"But [Scheidt] has never solved a cryptogram for us as a demonstration of his ability to do so--and probably never will. "

The CIA website has this quote/claim (December 2008) but I've never seen an article like that by him or thanking him. Scheidt has 38 patents and one article (from 1995 - "Private escrow key management: a method and its issues").

The only place I've seen Scheidt's name mentioned is in Jonathan Schaeffer's "One Jump Ahead" (1997) ... and that was actually his Dad, not him :-)
(Speaking of cryptanalysis of medieval manuscripts by people from spook world, the article about Trithemius by Jim Reeds is fantastic.)

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Scheidt has also contributed to cracking codes in the academic world. He helped break a Middle Age manuscript that illustrated an alcohol distilling process by guiding the translator to what he thought was the methodology that provided the key.

“Not too exciting today, but in the 13th century, how to make alcohol would have been a secret and not shared with the masses,” Scheidt said.
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I just interpret it as showing the insularity of spook world. I mean take this quote from an NSA presentation (sometime after April 2006 and before November 2010). ABC News did an interview with Stein in July 1998, the CIA "announced" that an "analyst" had solved "the lion's share" of it in November 1998, then ABC aired the Stein interview in June 1999. The reference to February 1999 is probably about the Stein presentation where Scheidt told him afterward "you didn't [solve] [K1-3] in the way I intended you to [solve] [them]."

"Well, in February of 1999, a CIA employee named David Stein, stated to the world that he had solved three of four sections of the sculpture. And the world pretty much ignored him."