The most prominent feature of the entire part is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll or a piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, half of which consists of encrypted text, that is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the agency's cafeteria.

[2] In addition to the main part of the sculpture, Sanborn also placed other pieces of art on the CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper sheets outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building.

Several Morse code messages are found on these copper sheets, and one of the stone slabs has an engraving of a compass rose pointing to a lodestone.

In April 2006, Sanborn released information stating that a letter was omitted from this side of Kryptos "for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced".

[5] There are also three misspelled words in the plaintext of the deciphered first three passages, which Sanborn has said was intentional,[5] and three letters ("YAR") near the beginning of the bottom half of the left side are the only characters on the sculpture in superscript.

Bauer, Link, and Molle suggest that this may be a reference to the Hill cipher as an encryption method for the fourth passage of the sculpture.

[12] After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had solved the same passages in 1998 using pencil and paper techniques, although at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community.

[13][14] No public announcement was made until July 1999,[15][16] although in November 1998 it was revealed that "a CIA analyst working on his own time [had] solved 'the lion's share' of it".

[18] In 2013, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Elonka Dunin, the NSA released documents that show these attempts to solve the Kryptos puzzle in 1992, following a challenge by Bill Studeman, then Deputy Director of the CIA.

The translations of the International Morse code (sometimes called K0) that are ascribed to the copper slabs when read facing the south:[24][c]E E VIRTUALLY E | E E E E E E INVISIBLE

ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWOSLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?When commenting in 2006 about his error in passage 2, Sanborn said that the answers to the first three passages contain clues to the fourth passage.

[30] In an article published on January 29, 2020, by The New York Times, Sanborn gave another clue: at positions 26–34, ciphertext "QQPRNGKSS" is the word "NORTHEAST".

The dust jacket of the US version of Dan Brown's 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code contains two references to Kryptos—one on the back cover (coordinates printed light red on dark red, vertically next to the blurbs) is a reference to the coordinates mentioned in the plaintext of passage 2, except the degree digit is off by one.