You don't seem to understand either me or the parent poster.
What we're saying is that the government (or parts of it, or whatever hair-splitting you want to do) is currently interested in drumming up funding/influence/power for the intelligence community, so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it.
This isn't some spontaneous born-from-Zeus' head revelation that the authors have stumbled into. They are given a target, and asked to write something to justify them. You don't need to 'fake' doing a study, to make your 'study' end up supporting whatever pre-conceived thesis you were shooting for. [1]
This is everywhere in the media and the think-tank space. You write what your funders want you to write. Denying this blatant transactionality is the wild conspiratorial thinking.
RAND is an especially egregious example of this, because it marches lock-step with the empire-building geo-political consensus in Washington. It's doing what it's paid to do, if it started drawing conclusions and advocacy its funders didn't like, they wouldn't keep writing cheques.
[1] And if you can't find any way to torture the data into your pre-planned outcome, you can just not publish it. These aren't medical trials, they don't have to be pre-registered.