[sweetbitter]

Not quite. The guy who wrote Tor can be clearly seen to have been studying a lot of these things in the later 90s, and it was pretty much always public, but only developed after he got the Navy to get him an NSF grant. Hell, in one slide he had made back then, he was even well-aware of some of the fundamental vulnerabilities in the protocol, and the (still too expensive) mitigations for those flaws, so it can't even be said that anything was concealed.

If we go back further to the original concept of chained anonymous remailers as envisioned by Chaum 40 years ago, it gets even harder to claim something like this.