> they didn’t burn their only agent like this.
I think I'd characterize that as "their only identity." What's the chance that some number (>1) of actual agents were sharing this identity? If that's the case, I'd extrapolate that to multiple identities. In fact the social engineering to gain the trust of the original maintainer likely involved several identities.
I suspect that detectability of intentionally injected bugs would be very low.
You have to assume if this was an intelligence agency they didn’t burn their only agent like this.