It has nothing to do with leadership, just incentives. If you're a world class hacker, your most prominent options are:

1) do black hat shit and risk prison time for gains that are hard to realize

2) work in white hat security and get paid a ton of money

3) work for the government and make very little money, but get to do black hat shit with impunity

It's pretty easy to imagine that the people submitting applications to work for the NSA have no interest in protecting the US from big bad overseas hackers.