Comment Re:The History of Codebreaking Began... And Ended (Score 2) 5
None of that matters.
If he wrote a history under NSA auspices it would be classified regardless of much of the material being about public developments. Recall that they successfully suppressed material in 1967 all of which was about publicly available information. Recall also the large amount of formerly classified stuff that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that Kahn never wrote about - the electro-mechanical crypto machines which were the backbone of spy work into the 1990s. It is a fact that Kahn never published a significant update on his 1967 book.
Also, although the NSA does naturally rely on the open literature on cryptography they have in addition their own math geniuses doing highly classified work on top of it. I recall that when the NSA recommended new public crypto-standards, which they had deliberately undermined, academic researchers found evidence that the weakening was so specific that it hinted that the NSA had a theory of the algorithms that was unknown to the outside world.
What do you suppose that journalist-historian was doing as an NSA Fellow for 15 years? Little or nothing has emerged about that. We know that classified agencies hire historians to have classified histories written about them - the CIA has that, Betty Perkins at Los Alamos wrote a whole series of histories about nuclear weapon development, which only one has ever been releases in any form (very heavily redacted).