“God’s gift to SIGINT!”
Early on in my career, I was at an intelligence leadership school where the platoons were divided up into different disciplines, from human intelligence (HUMINT), geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), All-Source, and my own profession, signals intelligence (SIGINT), among a few others. Every morning the HUMINT platoon chanted “God’s gift to SIGINT!”
I rolled my eyes. After all, I had not ever seen any of them recruit or run a source, much less be able to talk to a girl in the bar. The majority of source handling is left to the alphabet soup agencies and not handed down to the 20-year-old whose first job is a HUMINT collector. But this article isn’t about one being better than the other but explaining both in an operational context.
1 SIGINT
According to the NSA,
“SIGINT is intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets, such as communications systems, radars, and weapons systems that provides a vital window for our nation into foreign adversaries’ capabilities, actions, and intentions.”
It is a highly technical intelligence discipline with very little room for error – although I have seen some pretty lazy analytical work in my day. Even perfectly derived intelligence from AI can be skewed by bias and even a lack of sleep.
Proper analytical training can taint any intelligence discipline. If you have ever scanned frequencies on a walkie-talkie and stopped to listen to two other people talking in the clear, congratulations you performed SIGINT. While SIGINT existed since the advent of the radio, HUMINT was the first intelligence discipline on the block.
2 HUMINT
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recognizes HUMINT as the oldest way to collect intelligence, and rightly so. Old-school espionage involved turning people into double agents. This involves finding an individual on the inside of a guerrilla organization, or government, to feed information to the other side. Arguably one of the oldest known forms of HUMINT target confirmation was Judas kissing Jesus. This type of intelligence is Biblically old.
Today, human intelligence collection is the stuff of Hollywood lore – James Bond is the low-hanging fruit (who even had his SIGINT counterpart in Q), but then there are those kids from Spy Kids 1-5, and Kevin James in True Memoirs of an International Assassin. HUMINT and the espionage we see in movies are not the same thing. [Source]
3 Big Brother is Watching You
SIGINT gets a little nod here and there in movies like Zero Dark Thirty where a guy with a computer sits in the back of a vehicle racing through a marketplace as they chase a target, but even then, the star of the show is the CIA interrogator who is a trained HUMINT collector. SIGINT is also portrayed in Snowden, but its very existence is demonized and associated with a nefarious Big Brother-style government. In the real world of combat operations, one discipline often confirms the other, and they cannot exist without the other. One drives the other in a symbiosis which if applied correctly can produce incredibly effective results.
4 CIA Intelligence Cycle
Depending on where you look, you will see a number of very similar versions of a commonly accepted cycle of intelligence. The CIA lists the steps of the cycle as:
- Planning & Direction
- Collection
- Processing
- Analysis & Production
- Dissemination.
What each step in the cycle looks like for different intelligence disciplines differs somewhat.
5 Targeting Cycle aka F3EAD
I like to use an acronym which is popular in the Special Operations community called F3EAD.
- Find
- Fix,
- Finish
- Exploit
- Analyze
- Disseminate
Both HUMINT and SIGINT can tailor their skill sets to fit this process. Numerous Western militaries utilize this cycle for lethal operations. All lethal operations begin with intelligence, and the exploitation and analysis inevitably lead to follow-on operations. In F3EAD, HUMINT and SIGINT must operate hand in hand. Without going into tradecraft, the ways in which each discipline executes the steps would be difficult to lay out here. However, neither has any superiority over the other. There are different tools available for use at a commander’s discretion to accomplish the mission.
5.1 HUMINT as a part of F3EAD
HUMINT targeting begins with the choice of subject. This comes from OSINT observation of their online persona, as well as physical surveillance. You want to gather everything you can on the subject to determine if their potential as an asset is worth your time and effort, and if so how to go about effectively recruiting them.
5.2 SIGINT as a part of F3EAD
Similarly, the first steps in SIGINT targeting are defining the collection requirements and then deciding how to move forward in your collection plan. These requirements will differ depending on the overall goal of the mission, and who your enemy is. Force protection SIGINT versus offensive SIGINT collection look vastly different, as does SIGINT against a smaller extremist organization versus a near-peer threat.
HUMINT is the domination of the world you can see, of human interactions and behaviors. SIGINT is the domination of the world you cannot see, of the nebulous data streaming through the RF spectrum at different frequencies.
6 “Theater Level Rules of Engagement”
While the popular portrayal of intelligence operations depicts a lone operative in a foreign land doing all intelligence disciplines on their own, the reality is that operations of any discipline are compartmentalized, and much more restrictive.
On a broad scale, there are federal and international laws one must abide by. From there, theatre-level rules of engagement and commanders’ directives dictate anything you do. In a foreign country, at any given time, there are other intelligence services operating in and around the same area of operations as well.
Not only is this important for deconfliction, but the realization that your overt and covert activities are being monitored, and mirrored, and you may be the target of adversarial intelligence collection. This is where operational security dictates you do several things. These can include leaving your phone at home, not using commercial GPS devices on missions, and turning off Bluetooth despite how badly you want to use that speaker in the vehicle. All things you do are monitored in the same way you are monitoring the enemy.
7 Extroverts vs Introverts?
So maybe you’ve gotten this far and you’re considering a career in intelligence, and you are torn between HUMINT and SIGINT. There are a few things to consider about your own personality. A generalization is that HUMINT is for extroverts and SIGINT is for introverts. Being outgoing may not actually be a prerequisite for a career in HUMINT, though it surely helps. Human intelligence is about connecting with others over all else. How easy is it for you to make friends with a stranger? Strike up a conversation with a group of people at a bar you don’t know? Are you good at foreign languages? The list goes on.
Personality is not nearly as important for a SIGINT professional unless you are in special operations or some unit which focuses on ground collection instead of analysis or bulk collection. The majority of SIGINT is done far away from prying eyes in something called a SCIF-sensitive compartmented information facility. I avoid this place as much as I can, I like the sunlight. I digress… If you are adept at computers and know languages like SQL or Python, SIGINT may be for you. There are no computers in HUMINT past writing up reports.
8 Life After Service
Another consideration would be jobs as a civilian, assuming you are doing this job for the federal government and don’t wish to do it until you die. SIGINT has an abundance of opportunities on the outside, but they are 99% government contracting jobs. Due to the nature of SIGINT work, it must be relegated to that sphere. However, one exception is that some SIGINT work is done by police departments. However, I don’t personally know of any SIGINTer who wants to go work for their local police department.
8.1 SIGINT Employment After Service
However, the analytical skills required to perform good SIGINT analysis are applicable on a variety of platforms. SIGINT is also a gateway into cybersecurity and computer science. Many of my colleagues have made that transition and it isn’t a bridge too far.
With certifications in:
- Python
- SQL
- CompTIA
- Security +
They have all found lucrative employment as a civilian just by expanding their toolbox to become certified in the things they had exposure to and experience with as a SIGINT operator.
8.2 HUMINT Employment After Service
HUMINT has little job specific crossover on the other hand, unless you want to throw your hat in the ring for a three-letter agency and run sources overseas – which isn’t a guarantee. Even the dark world of corporate espionage is run by analysts, data experts and those with MBAs from Ivy Leagues and not by former HUMINT operators. I have had some former colleagues make their way into the world of private investigation from HUMINT, but that is still a one off.
As with any military occupational specialty (MOS) the skills you learn in your job training are not always going to meld into a civilian job seamlessly. You must work on creating a skillset that covers multiple domains. The true intelligence professional should be a jack of all trades, with experience in all intelligence disciplines.
8.3 Transitioning to the Private Sector
Transitioning from service to the private sector comes with two immediate challenges you should be aware of.
- The way you have conducted intelligence for the last number of years could be different from the way your new employer expects intelligence to be conducted. Not all things are simply results-driven. Following an unfamiliar workflow or methodology will require you to quickly adapt and tailor your skills to fit the methodologies of whoever you are currently working for. Think of this as being forced to think outside the box. Adaptability is the key to success.
- You may struggle to see your skills serving the purpose they once did. You may even go as far as seeing your own self as not serving the purpose you once did. You are more than your service, and you must find a way to give yourself purpose and meaning that isn’t tied to your uniform. This is the downfall of many who transition and cannot get out of the military mindset and find themselves grappling with depression because of it.
Always remember, you are more than your service.
9 HUMINT + SIGINT = Success
Whatever you find yourself doing in the intelligence community can be extremely rewarding. It is also very effective at driving everything from operations to policy. No one intelligence discipline is better than the other. This is true in the same way as no job in the military can exist in a vacuum.
Everyone and everything must work in tandem to make units function, to plan and execute deployments and individual missions. More work between HUMINT and SIGINT should be done stateside in order to create workflows based on fusion and shared intelligence and not to focus on the debate of HUMINT vs SIGINT.
It is the ego that drives bravado and the hubris that leads to one agency not talking to another. We have seen how that played out in the past. To avoid future mistakes, and create more mission success, new fusion-based tradecraft should be written into doctrine. I have plenty of ideas on how to blend SIGINT with the other disciplines that will be held for SCIF-based conversations. The framework is there, the relationships just need to be capitalized on and utilized fully.
