a communications officer.

He was in Syria during the war in 1967, and was the last one out, the one who "closed the vault".

He was also in the Philippines. Sadly, that was where his first wife died, in Manila in childbirth.

He was never in Cambodia.

Ed's 2nd (current) wife, Mary-Jane, was executive assistant to CIA Directors such as George Tenet (who was Director from 1996-2004). Next time I see her, I'll have to ask if she ever saw anything Kryptos-related in the office!

As for the documentary crew, they've got hours of footage now. From this point they'll edit it down to a short piece, probably about five minutes long, which will eventually be available at greatbigstory.com. I'll be staying in touch with them, and will of course let you know if/when I get transcripts of the interviews, and additional Kryptos pictures/videos.

And now, I sleep!

Elonka  :)