It took the CIA and computer engineer James Gillogly about 8 years to decode 3 of the 4 messages encrypted on Kryptos. However, according to a recently published document, NSA employees decoded the above three messages in less than a month and many years before the CIA.

MNN said the father of this transcendent architectural work is professional sculptor Jim Sanborn. The special thing is that Mr. Sanborn does not have extensive knowledge in the field of cryptography.

The story begins when the CIA Art Committee searched for an architectural complex on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia in 1988 and artist Sanborn was assigned this responsibility.

Within two years, Mr. Sanborn completed two sculptures including a stone complex following the international Morse code and a sculpture of wood and marble on a bronze pedestal.

The final work in the ensemble and also Sanborn’s most famous work are four encrypted messages consisting of 1,800 characters of the Roman alphabet engraved on copper plates. Looking from the outside, the left part of the copper plate is the 4 messages encoded by Sanborn and the right part is the key to decoding.

Because the fourth message was so short, cryptographic experts from both the NSA and CIA had difficulty finding the main keywords of the message. Thus, according to newly released documents, in 1993 the NSA had in hand the decoded content of 3 out of 4 messages on Kryptos while the CIA did not decode it until 1998.

Wired identified this announcement as a punch to defeat the CIA because this is an American agency specializing in encryption and decoding.