FOIAWEAR — KRYPTOS / The Unsolved Code Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 010

"Kryptos" — Greek for hidden — is the most famous puzzle the Central Intelligence Agency has ever put on display. Standing in the courtyard at CIA Headquarters, James Sanborn's sculpture was dedicated on November 3, 1990, and carries a theme of intelligence gathering.

Its centrepiece is an S-shaped copper screen that rises like a sheet of paper emerging from a printer, supported by petrified wood. Cut into the copper are 1,735 letters, arranged into four encoded messages. In 1998 a CIA physicist announced he had broken the first three; a California computer scientist did the same a year later. The fourth — a 97-character passage, the section now called K4 — has never been solved. Decades on, the sculpture is still a standing invitation to break the code.

Sanborn devised the codes over four months with a retired CIA cryptographer, and once remarked: "They will be able to read what I wrote, but what I wrote is a mystery itself."

The artwork on this shirt is an original decorative cipher inspired by the sculpture's copper screen — it is not a reproduction of the actual Kryptos ciphertext, which remains © James Sanborn. No claim is made that the shirt's letters decode to anything.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's page on the Kryptos sculpture, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/headquarters/kryptos-sculpture/

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the artwork in its light print on Black, Espresso, Navy, and in a matching dark-ink print on Butter, Ivory, Chalky Mint.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Offered here in Black, Graphite and Espresso, sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency or the United States government.