This article isn't a puff piece about NSA morale. It's a demand from the security apparatus for political support - especially for legislation to make recording of phone records legal.
Read the article - there is very little mention of morale at all, whereas there are many anonymous quotes asking for the President to get behind them:
former officials who say they are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support.
employees are privately voicing frustration at what they perceive as White House ambivalence amid the pounding the agency has taken from critics.
A senior administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record said that the White House would normally not endorse legislation so early in the process but that “it’s been clear . . . that we prefer legislation” that preserves the phone records program “while making some changes . . . to potentially strengthen oversight and transparency.”
The president has multiple constituencies — I get it. But he must agree that the signals intelligence NSA is providing is one of the most important sources of intelligence today.
Former officials note how President George W. Bush paid a visit to the NSA in January 2006, in the wake of revelations by the New York Times that the agency engaged in a counterterrorism program of warrantless surveillance on U.S. soil beginning after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
I think the NSA is seeing this as an opportunity to actually increase their powers by getting legal cover for what they already do.
(Also note that it is the Washington Post this is in - ie, it is for a Washington - political - audience who will read what the leaked statements, not the headline)