Berlin

Together we cooked up a scheme for me to parachute from France into northern Italy and then fall back into Hitler’s redoubt. A fascinating scheme; it might have been my last. As it was, Hitler failed to carry out his part of the plan and I found myself instead with the advance guard of the OSS in Berlin, where, well inside the Soviet Zone, with a Russian major and a bottle of vodka, I realized, sadly, that our enemies had changed.

The only constant in this crazy world would appear to be one’s friends.

– Peter Tompkins, last two paragraphs of A Spy in Rome

One of the biggest challenges with APEX Theory has always been the fact that somewhere around Step 8, the 97 characters of K4 get reduced to only 48 characters.  As I wrote in Step 10, this fact presents a dilemma because during a talk at the Hirshhorn Museum, on September 23, 2005, Jim Sanborn stated, “The final section that hasn’t been decoded yet is approximately one hundred characters.”  So in subsequent steps APEX Theory somehow needs to increase the character count back up from 48 characters to “approximately 100”. Considering that the theory also needed to explain how the “APEX” easter egg was injected into this intermediate stage, things seemed dire indeed.  The only way that I could envision satisfying these requirements was through the use of a book code, whereby Jim Sanborn, knowing that he needed to choose 24 words (indexed by 2 characters each) while also leaving this histogram in place, simply contrived the message and chose his words judiciously so that he could weight those letters more heavily.  At least, that was the theory.

Along with the recent plaintext clue (i.e. “BERLIN” at character positions 64-69) came the information that the plaintext solution contains exactly 97 characters.  While that doesn’t damage the logic that a book code could have been used, it significantly increases the likelihood that something else was (i.e. custom mixtures of transposition/substitution methods that leave the character count unmodified).  So, on a relative likelihood basis anyway, this may be perceived as a blow to APEX Theory.  I appreciate that, and I’m likely to continue my current mode of attack only for some fixed length of time.  After that, I will probably retrace back to Step 5 of APEX Theory.  This step occurs prior to character count reduction of K4, and it is also the step at which I have the most confidence.  Steps prior to 5 are all elegantly and simply motivated, and their easter eggs are more artistic and obvious.  (Pundits that have claimed I purposely manipulated my steps to arrive at those easter eggs are incorrect.  They need to go back and read Steps 1-5, including the motivation and observations, and give me the benefit of the doubt that I have been sincere in the description.)

Before I retrace back to Step 5, there is something that I am very excited about, and it must be checked out.  But first here is some background and speculation regarding Jim Sanborn’s actions and motivations…

The Book that Wasn’t and the Clue that Was

In September of 2009, I met Jim Sanborn and Ed Scheidt at a dinner in McLean, VA (not far from CIA HQ) along with a host of other Kryptos fans.  (We were given a banquet room to ourselves for the occasion.)  The food was excellent, the company fantastic, and the atmosphere was electric.   This was an event that I won’t soon forget.  After dinner, we mingled and shared our progress with Jim, Ed, and each other.

Notably, when I first started talking with Jim, he told me that he intended to write a book on Kryptos that contained facts, history, hints, guidance, encouragement, etc.  I thought “Really?  A whole book?”.  Then I proceeded to tell him about my work, and later I got a chance to do so with Ed too.  Other Kryptos researchers in attendance did the same.  But Jim and Ed had their poker faces on that night, so I didn’t really expect any feedback (positive or negative) to come from those exchanges.

So all this year, I’ve been waiting for news about this book.  Through the Kryptos grapevine (perhaps the Yahoo Kryptos Group page) I heard that Jim might still produce the book if he could find a publisher.  Again, I thought “Really?”  I find that hard to believe.  Jim Sanborn is already a published author, and I also believe that a book on Kryptos would sell at least a hundred thousand copies worldwide within a month.  While that might not land the book on the bestseller lists, it certainly puts it in the realm of economically  sound.  In my opinion, if Jim decided to write a Kryptos book, he would be able to find a publisher.  Something else is causing his reluctance.

Now comes this clue via the New York Times, as opposed to a book.  “BERLIN” at positions 64-69.  Quite the clue… or is it?   I find the nature of this clue quite interesting, almost more so than its content.  This is a crib, and cryptographers worldwide must be salivating in their sleep over it.  Cribs are extremely useful for cracking codes, especially if you’ve got some powerful computers at your disposal and know how to use them.  But here’s the rub:  cribs are useless without a candidate method to test them with.  If the K4 method is truly a custom code (as both Sanborn and Scheidt have indicated) then you need to be at least in the vicinity of the method before the crib will help.

So I am left with some questions:

(1) What really happened with regard to Jim’s intentions to write a book?

(2) Why did he provide a crib?

I think the answer to these two questions is the same:  somebody is relatively close to the right method, and Jim Sanborn knows it.  He found out about it sometime between the beginning of that dinner and now.

So I have proposed that Jim’s provision of a crib is interesting unto itself.  Now what about the content?  I find that interesting too.  While any 6 characters in the set of 97 would provide a significant boost for an attack (given the method) why did Jim choose to provide those 6?  He could have given us something less unique, like “andthe”, or perhaps even 6 characters that fell across word boundaries.  (Some have suggested that that may have happened here, and that this is not really the word “Berlin” but instead something like “rememBER LINcoln”.  Although that’s possible, I’ll be investigating a different premise for a while.)

So, my premise is that this is indeed the word “Berlin”, and I am wondering why Jim gave us that particular crib.  One possible answer is that such a unique crib can be more helpful than something more innocuous, like “ANDTHE”.  At a minimum, it sets some context about which we can extend the crib.  At the Kryptos Yahoo Group, folks have talked about guessing what may precede these characters, e.g. the words “West” or “East” may be likely.  But if one can say that a unique crib word provides a small boost (as compared to 6 common characters) when trying to crack a substitution cipher, then one could also say that it provides a tremendous boost for a book cipher.  After all, a unique word can help narrow the set of candidate books as well as help determine the method of indexing into them. (“ANDTHE” would do neither.) Since this is currently my preferred area of study for APEX Theory, using the word “Berlin”, I have studied some books and considered the methods.  And I am very excited about something I found…

The Peter Tompkins Connection

As I posted before on this blog, I have found numerous parallels between Kryptos elements and the literary works of Peter Tompkins.  I am convinced that Kryptos references his books, and regardless of whether the relationship is pertinent to solving K4 or the alleged mystery that lies beyond, I am certain that this is important.  The amazing thing is that the only reason I discovered this connection is because of APEX Theory’s insistence that only a book code fits the requirements.  Wouldn’t it be a wonder if APEX Theory is a big pile of steaming bunk, and yet it pointed me towards something important by pure serendipity?  Well, I guess that stranger things have happened, so I can’t prove otherwise.  But I decided to look a little more, and I found some more relevance to Peter Tompkins.

In my supplemental report, I listed a whole bunch of parallels between Kryptos elements (e.g. limestone chunk, red granite, whirlpool, green blob, “SOS”, and alignment of sculpture/pond/strata with Washington Monument) and Tompkins’ books (Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Secrets of the Soil, and The Magic of Obelisks).  Well, there are two more parallels that I didn’t introduce in that report, and so I’ll bring them into play now:

(1) One of Tompkins’ biggest bestsellers was The Secret Life of Plants, a far out treatise that raises the question of whether plants have consciousness and can remember events.  That sure does resonate well with the morse code “LUCID MEMORY” followed by “RQ” (which is essentially a way of placing a question mark at the end of a morse code statement).  The focus of the book is on answering the questions:  Are plants lucid? Do they have memory?  (I had already related the subsequent “SOS” to the book Secrets of the Soil, and I provided a very interesting dust jacket picture to support the relationship.)

(2)  Amongst the various Tompkins’ books that I identified, one of my favorite candidates for book code source was A Spy in Rome, which was essentially Tompkins’ autobiography of the time he spent as an OSS agent in Rome near the end of WWII.  I liked this book because the other Tompkins’ books were strangely hinted at, and we may have been expected to put two and two together and then make the final leap to this one.

Here’s what I find so exciting in light of the new Sanborn clue: after Peter Tompkins (admirably) performed his espionage duties in Rome, his next assignment was in Berlin.  Now, one might think that a book about WWII and living amongst the Gestapo in Germany-occupied Rome would be filled with instances of the word “Berlin”. Well, I checked, and that is not the case.  This book is written entirely from Tompkins’ perspective, and it is quite focused on giving you the description of his local events and observations rather than a dissertation on the general WWII situation.  As such, there are only two occurrences of the word “Berlin” in the entire book.  One of them is in the middle, on page 110, when Tompkins references a German officer coming to Rome with orders directly from Berlin.  But the other occurrence is the most interesting.  The second occurrence happens on the very last page, just a few lines up from the end, and in perfect position for indexing by alphabet characters if you work from the end. The quote at the top of this post contains the relevant passage, and it marks a transitional moment in history: WWII is ending, our enemies change from the Germans to the Russians, and the fledgling OSS gives way to the CIA. I find this very fascinating. (Perhaps “IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE.  HOWS THAT POSSIBLE?” is a clue that is supposed to make us think about referencing words by alphabet characters in the reverse direction?  I = INVISIBLE; T=TOTALLY.  Of course, I’m not suggesting that it be as simple as pulling off the first letter of each word. The indexing scheme would most likely be numeric, but with letters as substitutes.)

In the next few days, I am going to work on creating an ASCII file that is delimited such that one can distinguish individual words, lines, paragraphs, and pages.  I’ll be making that file available at the Yahoo Kryptos Group so that computer-savvy people can ingest the text and investigate modes of indexing either my APEX sequence or any other sequence their own theories indicate are significant.  I am asking for help because I have very little time to work on Kryptos.

Regards,

Randy Thompson