To be clear, the CIA wasn't founded until 1947, and although it had a precursor in the establishment of the CIG in 1946, I am excluding the OSS in this answer because the OSS was a distinctly different organisation, with a different purpose and mission, but also because the OSS falls a bit outside my expertise. The CIA itself was still very much involved in bureaucratic turf wars until the early 1950's when the dust settled and it acquired the form and functions it would continue to hold throughout the rest of the Cold War.

Anticommunism is a very broad and vague term to describe an organisation, but I think it is important to remember the context that shaped this institution and the American people in general. US public and political support for any kind of government-sanctioned spying was fragile after the end of WWII, because it violated a long-held view among US politicians that gentlemen don't spy, and that America shouldn't lower itself to the underhanded methods of other countries under peacetime. Developments in the Cold War directly impacted US lawmakers, such as revelations about the extent of Soviet espionage in America by the defection of Igor Gouzenko in 1946, in Canada from the Soviet military intelligence service. Initially, the kind of CIA that US lawmakers envisaged would primarily concern itself with all-source analysis, but lobbying by former OSS veterans and the need for flexibility, and an uncritical legislature, produced an agency that in the following years expanded mostly into espionage and covert action (which may include but is not limited to propaganda, disinformation, bribery, sabotage and assassination).

Whether or not the Agency's personnel profile was more anticommunist than the average U.S. citizen in the 1950's is hard to say. The 'typical' CIA officer has probably never existed anyway, as the Agency consisted of two distinct branches, Analysis and Operations, with their own recruitment needs, functions, and culture. In both branches however, a wide variety of skills and knowledge were required, producing a diverse staff. If one common trait stood out, it was that the CIA hired many college graduates and PhD's, so it's culture is often compared to that of a college campus. Rumor had it that they were mostly Ivy League campusses where the CIA recruited its future officers, and for this reason the KGB was quite active there as well, but former DCI Allen Dulles firmly rejected this claim and stressed that universities from across America supplied graduates to the Agency.

The recruitment policies of Western intelligence services in the early Cold War however, and with many intelligence officers still having direct experiences from WWII, did produce a type of culture that may seem odd to outsiders and later generations. Personnel recruitment for an intelligence service was quite a complex task. They didn't run normal job advertisements like other branches of the civil service or military until the late 1960's, and especially in the early days, agencies like the CIA and British SIS even concealed their own headquarters from the public. Secondly, it is quite difficult to recruit people for jobs of which they have little idea what the job exactly is and what they will be doing. On top of that, many intelligence recruits first had to undergo several years in various training courses to make them ready for any kind of clandestine work, which is quite an investment to make in any kind of new employee - especially when his training courses are state secrets that are not to be disclosed.

Therefore, the CIA employed talent spotters at university campusses to look for a rare combination of useful skills, loyalty and motivation in potential recruits. The CIA looked for, in the words of Allen Dulles, people with a ''frontline'' mentality, who were deeply aware of the geopolitical conflict in which the U.S. found itself and wanted to wage the Cold War against America's adversaries. Naturally then, with the adversary being the Soviet Union and its communist allies, the CIA wasn't looking for types who found communism or the Soviet Union attractive political models.

On top of that, WWII was still within everyone's living memory at the CIA, and the prospect of a third one meant that the stakes were extremely high. Making some dirty hands by propping up a Central-American dictator was far more acceptable to the CIA than allowing it to turn into a Soviet client state so close to the U.S. It needs to be stressed however that the CIA's covert operations were ultimately carried out on behalf of the president who ordered them. This mentality is probably what you described as the CIA's apparent ''pragmatism''. Especially the OSS veterans viewed the CIA's mission as to ''beat the Russians'', just as it had been the OSS's mission to beat the Germans. The ends justified the means. Nowadays, scholars have pointed out, most intelligence services are still predominated by this so-called 'consequentialist' morality, which is often summarized as Machiavellian.

So when talking about CIA culture, or why it was the way it was, we need to take into account the intensity of the Cold War in which U.S. politics and American culture existed, and that anticommunism was rather the norm. The nature of an intelligence agency and its recruitment methods further attracted especially upper class, educated people with a battle mentality, looking to engage America's enemy at that time, which was the Communist bloc. Intelligence people get paid to take seriously the threats against their country. If they don't do it, who else will? Careerists and thrill-seekers are shunned, for they will inevitably be dissapointed in their job and quickly leave after so much has been invested in them, or worse, sell their inside knowledge to the enemy to spice up their boring lives. Some practitioners, like spy novelist John Le Carré, despised the warrior mentality that sacrificed people and principles on the altar of democracy and portrayed intelligence as a deeply immoral game with no winners and in which everyone will lose.

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The literature on the CIA is vast, and a growing body of scholarship looks at intelligence ethics. I can recommend you the following literature in particular:

Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (1965)

Richard Helms and William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Presidio Press, 2003).

Richard H. Immerman, The Hidden Hand: a Brief History of the CIA (John Wiley & Sons, 2014)

Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men, Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (Simon & Schuster 1995)

Randall B. Woods, Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA (Basic Books 2014)

Michael Andregg, ''Ethics and Professional Intelligence'' in: Loch K. Johnson (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (Oxford University Press 2010).