bought the rights to the system from a reputable cryptography consulting firm for several million dollars

That's petty change -- consider big-studio movie budgets for proper context.

but the elite decision makers had no access to this information

I am pretty sure they had -- but it's hard to say whether they discounted it to low probability or their whole incentive structure was such that it made sense for them to ignore this information even if they believed it to be true. I'm inclined towards the latter.