Human Intelligence (HUMINT)

A type of intelligence gathering involving tracking, interviewing, psychological manipulation, or physical coercion of individuals to gain strategic or tactical information that is vital to policy making. The process of gathering and processing human intelligence is done most often on a national level. However, it also may be carried out by companies, a practice called industrial espionage.

An individual who engages in human intelligence (HUMINT) gathering and processing for a government may be an intelligence specialist, an officer in the military, or a field operations officer, commonly known as a spy or agent, for an intelligence agency such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Members of the intelligence community refer to HUMINT as having “feet on the ground” because this type of intelligence provides hard data to back up or supplant information gathered by the other intelligence disciplines, such as signal intelligence (SIGINT) or electronic intelligence (ELINT).

[Page 336]Nearly every nation has intelligence-gathering and processing agencies that rely, at least partially, on human intelligence—regardless of whether the actual existence of such organizations is recognized. Some of the better-known intelligence agencies are the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States, the Mossad in Israel, and the MI5 and MI6 in the United Kingdom. The KGB of the former Soviet Union, replaced by the Russian FSB in 1991, combined both intelligence-gathering and counterintelligence functions.

Spies have been employed to gain knowledge of adversaries for as long as peoples and nations have gone to war. The Chinese philosopher and strategist Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of intelligence gathering in military victory in his treatise The Art of War, written in the 400s BCE. Sun Tzu argued that success in war is based on the ability to deceive the enemy. The ancient Romans, whose power depended just as much on political and diplomatic influence as it did on military conquest, often employed spies disguised as diplomats to collect strategic information on friends and foes.

Since the second half of the 19th century, technological advances such as the telegraph and wireless radio have meant that information gleaned from the enemy can be transmitted at an ever faster pace, enabling national leaders to react quickly to military and diplomatic developments. This led the world's major powers to form civilian organizations to collect and organize human intelligence. At the beginning of World War I, the United States was the only one of the world's leading nations that lacked such a service.

During World War II, Britain's MI5 and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) coordinated extensive human intelligence efforts. In the Pacific, Allied soldiers named coast watchers remained behind enemy lines on remote jungle islands to report on the movements of Japanese planes and ships. Their contributions were crucial to key victories, such as the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942–1943. Espionage, often conducted by civilians in neutral and occupied countries, provided the British with information to locate and bomb German V-1 and V-2 rocket sites before the weapons could be unleashed.

The National Security Act of 1947 created a civilian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency, out of the wartime OSS. With the United States and the Soviet Union eyeing each other with suspicion, human intelligence was employed extensively by agencies such as the CIA, the Soviet KGB, and the British MI5 and MI6 to gain information about the nuclear and conventional forces of the enemy.

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