Had the chance to interview with them when I was completing graduate school but declined. A friend of mine did and he said it was a very interesting interview. He was told that unlike the FBI or other government agencies they didn’t look for honest people with clean backgrounds. They looked for people who might be law abiding on American shores but had no moral qualms about performing criminal acts offshore. I’d suspect that as a result they just ended up hiring a lot of potential criminals.
It all ultimately falls back on the primary methodology of collection. Military Intelligence and Overt use personal relationships, built over time, to create a fertile situation for sharing of information. Usually, little or no money is needed to keep this relationship going.
The CIA knows of one thing and one thing only, MONEY. You pay enough, and you can get whatever information you think is out there. And the sources know there is no real connection between you and them, so they will SELL the agent whatever they think the agent wants.
I know that CIA personnel reading this will argue that they create relationships all the time, but ultimately that is proven false by all the disinformation they put out. But the DoD keeps doing its job and writing information that helps the war-fighter and the boots on the ground. If the DoD makes a mistake, their friends and brothers die. If the CIA makes a mistake, some trash they do not know or care about dies.