Be careful, that way lies madness.

Look up the Wikipedia article on this spacecraft. There are 19 nations besides the US involved in this project. Its highly unlikely this would be some super secret boondoggle when we could do that easily under DOD or CIA cover and no one would know anything about it. I know a little bit about astronomy and a little bit about IMINT, and take my word for it, this is just what it appears to be, the orbital characteristics and the on-board sensors peg this to what it really is, the Infrared Astronomy successor to the Hubble.

As for the "launching mechanism", its being launched by the French on one of their Ariane rockets.

The mission and the tech behind this bird are pure science, so it will be as difficult to hide its purpose and capability as it was Hubble's. There are too many fingers in the pie, and there are too many subscribers to its product. It just doesn't make sense, when we can do all the espionage stuff we want with very little supervision from the press or the outside world.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

OTOH, if you really want a conspiracy to chew on, a sensitive infrared telescope would not only be a perfect tool for routine astronomical research, it would be just what we need to search for Dyson Spheres and other evidence of Kardashev Type II civilizations.

Maybe that's what that reference to LGMs in the article Dan linked to was really all about. 8)