received from John Young <jya@pipeline.com>:
Responding to msg by rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz) on Wed, 24 Jan 7:34 PM
Is there any indication that the NSA knew about public-key before it entered the open literature?
Fred B. Wrixon writes in "Codes and Ciphers," under the "Public Key" entry:
... This Hellman-Diffie proposal was apparently anticipated by a similar version developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) a decade earlier. (p. 164)
No citation or elaboration is given for this claim.
Wrixon's book is a simply written compendium:
Codes and Ciphers: An A to Z of Covert Communication, from the Clay Tablet to the Microdot. Fred B. Wrixon Prentice Hall, 1992. Paper $18.00 ISBN 0-13-277047-4
It was originally called FIREFLY or somesuch thing. I may have some of the early papers. (The same ones leading to the statement in the book). This should predate the STU-II to STU-III transition.