The current Obama Administration review of classification policy will almost certainly produce an incremental adjustment to existing practices– though hopefully with provisions for independent validation (or rejection) of agency classification decisions, strengthened oversight, expedited declassification, and so forth.  But it is unlikely to lead to a wholesale replacement of the basic framework of the Cold War classification system that has lingered now for more than half a century.  The “next generation” of national security information policy is still out of reach.

To hasten the development of more efficient and transparent information security policies, the forthcoming Obama executive order on classification could encourage experimental pilot projects in classification and declassification and related activities.

An agency head could be authorized to establish, with the approval of the director of the Information Security Oversight Office, a limited-scale initiative that departs from the otherwise binding requirements of the executive order in the interests of fostering innovation in classification policy.  (ISOO concurrence would be needed to ensure that the pilot projects were designed to promote appropriate efficiency and transparency, not to provide a new pretext for intensified secrecy.)

What kind of initiatives might these be?  One possibility would be to collapse the multi-tiered classification system into a single level, so that information within the domain of the pilot project would either be “classified” or “unclassified” — other classification levels and compartments would not be permitted. Another possibility would be to undertake ambitious bulk declassification projects that have an elevated risk of disclosure of classified information beyond what is normally tolerated.  This would provide a realistic but small-scale indication of the “damage” that could ensue from forgoing expensive, time-consuming declassification review.  Other initiatives could experiment with discretionary releases of classified information, prohibitions against use of the “need to know” principle, and similar deviations from the norm.

One precedent or model for this kind of approach is the congressionally-mandated program for Science and Technology Reinvention Laboratory (STRL) demonstration projects, which are used to promote innovation in Defense Department personnel management policies.  Those projects have been authorized to waive existing laws and regulations on human resources management.

“The STRL demonstration projects are the vehicles through which the… Department of Defense will determine whether changes in personnel management concepts, policies, or procedures would result in improved laboratory performance and contribute to improved DoD or Federal personnel management,” according to a DoD directive (pdf) issued just last week.

“In the most general terms, a demonstration project provides a means for testing and introducing beneficial change in Government-wide human resources management systems,” according to an earlier Air Force Fact Sheet.  The Air Force identified several successful policy innovations that have been developed in this way, such as the Voluntary Emeritus Corps that permits senior scientists to continue their research into retirement while mentoring younger scientists in Air Force laboratories.  Similar creativity is desperately needed in the stagnant realm of government secrecy policy.

The point is to promote unorthodox approaches to security policy that may involve heightened risk, but that also offer significant potential improvements in operational performance, cost reduction and/or transparency.  Most of these efforts could well fail.  But some might prove fruitful, and worth replicating on a larger scale.  In this way, the Obama executive order could help pave the way for the executive order after next, and for a new, more nimble 21st century information policy.

“Implementation of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI),” the notoriously secretive program “which was established by President Bush in National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 in January 2008, continues at this time.”

That interesting reminder was mentioned in passing in newly disclosed answers to questions for the record (pdf) submitted by the Director of National Intelligence to the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009 following the DNI’s annual threat briefing last February.

Some other notable observations from the DNI’s forty pages of wide-ranging answers to Senators’ questions include:

“Iran is covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government.”  “Iran’s policy calculation in Afghanistan currently emphasizes lethal support to the Taliban, even though revelation of this activity could threaten its future relationship with the Afghan government and its historic allies within Afghanistan.”

Based on counterinsurgency principles, the DNI said, it would require “roughly 818,000 security personnel to secure Afghanistan” including 325,000 personnel to secure the Pashtun areas where most insurgents are located.  But there are currently only 83,094 soldiers in the Afghan National Army.  To grow to 325,000 soldiers would require $946 million annually, well above the FY2008 Afghan defense budget of $242 million.

While Iran has made significant progress in uranium enrichment technology, the State Department’s intelligence bureau (INR) “continues to assess it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce HEU [highly enriched uranium] before 2013.  INR shares the Intelligence Community’s assessment that Iran probably would use military-run covert facilities, rather than declared nuclear sites, to produce HEU. Outfitting a covert enrichment infrastructure could take years.”

“Some analysts believe that Iraq is more fragile, the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] less capable, and the impact of a drawdown [of U.S. forces] more destabilizing than the majority of the Intelligence Community.”

“Hizballah remains the most technically capable terrorist group in the world.”  But “Al Qa’ida is the terrorist group that historically has sought the broadest range of CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] attack capabilities, and we assess that it would use any CBRN capability it acquires in an anti-U.S. attack, preferably against the Homeland.”

In March 2009, the Central Intelligence Agency created a new daily intelligence publication called the Economic Intelligence Brief (EIB), which is “the most visible step we have taken to increase reporting and analysis” on the global economic crisis and its impact on U.S. national security.

“Moscow has been in the process of restoring some of the military capabilities it lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union as it downsizes and reorganizes its forces.” “Despite its still considerable capabilities, the Russian military is a shadow of its Soviet predecessor.” “Russia has consistently kept its defense spending at less than three percent of GDP, avoiding the huge defense burden that ultimately choked the Soviet economy.”

Some of the DNI’s statements are surprisingly flimsy.  For example, he declares (question 17) that “In 2003, the Russian military prepared for an exercise that included attacking U.S. satellites to disrupt the NAVSTAR global positioning system, the Keyhole optical-electronic reconnaissance satellites, and the Lacrosse radar reconnaissance system with the intent of ‘blinding’ the Pentagon and denying it the opportunity to use precision weapons against Russia.”

This is an odd assertion, first, because intelligence officials rarely if ever use the old Keyhole or Lacrosse satellite names in unclassified public statements.  And on closer inspection, it turns out that the DNI’s statement was simply lifted, almost word for word, from a news story that appeared in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta on May 14, 2003.  (It was also picked up by the online Newsmax.com on May 18, 2003.)  The Russian story lazily attributed its claim regarding the anti-satellite exercise to “certain reports.” The DNI repeated the Nezavisimaya Gazeta item nearly verbatim, presenting it as an established fact, with no attribution at all.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has renewed the valuable tradition of submitting unclassified questions for the record to senior intelligence officials following the annual threat briefing to the Committee.  Unfortunately, the congressional publication schedule is such that the answers to the questions often do not appear for one or even two years after they are prepared.  The latest DNI responses to questions for the record, transmitted in April, were obtained by the Federation of American Scientists this week through the Freedom of Information Act.

In the early 1970s, the Nixon Administration plotted to interfere in Uruguay’s presidential elections in order to block the rise of the leftist Frente Amplio coalition.  But when the State Department published its official history of U.S. relations with Latin America during the Nixon era last month, there was no mention of any such activities.  Instead, the State Department Office of the Historian said that Uruguay-related records could not be posted on the Department website because of “space constraints.”  Following repeated inquiries, however, the Historian’s Office revised its position last week and said it would include Uruguay-related records in its Nixon history after all.

The United States should work “overtly and covertly” to blunt the political appeal of the Frente Amplio and to diminish its chances for victory in the Uruguayan presidential elections, advised one declassified document (pdf) from 1971.  Several important documentary records of that turbulent period were compiled by the National Security Archive in 2002.  See “Nixon: ‘Brazil Helped Rig the Uruguayan Elections,’ 1971” edited by Carlos Osorio.

Meanwhile, urban guerrillas who were violently challenging the governments of several Latin American countries drew the worried attention of U.S. intelligence officials.  In particular, the Uruguayan Marxist revolutionary group known as the Tupamaros, which murdered a U.S. AID official in 1970, “has had a spectacular and rapid rise to prominence during the last few years,” according to a 1971 CIA analysis entitled “The Latin American Guerrilla Today” (pdf).

But none of this concern over Uruguay could be discerned from the State Department’s official history of U.S. policy towards the region.  A July 10, 2009 State Department press release announcing the publication of the latest online volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) on American Republics, 1969-1972, mentioned almost every Latin American country except for Uruguay.  The original Preface of the new FRUS volume (pdf) made the peculiar assertion that: “Due to space constraints, relations with… Uruguay… are not covered here.”  This assertion is doubly strange since the new FRUS volume was only published online, not in hardcopy, so that “space constraints” are hardly a factor.

By excluding the rather intense U.S. policy focus on Uruguay, the latest FRUS volume was not just practicing bad history, it may also have been committing a violation of the law, which requires that FRUS be “thorough, accurate, and reliable.”

The State Department did not respond to half a dozen inquiries over a two-week period regarding the decision to exclude Uruguay from the official history of the region or the nature of the supposed “space constraints.”  The State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee did reply that it was unfamiliar with the issue.

But in a brief email message on July 30, FRUS Acting General Editor Dr. William B. McAllister wrote:  “We have revised the Preface.  This should clarify the situation.”  The revised Preface to the new FRUS volume now states that a chapter on Uruguay “will be added” following completion of the declassification process.  The newly revised Table of Contents includes a placeholder listing for Uruguay. There is no indication of what records may be declassified, or when they might become available.

Today, the Frente Amplio coalition whose rise alarmed the Nixon Administration leads the government of Uruguay.

In May 2001, CIA officer Franz Boening submitted a memorandum to the Agency Inspector General alleging that the CIA’s relationship with disgraced Peruvian intelligence official Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos may have involved violations of U.S. law.

There is no evidence that the CIA Inspector General ever took any action in response to Mr. Boening’s memorandum, which was presented as a whistleblower complaint. CIA classification officials, however, responded quickly and energetically — to silence him.  Information contained in the Boening whistleblower complaint is classified, declared CIA information review officer Ralph S. DiMaio (pdf), and its disclosure “reasonably could be expected to cause damage to national security.”

Pursuant to the non-disclosure agreement that Mr. Boening had signed upon employment at CIA, Agency officials forbade him from publicly revealing his allegations, though he said they were based on published news reports and other open sources.  And CIA classified most of the substance of his 2001 complaint (pdf), including even (or especially) the name of Montesinos.

With the assistance of attorney Mark S. Zaid, Mr. Boening went to court to challenge the Agency’s censorship of his allegations as an unlawful act of prior restraint.  Eight years after submitting the document, he emerged more or less victorious, as the CIA withdrew most of its objections, and permitted publication (pdf) of the 2001 whistleblower complaint regarding Montesinos with only a few remaining redactions.

Mr. Boening is still obliged to comply with his Agency nondisclosure obligations, advised R. Puhl, the chairman of the CIA Publications Review Board, and he must seek a new Agency review if he wishes to make any changes at all to the newly authorized text, including any deletions of material.

“If you add or delete material to or otherwise change the text the Board has approved for publication, you must submit these additions, deletions, or changes to us before giving them to your publisher or anyone else,” Mr. Puhl wrote (pdf) in a February 13, 2009 letter.

Even though certain information concerning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) was redacted and declassified for use in the prosecution of former vice presidential aide Scooter Libby in 2006, that same information is nonetheless “currently and properly classified,” the Central Intelligence Agency said (pdf) last week.  The Agency denied release of the material under the Freedom of Information Act.

The existence of the declassified PDB material was disclosed in a January 9, 2006 letter (pdf) from Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to Mr. Libby’s attorney.  He wrote:  “In response to our requests, we have received [from CIA] a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs and discussions involving Mr. Libby and/or Vice President Cheney concerning or relating to the PDBs.  We have provided to Mr. Libby and his counsel (or are in the process of providing such documents consistent with the process of a declassification review) copies of any pages in our possession… in the redacted form in which we received them.”

Since declassified PDBs are comparatively rare, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act request in February 2006 for a copy of the PDB-related material that was declassified by CIA for the Libby prosecution.  Last week, the CIA responded that it had located the requested material but that “we determined [it] is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety.”

This is a somewhat puzzling development.  It is a pity that the CIA Inspector General does not investigate violations of the law of non-contradiction. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b12-20.)

With few exceptions, the CIA has consistently opposed public release of PDBs, reflecting an uncompromising view that PDBs are intrinsically sensitive, irrespective of their age or contents, and should not be disclosed.  (The Agency did reluctantly agree to disclose the August 6, 2001 PDB item entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” (pdf) at the insistence of the 9/11 Commission.)

When challenged under the Freedom of Information Act, courts have upheld the CIA’s refusal to release specific PDBs.  But a 2007 ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the CIA view that “PDBs are categorically exempt from FOIA.”  In particular, the court denied the CIA assertion that the PDB itself is an intelligence method that is protected by law.  “Although PDBs will typically contain information that reveals intelligence sources and methods, this does not mean that PDBs themselves are intelligence methods.”

“If we were to accept the CIA’s logic,” the court said, “then every written CIA communication — regardless of content — would be a protected ‘intelligence method’ because it is a method that CIA uses in doing its work…. We decline to adopt such a boundless definition, and instead hold that whether or not a particular document used by the CIA in its ordinary course of business is an intelligence method depends upon the content of the document.” (Larry Berman v. Central Intelligence Agency, September 4, 2007).

Although the CIA claimed that the Libby PDB-related material that was declassified in 2006 is now “properly classified,” the Agency did not invoke the FOIA exemption for classified information.  Instead, it denied release of the material on the basis of FOIA exemption (b)(3) which includes statutory protection for intelligence methods.

Update: Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel has some of the PDB-related exhibits that were introduced at the Libby trial, along with her own insights into this peculiar turn of events.

Some 2.4 million persons currently hold security clearances for authorized access to classified information, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report (pdf) to the House Intelligence Committee, citing an estimate from the security clearance Joint Reform Team.  This figure does not include “some of those with clearances who work in areas of national intelligence,” the GAO noted (at p.1).

An accurate tally of the number of cleared government employees and contractors — as opposed to a round-number estimate — is not currently available anywhere in government.  The House version of the FY2010 intelligence authorization act (sec. 366) would require an annual report that indicates the number of individuals with security clearances.

In 1993, an estimated 3.2 million persons held security clearances, according to a 1995 GAO report (cited by the Moynihan Commission, chapter 4).

Some noteworthy, newly published congressional hearing volumes on intelligence policy and related topics include the following (mostly pdf).

“Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Criminal Investigations, National Security Investigations, and the Collection of Foreign Intelligence,” Senate Intelligence Committee, September 23, 2008.

“Nomination of Michael Leiter to be Director, National Counterterrorism Center,” Senate Intelligence Committee, May 6, 2008.

“U.S. Interrogation Policy and Executive Order 13440,” Senate Intelligence Committee, September 25, 2007.

“Fixing the Homeland Security Information Network: Finding the Way Forward for Better Information Sharing,” House Homeland Security Committee, May 10, 2007.

“Budget Request on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Capabilities,” House Armed Services Committee, April 19, 2007.

In 2005, the National Security Agency released a partially declassified (pdf) 1952 history of communications intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor with several passages censored.  But this month, the NSA released the complete text (pdf) of the document after the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) determined that there was no justification for continued classification of the withheld portions.

During World War II, “Collaboration with the BRITISH COMINT organization got off to a bad start so far as the Navy was concerned…,” according to one newly declassified paragraph from the official history. “For several months U.S. Navy COMINT personnel thought they had been double-crossed by the British and were reluctant to go ahead with collaboration in direction finding and other matters which were greatly to England’s advantage throughout 1941.”  Subsequent cooperation, however, proved “harmonious.”  Now it can be told.

The NSA document was released in response to a mandatory declassification review request, followed by an appeal to ISCAP, submitted by researcher Michael Ravnitzky.  See “A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States” by Captain Lawrence Safford, USN, 21-27 March 1952.

The new disclosure illustrates once again the efficacy of the ISCAP in overcoming the reflexive secrecy of executive branch agencies, including those that are represented on the ISCAP itself.  More often than not, the ISCAP has released information that one of its own member agencies said must remain classified.

Fundamentally, the ISCAP’s experience over the past decade or so demonstrates the importance of extending declassification authority beyond the original classifying agency.  Left to their own devices, agencies will adhere to past classification practices indefinitely.  But when such practices are critically examined by others, including others within the executive branch, they often wither before the scrutiny.

If there is a solution to “the problem of overclassification,” as requested by President Obama in a May 27, 2009 memorandum, it is bound to involve this kind of independent, external review of agency classification and declassification practices.

A new report from the Congressional Research Service examines the government’s use of “grand challenges” or monetary prizes to provide incentives for technological advancement.  In quite a few cases, such incentives have inspired or accelerated new technology breakthroughs — in lightweight power supplies and autonomous unmanned vehicles, for example.  In other cases, the proffered prizes have gone unclaimed because the challenge was not met, as in a recent competition to generate breathable oxygen from simulated lunar soil.  In any case, it seems likely that the new CRS report is the best thing ever written on the subject.  See “Federally Funded Innovation Inducement Prizes” (pdf), June 29, 2009.

Another new CRS report considers the mundane but significant fact that the US Postal Service may soon close thousands of post office branches and stations due to declining demand and volume.  This exhaustive report, once again, is almost certainly the best, most informative treatment of its chosen subject.  See “Post Office and Retail Postal Facility Closures: Overview and Issues for Congress” (pdf), July 23, 2009.

Despite the efforts of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Sen. John McCain and a few others, there appears to be little near-term prospect that Congress will permit direct public access to CRS reports like these.  Fortunately, routine unauthorized disclosures of the reports continue to meet the need fairly well.

See also, lately (all pdf):

“Issues Regarding a National Land Parcel Database,” July 22, 2009.

“Federal Research and Development Funding: FY2010,” July 15, 2009.

“The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition,” July 8, 2009.

“Agricultural Conservation Issues in the 111th Congress,” July 7, 2009.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) has suggested that the time may have come to undertake a comprehensive review of U.S. intelligence agency activities and operations on the scale of the 1976 Church Committee investigation.  See “Holt Calls for Next Church Committee on CIA” by Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent, July 27, 2009.

The corrosive tendency of government agencies to classify historical information that is already in the public domain is made vividly clear in a collection of erroneously redacted documents compiled by William Burr of the National Security Archive.  See “More Dubious Secrets: Systematic Overclassification of Defense Information Poses Challenge for President Obama’s Secrecy Review,” July 17, 2009.

A 2008 intelligence community policy memorandum on “Connection of United States and Commonwealth Secure Telephone Systems” (pdf) was released in almost entirely redacted form.

Some 700 classified images of Arctic sea ice have been declassified and released, the Department of Interior noted in a July 15 news release.  “It reportedly is the largest release of [imagery] information derived from classified material since the declassification of CORONA satellite images during the Clinton Administration,” the DOI said.  The release followed a National Research Council report that said the release of such classified imagery was needed to support climate change research.  (See also coverage from Mother Jones and The Guardian.)

Persistent concerns over the government’s use of the state secrets privilege to curtail civil litigation were aired at a June 9, 2009 hearing before Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s House Judiciary Subcommittee.  The record of that hearing, with abundant supporting materials submitted for the record, has just been published.  See “State Secret Protection Act of 2009.”

The Senate version of the FY2010 intelligence authorization bill (pdf) would require the President to disclose the aggregate amount requested for intelligence each year when the coming year’s budget request is submitted to Congress.  Currently, only the total appropriation for the National Intelligence Program is disclosed — not the request — and not before the end of the fiscal year in question.

Disclosure of the budget request would enable Congress to appropriate a stand-alone intelligence budget that would no longer need to be concealed misleadingly in other non-intelligence budget accounts.

“This reform makes possible a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to improve oversight by passing a separate intelligence appropriations bill and provides for greater transparency and accountability for intelligence spending,” said Sen. Russ Feingold, who sponsored the proposal, together with Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Christopher Bond and Sen. Ron Wyden.  (Curiously, the measure was opposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.)  See Senate Report 111-55 (pdf) on the FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, July 22 (sec. 356).

Intelligence budget disclosure has been and still remains a subject of extraordinary sensitivity to some officials.  In 1999, DCI George J. Tenet specifically opposed the idea of releasing the annual budget request because he said it would damage national security by revealing intelligence strengths and defects.

“Disclosure of the budget request reasonably could be expected to provide foreign governments with the United States’ own assessment of its intelligence capabilities and weaknesses. The difference between the appropriation for one year and the Administration’s budget request for the next provides a measure of the Administration’s unique, critical assessment of its own intelligence programs,” Mr. Tenet argued in an April 6, 1999 affidavit filed in a FOIA lawsuit brought by the Federation of American Scientists.

This is surprisingly close to nonsense.  Changes in aggregate spending levels occur for many reasons, including the start of new programs, the termination of completed programs, shifts in acquisition phases, personnel changes and inflation.  The difference between the previous year’s expenditures and the following year’s request represents the outcome of thousands of individual programmatic decisions.  Looking at last year’s NASA budget and this year’s NASA request, one could not possibly infer a meaningful assessment of the performance of the civilian space program.  The same is true of the vastly more complicated intelligence bureaucracy.

But implausible as it seems, Mr. Tenet’s argument was sufficient to convince D.C. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan that disclosure would in fact threaten national security.  And so the intelligence budget request has never been released.

Even now, the CIA takes great pains to conceal budget information that is more than half a century old, as if national security were somehow at stake.  This week, the CIA published an historical document on its website concerning the “Central Intelligence Group Budget, Fiscal Year 1948” (pdf) with the ancient budget numbers meticulously removed.

Today, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reported on a working draft of a new executive order on classification that he obtained. The principal feature of the new draft seems to be a National Declassification Center, designed to coordinate and expedite the declassification of historical records across the government.  But it remains unclear if the proposed Center will include a mechanism for overturning erroneous classification policies like CIA’s indiscriminate budget secrecy.  If it does not provide an error correction mechanism, then the Center might end up perversely reinforcing today’s retrograde classification policies and implementing them even more efficiently.

North Korea has renewed its planning for the likely succession of leadership from the ailing Kim Jong Il to his youngest son Kim Cho’ng-un (or Kim Jong Un), according to a deeply researched assessment by the DNI Open Source Center (OSC).

“Pyongyang last autumn reinvigorated a nuanced propaganda campaign that it apparently began eight years ago to prepare for the emergence of a hereditary successor to Kim Jong Il,” the OSC said.  “The recent signals have been extremely subtle, suggesting that they are designed to inform internal audiences without alerting outsiders.”

The OSC report (pdf) is a virtuoso piece of analysis that includes rich detail on the three generations of Kims, the development of the unfolding information campaign on leadership succession, and background on the little-known Kim Cho’ng-un. It even presents “an OSC-generated age-progression photo” that extrapolates from the only available photograph of the younger Kim, taken at age 10, to show what he may look like now at age 26.  And it shows an amazing familiarity with obscure facets of North Korea’s notoriously secretive society.

Thus, it finds a possibly significant allusion to Kim Cho’ng-un, who is his father’s third-born son, in the recent broadcast of “a children’s program entitled ‘Good Heart of the Third Child,’ which emphasized the moral virtue of the youngest of three brothers in his adherence to socialist principles.”  This is something of a departure from the Confucian tradition which favors the eldest son, the OSC explains.

The OSC analysis, marked “for official use only,” has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  It was mentioned in “Who Will Succeed Kim Jong Il?” by Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, July 16, 2009.  See “North Korean Media Campaign Suggests Long-Term Planning for Hereditary Successor,” Open Source Center, 6 May 2009.

For all of its detail and sophistication, the OSC assessment is inconclusive.  A Russian analyst this week told Gazeta.ru that the anticipated selection of Kim Cho’ng-un is merely “conjecture and rumor” (Interview with Vasiliy Mikheyev, Gazeta.ru, July 21, 2009, translated by OSC).  He recalled witnessing the ascension of Kim Jong Il to power in 1975 when Kim was publicly presented together with his father Kim Il Sung in joint portraits and official news stories.  But “nothing of the sort is happening now… If only speculation is occurring, I think the successor has still not been chosen.”