> Author doesn't seem to know what the difference between a sigint organization NSA/GCHQ and a Humint one is or even what the difference between an officer and a spy is.
To the contrary, he specifically contrasts humint with sigint: "
Spying may be worthwhile in cases where it is very hard or very costly to produce misleading information. Two potential cases are those of code-breaking in wartime, where the number of messages an enemy needs to send is so large that their validity can be checked fairly easily, and that of a secret weapon, where the information produced by spies can be checked by actually making the weapon."
> Both GCHQ and NSA can point to successes as can all the major players in the spy game would Stalin have got the bomb so quickly without spies.
To the contrary, he specifically addressed Stalin's bomb: "On the face of it, the reaction to the atom spies seemed justified. The atom bomb was a weapon that could destroy the world (and perhaps still will) and the science on which it was based was popularly associated with the genius of Albert Einstein. Surely, the only way the Russians could create such a weapon was to steal the secrets of the West....But once the existence of the bomb was known, any competent team of physicists, with access to the right resources, could duplicate it...The secrets passed by Western spies probably saved them a year or so in their research program but did not fundamentally change anything. The Chinese, French, Israelis and others made their bombs without significant assistance from spies."
> Or the success of the XX committee.
To the contrary, a victory for the British necessarily meant a defeat for the Nazis, a Nazi defeat only possible because they tried to use humint: "Yet the actual achievements of these shadowy regiments were unimpressive. In most cases, espionage agencies can cloak their failures in secrecy, but the defeat of the Nazis paved the way for a look at the record of one of the most-feared espionage networks in history. The Hitler regime made numerous attempts to infiltrate spies into Britain and to recruit British agents. As far as can be determined from the German records, all were captured and many were ‘turned’, being induced or forced to transmit disinformation to Berlin."
> And do you think binladen would not have been found and killed if it wasn't for spies run by CIA officers?
Sigint, again. Not that bin Laden's death really mattered aside from the documents captured and the symbolic victory.