I do not think that Satoshi used altcoins like Namecoin to draw attention away from Bitcoin. The CIA knew about Bitcoin in early 2011 and wanted Gavin to give them further inside on the topic. So, even if it was his purpose which I highly doubt then it failed. But remarkable is that Satoshi left the whole Bitcoin scene including this forum close after he heard about the meeting with Gavin and the CIA.
I doubt if Gavin Andresen was ever a legitimate Bitcoin developer or he was an insider CIA agent since day 1... at the beginning he was really collaborative and looks like he wanted the best for Bitcoin. He would often be in relevant debates trying to help, coding etc. He even was considering flaws in Bitcoin which he later on put into practice himself:
I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.
Good idea or not, SOMEBODY will try to mess up the network (or co-opt it for their own use) sooner or later. They'll either hack the existing code or write their own version, and will be a menace to the network.
I admire the flexibility of the scripts-in-a-transaction scheme, but my evil little mind immediately starts to think of ways I might abuse it. I could encode all sorts of interesting information in the TxOut script, and if non-hacked clients validated-and-then-ignored those transactions it would be a useful covert broadcast communication channel.
That's a cool feature until it gets popular and somebody decides it would be fun to flood the payment network with millions of transactions to transfer the latest Lady Gaga video to all their friends...See this. Very telling. He is pointing to hard forks with alternative clients, spamming the network with useless crap... interesting in retrospect.