I have been neglecting this one,Body of Secrets,Bamford's work on the NSA.

... Despite the trauma of losing a ship and many of its men, neither the NSA nor the Navy learned much; in less than a year more blood would run across gray decks, and another seagoing listening post would be lost.

Long before the Liberty was attacked, the Navy had become disenchanted with the entire NSA oceangoing program. Navy personnel had become little more than seagoing chauffeurs and hired hands for NSA, permitted to eavesdrop on targets of great interest to the Navy only when doing so could not in any way interfere with the program's primary mission of monitoring NSA's targets. To listen to foreign naval signals, the Navy had to stick its analysts in awkward, antenna-covered mobile vans placed aboard destroyers and destroyer escorts. But doing so meant pulling the ships out of normal service to patrol slowly along distant coasts, rather than taking part in fleet exercises and other activities. It was a highly inefficient operation, combining the minimum collection capability of a crowded steel box with the maximum costs of using a destroyer to cart it around.

"The Navy was very interested in having a trawler program of their own," said Gene Sheck, formerly a deputy chief within NSA's collection organization, K Group. Sheck managed the mobile platforms, such as the Sigint aircraft, ships, and submarines. "The Navy position pretty clearly was that they wanted a Navy platform controlled by Navy, responsive to Navy kinds of things." The Navy said they needed their own fleet not just for collecting signals intelligence, but also for a wide variety of intelligence activities. A fleet would be useful, they said, for such things as hydrographic intelligence ,analyzing the salinity of the ocean at various locations, which could enable better tracking of Soviet submarines.

But NSA was not buying that. "It was totally Sigint," Sheck said. "When they tried to tell us about all this other collection, it consisted of a rope and a bucket, and it pulled water out of the ocean. ... I said, 'You're not going to get away with [this] garbage. The director of NSA is going to have a lot to say about what you do with Sigint platforms.'"

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/11/part-7-body-of-secretsspine.html