Afaik Larry himself was working on an NSA-project (or at least some project that was indirectly funded somehow by the NSA, I can't remember the details) at the time when he created Perl.
For further amusement here a quote from the 2005 "State of the Onion (http://www.perl.com/pub/2005/09/22/onion.html):
Some of you have heard the part about my looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through /usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with positive connotations. Though offhand, I can't explain how I missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with "Pearl" instead.
But it's a little known fact that one of the three-letter names I considered for quite a while was the word "spy."
