I think that is an urban legend, along the lines of "the Internet was created to survive nuclear attacks." AFAIUI the Internet was created to unify various predecessor networks (NSFNet, ARPANET, etc.), and as an experiment in computerized communications. Sharing research data may have been an early application of the Internet or its predecessors, but I am not so sure it was the driving purpose of the project.
In fairness they did also mention the www as well as the internet. Tim Berners Lee definitely had sharing academic data in mind with the web. So they were half right.
