Wiktionary
n. (cover story English)
Usage examples of "cover stories".
It's hard to think of any such memoir that has been completely forthcoming, and for any number of reasons Hillary's Living History is filled with predictable ellipses, cover stories, and creative embroidery of the truth.
Each had a choice of cover stories, and such were the parameters of the mission that having more than one of the group select the same one didn't matter.
For the Russians, it was the loss of a valuable national asset through high treason--worse still, something their intelligence organs had not discovered, which was quite incredible on reflection, but the cover stories had been good ones, and the loss of two hunter submarines in the same operation had made the affair something that the Soviet navy had every desire to forget--and so they hadn't looked far beyond the cover story.
Tesserax explains that various high-ranking maseni on Earth have been secretly recalled to the home world-their death notices being cover stories-to deal with a crisis that has arisen there.