Close. The real story is that that the design of the s-boxes in DES appeared a bit strange to the crypto community, and there were rumors that the NSA had been involved in selecting the values. Foul play was suspected. It turns out that the values in the DES s-boxes were very resistant to differential cryptanalysis, much more than they would have been if they were selected randomly. Either the NSA knew this technique back in the 70s or the IBM researchers figured it out and agreed to keep it secret (both claims have been made); it was not until independent discovery in the 90s that we all learned why the s-boxes had those specific values.
Nobody was quite sure what the NSA did to the tables, but when they came back they were different. Naturally, there is speculation that they built in backdoors. (These days it is an obsolete argument anyway as DES has already been broken by brute force because of its short key length.)