There is precedent for this. IC Satellite optics were years ahead of commercial. Same with cryptography. The NSA invented asymmetric encryption and kept it secret. I wouldn’t be surprised if they know a few advanced things about quantum computing that IBM hasn’t figured n out yet
I would, I've written about this before. A common error is to think that say NSA mathematicians have access to what's in the "free world", but those on the outside don't have access to the inside.
The reason this is an error is because research is an interactive process. Spooks can read papers, but they can't freely discuss with outside researchers - not what they themselves are working on of course, but even talking to outsiders about what the outsiders are working on, can be risky, since it can accidentally reveal a lot.
Secrecy cripples research. Even in areas where the TLAs hoover up the majority of graduates (was apparently true of math a while ago), they often fall behind.
There was a time when the TLAs could just call people like Claude Shannon, demand he work for them and never tell anyone about what he was working on, and he would say OK. That time is long gone. They don't have that goodwill any longer, and the price of isolation for a researcher has only gotten worse as communication has improved.
