A few pointers as some of you misunderstand things and are going in the wrong direction
Jim Sanborn will never ever give you a clue that helps to solve Kryptos and neither will the CIA guy. They will only ever give you clues to send you in the wrong direction, it’s the CIA not Sesame Street. Sanborn said “it is virtually impossible for Schneidt to solve K4” and that’s with Scneidt providing the know how. If Schneidt can’t solve it how can you ? Perhaps you will have a Eureka moment. There are no clues in anything either of them say, there is only contradiction, and that’s their job, to send you in the wrong direction. The clues are in Kryptos, to an either solvable K4 or a hoax. The setting is to resemble the world after a nuclear war or other catastrophe, nothing else is left, no humans to give you clues. Perhaps the answer to K4 is the reality that not all encrypted messages can be broken, only JS knows if that is so.
Lets assume though that they have told the truth when they say they used masking. For those of you saying the Vigenére used on K1 and K2 is masking it’s not. Obviously anything changed to look like something else is masked but that is not masking. Masking in this context means the use of steganography (the practice of concealing messages or information within other non-secret text or data). Or, shave the head of your messenger, write you message on his bald head, let his hair grow back then send him to the recipient in plain sight of your enemy, the message is hidden and only the recipient knows to shave his head,.
What they are saying is the 97 letters of K4 are not the letters you need. You can’t use them in their current form to break K4 using either substitution or transposition or a combination. You may need more letters or less letters or they may need to be in a different order so that it can be broken. You may need numbers, you may need symbols. If you take the first half of the letters in K1 and add them on the end of the second half and try to break K1 using Kryptos and Palimpsest it won’t work, that would be an example of masking, you would need to know first that the first part of K1 is tagged on to the end of the second half. That is what you are looking for, the masking technique, if masking is used, or you will get nowhere.
The clues are in the puzzle. Each step of the way the clues have been provided. BerlinClock is no more a clue than the fact it rained today. K1 clue is Palimpsest, that’s what you are looking at, the Kryptos tableau is also provided. Abscissa is found in the K1 plaintext for the keyword for K2. K2 then provides the clue to K3. IDBYROWS and frequency analysis supports its a a transposition . This has been corrected by Sanborn to read LAYERTWO but I don’t believe that. Palimpsest is 10 letters so you only use 10 alphabet columns, Abscissa is 8 so you only use 8 columns. This limits the cipher letters to approx 4 per plaintext letter. By adding a letter and changing to LAYERTWO that changes one of the letters to 5. That is how it should work I know but is enough for me to believe it’s IDBYROWS and a clue to transposition on K3 if there is a K5 ciphertext hidden behind K1 to K4.
So I believe we have the clues for K4. Can you see anything Q. You are looking for a C, and looking for an I and an A. You are looking for a CIA string. It’s right in front of you using K4 in the order it’s in already but you need to use it to find CIA and line up with the L. If you do this correctly you will see the confirmation you need to know you are going in the right direction. It’s there, I’ve seen it.
About the coordinates (K2). Sanborn said it could refer to two locations (if we choose to believe him). In the times of King Tut the prime meridian was not at Greenwich in the UK. It was at Giza at the site of the Great Pyramids. Latitude 0 is the Equator and has never changed, it is the centre of the earth but longitude 0 (the prime meridian) changed from Giza to Greenwich. If you use the prime meridian of King Tut’s time (k3) the coordinates point to where USS Scorpion was sunk. Is this the secret Sanborn was asked to keep ? Two months earlier the Russian K129 was lost. Some say it was tit for tat and covered up.
If you reverse the coordinates you are taken to the seas off Russia where the USS Halibut tapped the Russian communication lines.
So I don’t think anything is pointing to anything in Berlin at all.
But this is irrelevant if we don’t break K4.