Yeah, as a German, I doubt our ability to place fancy surveillance stuff or other military projects onto the seabed.

Maybe all of your talented engineers are doing exactly that, and everyone else left over is doing things like building airports.

and faking emission readings?

It could have been cooperated with the NATO to monitor Russian submarine activity. That could be the explanation why it was cutoff and took away, and not just intercepted (spliced) as usual.

It doing climate science is plenty of reason for some people to want it to disappear.