Not quite. The Shuttle's wing design was an airforce requirement (high cross-range) to allow a launch from California, release or retrieve a polar orbiting satellite and return to US soil.
The idea is that if you track the launch vehicle's path you can get a good estimate of where to look for the payload and so you know it's orbit and when to not doing anything suspicious out of doors. KH satelites are so big that you can see them in orbit anyway and are difficult to move to an other orbit very often. If you had the ability to maneuver in flight while over friendly territory the opposition couldn't get a good estimate of where you had been.
Since the Vandenburg facility was never used and shuttle flights from the Cape were pretty public and a payload this big was pretty obvious then it's unlikely that it was used.
Buran was probably a pure case of "what do they know that we don't" plus politics overriding the engineers saying that it didn't make sense.
Yeah, the Shuttle never flew a polar orbit, nor did it ever land at Vandenberg. Fun fact: the only reason the Air Force had a say in the Shuttle's design is because the Shuttle was supposed to be a fast-turnaround spaceplane with enough launch capacity to serve as the standard spacelaunch system for the entire government, including NRO flights.
Then we actually flew the thing. Whoops, the heat shield falls apart after reentry. Whoops, the turbopumps can only last one flight. Therefore, six months of downtime between flights. Whoops, Columbia and Challenger! Therefore, the fleet might be grounded at any time, for years at a time, since the Shuttle can't be flown without humans, (Landing gear deployment requires pulling a manual lever, on the insistence of the astronaut corps. Otherwise it was entirely automatic) and the public doesn't like it when astronauts are killed.
Thus the military returned to conventional rockets. They even built an unmanned spacecraft for the "go up and steal a satellite" mission the Shuttle never ended up performing: the X-37.
Given the USSR also built the Tu-144 so you're probably right about it being a case of envy, though the shuttle is fairly unique in that it can retrieve things from space and bring them back, something not practical in a Soyuz or Dragon-type vehicle.
I can imagine if the military had orbit-capable telescopes like those sitting around, there must be many ground-based ones used to track other satellites.
Retrieving satelites never really held water.
Your own payloads would have to be very very valuable to be worth the cost and risk of manned launch and rendezvous and the shuttle couldn't land with something the mass of HST or a KH spy sat
Snatching an enemy's property is even more risky - as soon as the opposition has the capability you would fit your special toys with an anti-handling device. I don't work on the 'dark side' but I'm betting that anything special has a self destruct anyway just in case a launch goes wrong and it is retrieved.
You could even launch a whole constellation consisting of just a proximity fuse, a few kg of C4 and some ball bearings and wait for the other side to go fishing in their $billion space plane.
There was a very large US program to send up a photo sat manned, take pictures, and send back to earth in very small pods. It is a good read I will update post if I can find video.
I was only involved in Hubble after it was built, but my boss had conference proceedings from the early 70s were it was proposed that it would be a Skylab type space station with a crew of 3 loading photographic plates into a telescope and then developing them!
A return was considered in place of the COSTAR servicing mission, I can't remember if there was a 'safety margin' in that figure or there was another reason - but it was rejected for safety reason.
The idea is that if you track the launch vehicle's path you can get a good estimate of where to look for the payload and so you know it's orbit and when to not doing anything suspicious out of doors. KH satelites are so big that you can see them in orbit anyway and are difficult to move to an other orbit very often. If you had the ability to maneuver in flight while over friendly territory the opposition couldn't get a good estimate of where you had been.
Since the Vandenburg facility was never used and shuttle flights from the Cape were pretty public and a payload this big was pretty obvious then it's unlikely that it was used.
Buran was probably a pure case of "what do they know that we don't" plus politics overriding the engineers saying that it didn't make sense.