Ed Scheidt

Edward Michael Scheidt is a retired Chairman of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Cryptographic Center and the designer of the cryptographic systems used in the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Scheidt was born July 20, 1939 in Santa Monica, California United States. His father, Edward F. Scheidt, worked for the FBI and held the position of Director of the New York City FBI Field Office, and his mother was a switchboard operator at AT&T. He graduated in 1957 from Cor Jesu High School in New Orleans and then joined the Army, where he worked in Signals Intelligence.

In 1963, he was hired as a communications officer for the CIA, in the Office of Communications, which began a 26-year career, retiring in December 1989. Scheidt spent 12 years posted overseas, including serving in Laos in the early 1960s, Lebanon in the late 1960s, and a tour in Southeast Asia. Most often he used one-time pad paper systems of encryption. Scheidt received a B.A. in business administration from the University of Maryland in 1970 and a degree in telecommunications from George Washington University in 1975.

Scheidt is best known for his involvement with Kryptos, a sculpture in the CIA courtyard which contains one of the world's most famous unsolved codes. Kryptos was created by Washington DC sculptor Jim Sanborn, who was commissioned by the CIA in the 1980s to create art around their new Headquarters building in 1988. After Sanborn decided he wanted to incorporate some encrypted messages in his artwork, he was teamed with Scheidt, who was in the process of retiring and was called by then-director William H. Webster "The Wizard of Codes". Up until that point, Sanborn had never used encryption or text in his work. Scheidt taught various encryption methods to Sanborn, who chose the exact messages to be encrypted. Of the messages on the sculpture, three have been solved, but the fourth section, 97 or 98 characters at the very bottom, remains uncracked. Scheidt has said that he knows the answer, along with Sanborn and "probably someone at the CIA."

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