A single person wasn't behind it - you can look at David Chaum et al's. 1988 "Untraceable Electronic Cash" paper, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor's 1992 paper on proof-of-work, Nick Szabo's bit gold and Wei Dai's B-money from 1998, etc. for work that led up to bitcoin. There is one big innovation in the paper, and that is that proof-of-work on a Merkle tree can be used to solve the double-spending problem. Proof-of-work wasn't new. Merkle trees weren't new (1979). Awareness of the double-spending problem wasn't new (Hal Finney wrote an article on it in 1993, but I doubt that was the first time anyone thought of it). Combining all three is certainly clever and innovative, but it's just one innovation, not years of directed work by a government-funded team.