The military industrial complex is pretty powerful (arguably it's the most powerful organization on the planet), and is plenty capable of engaging in ongoing conspiracies and psyops. It's naive to believe that the same government who created nuclear bombs with the secret Manhattan Project, and that inserted intelligence agents into media companies in Project Mockingbird, is not continuing to conspire at levels of grand strategy equal to or exceeding those of its past projects.
I can't imaging trying to hide a Manhattan project today. They hid an entire city containing tens of thousands of people and consuming a serious whole segments of the total US electrical grid and federal budget.
Modern civilian OSINT would have been adequate to deduce fission work was being performed, assuming no one posted centrifuge schematics on their gaming Discord.
And it still didn't succeed, the first world leader to learn that fission weapons work was Stalin.
You're referring to Operation Mockingbird which afaik was completely unrelated to Project Mockingbird (an illegal wiretap by the CIA on a US journalist)
