Steve Bellovin of ATT has posted a message on Cryptography in response to the CESG paper in which he discloses a 1962 National Security Action Memorandum by President Kennedy on permissive link devices for nuclear weapons which apparently led to NSA invention of PK crypto. Matt Blaze obtained the NASM under FOIA and Steve is offering it on his Web site as GIF images. http://www.research.att.com/~smb/nsam-160/pg?.gif where ? ranges from 1 through 7. We've transcribed the images and put them with Steve's message: http://jya.com/nsam-160.htm BTW, Professor Denning posted an announcement of the CESG paper to UK Crypto (where a notice had appeared earlier) with brief comment of prior art signficance.