If money was what Shannon was primarily interested in, he wouldn't be in academia. This is true of almost all types of narrow domain experts. There are more parties than government that can offer them money, too.

For most academics (and more, the better they are), not being allowed to talk about what you're working on to the vast majority your peers, would be too high a price for money to make up for.

NSA circumvented this for many years by employing an obscene number of math graduates, effectively creating their own parallel academia. We can only imagine how expensive that was. Still, they were surpassed by the "open" world even in the narrow fields they were interested in, such as cryptography, by the late 90s at the latest. It's not just sad being cut off from the free world, it stunts you.

It is not for North Korea. Their APT groups switch between intelligence gathering and PayPal / crypto scams. They also have prominent ransomware groups. Crime pays for the hermit kingdom and they do need cash.

Now, to OPs point, on getting someone competent. Say, they want to infiltrate a crypto trading firm. Maybe the guy who knows crypto doesn't know English. So you end up with a team of guys playing telephone and hoping for the best.

I have to work for a living. If I stop working, I'm homeless. Every agency in the entire US IC could ask me for help and offer me a billion dollars to do it, and I'd still tell those traitors, tyrants, and cowards to go rot in hell. Not that hell exists, but a person can dream, can't they?

You need to identify him first, and remember, from the position of NOT being able to answer those questions yourself.

It is very hard to identify someone as smarter than you, if they try to avoid being identified as such. Even if we're talking about smartness in a very narrow technical sense.