Dizzy offers a comment on my earlier posting about the security or not of Embassy communications:

"The only system that is truly secure is one that is switched off and unplugged, locked in a titanium safe, buried in a concrete vault on the bottom of the sea and surrounded by very highly paid armed guards. Even then I wouldn’t bet on it." – Eugene H. Spafford’s rule of data security

We tried that in the Embassy in Belgrade but the Sava river was just not deep enough. And the guards could not swim.

In fact however highly paid (and piscine) the guards might be, there always are people out there with more money than they have.

Which is why it all comes down to the human factor, and to such old-fashioned ideas such as loyalty and patriotism.

How do we Brits persuade foreigners with access to sensitive material to slip some of that material to us, maybe risking their lives to do so?

Money (I gather) helps, but is often not the main motivation. Best to find a way to appeal to some higher order sense of honour and duty and responsibility (with maybe a dash of personal guilt?) than they are expected to uphold in their everyday lives.

Thus the drama of intelligence work. People are more likely to betray an utterly evil system. But because it is so utterly evil it watches people like hawks and will stop at nothing to torture and kill anyone suspected of betrayal.

So the risks are appallingly high. And the skills required even to get alongside such people securely, then coax them in that direction, have to be exceptional.

Which is why these days the focus is less on HUMINT and more on SIGINT, TECHINT, IMINT and OSINT

HUMINT is the best, since it allows you to question the source and form a better view on the reliability of the information received. Even if – astonishingly – you have managed to bug Saddam’s own computer and read all those files about his WMD programmes, are they true even though they have the highest secrecy classifications on the planet?

But even with HUMINT judgement is needed. Your highly-placed source really believes what he is telling you. He has seen the containers of WMD himself, in a secret location near Baghdad. But is really able to be sure what exactly is in them? Is it all an elaborate ruse or trickery of some sort we and he just don’t know about?

Sometimes someone deep in a repressive system has reached the decision to organise his life to higher principles anyway, just in case an opportunity comes along one day to live honourably.

And then the intelligence haul is very rich indeed.