I Have Solved The Final Mystery Of Kryptos

If you're like me, you've spent the past 24 hours unable to think about anything other than the fourth puzzle of Kryptos—the encryption sculpture that stands on the lawn at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Cryptographers all over the world have been obsessed with deciphering the messages hidden in the 865-character text since it was erected twenty years ago. The first three sections were solved in 1999. They say stuff about illusion and buried secrets and the excavation of King Tut's tomb. But the last part, the final 97-character puzzle, has remained a mystery, confounding some of the world's greatest minds. Author Dan Brown referenced Kryptos in his bestselling novels The Davinci Code and The Final Symbol. The code has proven so difficult that its creator, cryptographer and sculptor Jim Sanborn, has provided a tantalizing clue to the New York Times: Characters 64 through 69, the letters N-Y-P-V-T-T, are decoded as B-E-R-L-I-N.

Since reading about this yesterday, I have been going crazy—poring over the fourth puzzle and its accompanying Vigenere Tableau. I have lined up the letters every way I can, numerically, backwards, forwards, upside-down, in the mirror. After awhile, they just start to spin and spiral and fall off the page like a collapsing house of cards. Then I got to thinking, what might be the significance of Sanborn revealing the clue when he did? Does this have something to do with Jay-Z's book, Decoded, which was released just last week? "Decoded?" That couldn't be just a coincidence, could it? Or is about the new information about the J.F.K. assassination that comes with the secret service agents involved opening up for the first time—in a new book and a Discovery Channel documentary, The Kennedy Detail, set to air tonight, the 47th anniversary of the shooting? Or is there a connection to the Dorito-shaped U.F.O. that was recently spotted, for the third time, in the skies over England? There must be, right?

Or is there perhaps a message in the medium? Why did Sanborn choose to reveal his clue to the New York Times? I've long suspected the government or the Illuminati, or both, working in collusion, might be sending me personal messages encrypted in newspapers. But how did they know I read the Times? Do they have access to subscription lists? Have they been videotaping me through my windows with long-range zoom-lens cameras on helicopters? Are there invisible camera lenses implanted into my lenses of my reading glasses, so they can see exactly what I'm reading, and read along, word for word, when I'm reading it?

What was I missing? What was the secret? For a while—many torturous, torturous hours—I chased the suggestion, which I found somewhere on the internet, that the "Berlin," might be a reference to the fact that the Berlin Wall came down while Sanborn was working on his sculpture, and that a monument to that historical event actually sits near to Kryptos on the Langley lawn.

This turned out to be a red herring. Because, finally late last night—or early this morning, I don't know, I haven't slept—the letters suddenly stopped swirling and fell into place. Neatly, orderly, the words took shape, appearing to me as clearly as if they were written in lip-stick on a mirror that was not shattered into a million tiny pieces like the mirror above the sink in my bathroom, which I punched at some point last night after shaving off all my hair and my eyebrows with a straight-razor.

All became clear. I had cracked the code.

The final 97 characters,

"OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR"

decrypt to read:

"Who sings that song 'Take My Breath Away' from Top Gun? The Motels? Ohh, no, right, Berlin. Ahh, one less mystery in the world."