The CIA had plans to commit terrorist acts against American civilians to start a war against Cuba in the 60s. This is quite literally their style. For example, perhaps they were planning to blame the hack of a power plant or critical infrastructure on this exploit, then use the "evidence" that was leaked to prove it was China, and from there carry out an offensive operation against Chinese infrastructure. There are lots of subversive reasons they would want to do this.
You are referring to Operation Northwoods [0], a set of plans from the 1960s, all of which were rejected.
Operation Northwoods came about because Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, asked the CIA to come up with a list of pretexts that might be used to justify an invasion of Cuba. This request had a number of planners at the CIA enumerate possible false flags that could be used as a pretext. One of those plans was a terror attack against US citizens. Operation Northwoods was rejected and never implemented.
The US has plans for nearly everything, but there is a massive difference between a plan that some CIA analyst is pitching and something the US is likely or even able to do. The US had all sorts of plans for how to handle a pandemic, but then when one actually happened, the plans couldn't be implemented because the US didn't actually have the capabilities the plans called for.
> example, perhaps they were planning to blame the hack of a power plant or critical infrastructure on this exploit, then use the "evidence" that was leaked to prove it was China, and from there carry out an offensive operation against Chinese infrastructure.
Backdooring OpenSSH would in no way function as a pretext for attacks on Chinese infrastructure. No one outside the tech companies cares about this. The US also doesn't need to invent hacking pretexts, you could just point to one of many exposed Chinese hacking incidents.
