[patentatt]

A perfectly innocuous connection could be that intelligence community folks are good at ... drawing conclusions from intelligence? It makes sense to recruit spooks to analyze and interpret mounds of proprietary but legally-gathered intelligence then.

[dredmorbius]

NSA's core competence is signals, largely making and breaking ciphers.

Intel analysis is more CIA/DIA.

My understanding is that this was generally true in the 1960s-70s as well. E.g., MINARET:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET