Nitpick: strictly speaking, it wasn't plainly a backdoor specifically, but plainly either a backdoor, or something deliberately designed to look backdoored, but with some unknown way for the NSA to 'reluctantly' declassify a proof that it wasn't backdoored in a attempt to discredit people who accused it of being backdoored (basically trying to recreate the DES S-box versus differential cryptanalysis thing). But smart money was on actually-a-backdoor.
Nitpick: strictly speaking, it wasn't plainly a backdoor specifically, but plainly either a backdoor, or something deliberately designed to look backdoored, but with some unknown way for the NSA to 'reluctantly' declassify a proof that it wasn't backdoored in a attempt to discredit people who accused it of being backdoored (basically trying to recreate the DES S-box versus differential cryptanalysis thing). But smart money was on actually-a-backdoor.