thank you! a very reasonable explanation

in regards to another thread: WHOI being a naval/rockefeller/derp state front org

it most definitely is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161225101619/http://www.hoover.org/research/deep-cover

The lesson is that you are better off finding cover than creating it.

That was how the Navy hid another secret program 20 years later. The search for the sunken liner Titanic was, in effect, a cover for a highly classified Navy program to inspect the wrecks of two lost Navy submarines: the Thresher, which sank 200 miles off the coast of Cape Cod in 1963, and the Scorpion, which was lost in the mid-Atlantic in 1967.

The Navy was concerned about the condition of the two subs’ nuclear reactors, as well as the nuclear-armed torpedoes that the Scorpion was carrying. However, the Navy did not want to draw attention to the wrecks, lest others—such as the Soviet Union—get the idea to grab parts of the submarines for themselves. So any survey had to be secret.

Robert Ballard worked for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, an independent research center in Massachusetts founded in 1930. Today Woods Hole employs about 600 people who work in fields ranging from ocean physics, biology, and engineering to policy studies. Most of its work is purely scientific and totally open. Ballard had taken a year off from Woods Hole and spent some time at Stanford University just as the Information Revolution was taking off. There Ballard got the idea of applying the new technology to create a new field: virtual exploration of the ocean using robotics, just the technology the Navy needed for finding subs deep in the ocean.

Ballard also had a dream: finding the Titanic. People knew where other lost ocean liners—Andrea Doria, Lusitania, Britannic—had gone down, and divers had explored most of them. But no one knew the exact location of the wreck of the Titanic, the grand prize of ocean explorers.

Ballard proposed a deal to the Office of Naval Research: fund most of the development for a deep-sea robot (Ballard would raise the remaining money). Ballard would first use the robot to look for the Thresher and Scorpion and survey the wreck sites. Then he and his team would use whatever time he had remaining to look for the Titanic.

This robot became the Argo/Jason system. Argo served as a docking station for Jason, a smaller sub-robot that carried the lights and camera. Jason could reach tight quarters, like the interior of the Titanic or the torpedo room of a submarine that had been lost years before.

For the Navy, using Ballard’s research as a cover offered many advantages—not the least being Ballard himself. Ballard was an officer in the Naval Reserve. So whenever the Navy needed him to perform a classified mission, it simply reactivated him. Robert D. Ballard, Ph.D., became Commander R. D. Ballard, USNR. He was a bona fide employee of the U.S. government—but still looked like an oceanographer, which he was. For keeping cover, the arrangement was perfect. By publicizing the search for the Titanic—which was bound to get the spotlight anyway—and being coy about how much time Ballard was actually at sea, the Navy succeeded in making sure no one brought up the subject of the Thresher and Scorpion. The secret parts of the mission remained secret until Navy officials decided to reveal the survey operation in 1996 to reassure the public that the reactors posed no safety hazards.

The basic technique was the same as in GRAB: Find a large research institute with enough routine activities so that a secret project can get lost in the noise; find or create a project with a bona fide scientific function. Blend the sensitive operations into the larger project. Publicize the hell out of the public operations, or just be nonchalant when the press follows its own instincts for a good story. Then simply say nothing about the sensitive part.