When HUMINT Forgot the Internet: Why Human Intelligence Needs OSINT More Than Ever

There’s a moment every investigator eventually faces.

A moment when a source tells you something that sounds almost right.

Close enough to trust.

But just off enough that a small voice inside you whispers:

“Check again.”

I’ve had that moment more times than I can count.

Sometimes it came during a late-night debriefing in a dim café.

Sometimes during a walk in the rain with someone who didn’t want to be seen speaking to me.

Sometimes over an encrypted chat where the words looked perfect but the timing felt wrong.

And more than once, OSINT (nothing glamorous, nothing classified) blew apart an entire HUMINT storyline that would have made it into an intelligence report if we hadn’t bothered to look.

People like to say HUMINT is about “understanding people.”

But in the world we live in today, understanding people without understanding their digital lives is not intelligence. It’s faith.

And faith is a dangerous foundation for national security.

I learned (most of) this the hard way.

This blog is inspired by people I often talk to that operate in the HUMINT, OSINT, SIGINT and Journalistic space. But this blog is also inspired based on my personal background at Dutch Government. I also want to thank Matthias Wilson (again), Matthijs R. Koot and my team at ShadowDragon.io for our in depth conversations around topics like these.

HUMINT operators talking with a source in a cafe and an OSINT Analyst validating the source his stories and background

The Dangerous Romance of HUMINT

There’s a certain mythology around HUMINT.

You may know it:

The clandestine meetings.

The quiet confidences.

The human connection.

The “I trust you enough to tell you something I shouldn’t.”

We fall in love with that mythology because it’s intoxicating.

Human intelligence feels visceral. Real. Tangible.

There’s a pulse behind the information, a heartbeat behind the narrative.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth that many HUMINT operators don’t want to say out loud:

Sources lie.

Sources omit.

Sources misremember.

Sources romanticise.

Sources perform.

And even the best ones (the reliable ones) live in two identities now:

• The one they show you.

• The one they show the Internet.

  
  

Sometimes the second is where the real story hides.

I’ve seen HUMINT operators who could read micro-expressions like a book, who could smell deception in a sentence, who could recruit sources in environments that would make most professionals freeze, yet completely ignored the online ecosystem surrounding their asset.

They trusted the person.

But not the data.

And trust, unchallenged, can be lethal to intelligence.

The First Time OSINT Broke My Confidence in a Source

Years ago, I handled a cooperative source tied to a network we were tracking across Europe and the Middle East.

On paper, he was perfect.

He had access. He had motivation. He had a narrative that fit the intelligence picture like a tailored suit.

He also had something else I didn’t fully consider at the time:

a digital footprint that didn’t match his life story.

When we finally ran a simple OSINT background sweep, things fell apart quickly:

• Employment dates that didn’t line up

• A conveniently polished LinkedIn history

• A series of “friends” who were obvious sock puppets

• Metadata from an old photo that contradicted his travel timeline

• A dormant Instagram account that suddenly came alive the day before he contacted us

It was basic OSINT work. Nothing advanced, nothing that required tools beyond a browser. But that simple work did something HUMINT couldn’t:

It exposed the cracks in his persona.

He wasn’t a hostile actor.

He wasn’t even intentionally deceptive.

He was someone trying to be useful.

Trying to be important.

Trying to shape his value by filling in gaps with fiction.

If we had accepted his narrative at face value, it would’ve affected operational decisions. That’s the thing about HUMINT: the human part is both the strength and the vulnerability.

People are unpredictable.

Digital footprints are less so.

When HUMINT Saves OSINT From Itself

OSINT has its own mythology. Almost everything can be found, mapped, scraped, and reconstructed if you just look long enough.

But I’ve seen digital profiles that told tidy, misleading stories.

Perfect timelines.

Perfect identities.

Perfect illusions.

And HUMINT. One subtle hesitation, one emotional slip, one casual comment shattered the OSINT picture completely.

That’s the dance.

One sees the digital truth.

The other sees the human truth.

Neither can see the whole thing alone.

The Modern Human Source Lives in a Digital City

This is the part HUMINT units still fail to internalise:

Every person in today’s intelligence landscape:

from a cartel courier in Mexico to a political proxy in Eastern Europe,

from an extremist recruiter in the Middle East to a cyber mercenary contracting in Asia

They live inside an invisible city.

A city made of:

• traces

• patterns

• likes

• comments

• metadata

• usernames

• re-used handles

• gaming profiles

• hidden social circles

• language patterns

• timelines

• artefacts

• contradictions

They leave trails not because they are careless,

but because digital life is life.

Your HUMINT source is alive and active in the real world as well as the digital world

There is no “online world” anymore.

There is only the world.

Part physical.

Part digital.

Completely intertwined.

Every HUMINT source brings that world with them.

If you’re not reading it, you’re reading them blind.

The Most Dangerous Person in an Operation Is the One You Assume You Understand

One of the most unsettling experiences I’ve had was with a source who seemed almost too polished. Calm under pressure. Structured. Precise.

He told a story that felt rehearsed, but not in a deceptive way, more like someone who didn’t want to waste my time.

There was one detail that bothered me:

His timeline of travels was too clean.

People who travel under stress always leave human messiness. Maybe a missed train, a delayed bus, a forgotten receipt.

His story had none of that.

It felt cinematic.

It took 90 OSINT minutes to find the anomaly:

A geotagged photo, years old, forgotten and buried under hundreds of posts but timestamped on a day he claimed to be somewhere else entirely.

Not a major contradiction. But enough to change the angle of my questions.

When confronted, his reaction told me everything:

He wasn’t deceptive. He was protecting something else, a personal vulnerability that had nothing to do with the operation.

If I hadn’t checked, I would’ve misread his behaviour later.

I might’ve assumed fear, or deflection, or disloyalty.

Instead, OSINT allowed HUMINT to be human.

This is what many agencies still fail to grasp:

OSINT doesn’t replace HUMINT. It reveals the context in which HUMINT becomes readable.

Intelligence Work Is No Longer Linear

There used to be a workflow:

collect → validate → analyse → report.

Today it looks more like:

collect ⇄ analyse ⇄ validate ⇄ re-collect ⇄ contextualise ⇄ pivot

Intelligence is recursive.

Interconnected.

Chaotic.

Digital.

Human.

Fluid.

And the teams who still operate in silos, OSINT here, HUMINT there. They are burning money, time, and trust.

I’ve seen OSINT analysts who never once met the HUMINT officers they were supporting. I’ve seen HUMINT operators who didn’t even know their OSINT unit existed. And I’ve seen intelligence failures born not from lack of talent, but from lack of shared reality.

HUMINT Without OSINT Is Guessing.

OSINT Without HUMINT Is Misreading.

Together, They Are (closer to the)Truth.

The most powerful intelligence operations I’ve witnessed were never HUMINT-only or OSINT-only. They were hybrid.

A HUMINT whisper about a person of interest.

An OSINT search that uncovers forgotten aliases.

A HUMINT observation about emotional pressure.

An OSINT pattern in their online activity during stressful periods.

A HUMINT read on their motivations.

An OSINT mapping of their digital network.

A HUMINT conversation that tests the boundaries.

An OSINT confirmation that the story holds.

One without the other is guesswork. Together, it’s clarity.

OSINT and HUMINT go hand in hand.

This isn’t theory.

This is what works, in Europe, in the United States, in the Middle East, across Latin America, and everywhere else modern intelligence is being tested.

The Psychological Shift Agencies Need

Most agencies don’t have a technical problem. They have a cultural one.

HUMINT people trust people.

OSINT people trust data.

Neither fully trusts the other.

But intelligence today requires a different kind of humility:

The humility to accept that no single discipline can see the full human picture anymore.

The world changed. People changed. Threats changed. Tradecraft must change too.

The Teams of the Future Look Different

They sit together.

They plan together.

They challenge each other.

They argue.

They break each other’s assumptions.

They co-author intelligence, instead of passing it like a file in a bureaucratic relay race.

Hybrid teams: HUMINT + OSINT + behavioural science + cyber + linguistics, are not just “innovation.” They are survival.

The agencies that reorganise early will own the intelligence landscape of the next decade.

A Closing Thought I Keep Returning To

Every human being carries two truths now:

The truth they tell.

And the truth they leave behind.

HUMINT hears the first.

OSINT uncovers the second.

And somewhere between the spoken and the digital, between intention and pattern, between narrative and metadata, the real intelligence lives. If you want to see the whole person, the whole threat, the whole opportunity, the whole world, you need both.

Anything less is a half-finished story.

And half-finished stories get people hurt.