https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/open-so...
In later years, KBG agents in boring posts would basically repackage OSINT as secret intel and send it back to Moscow. Putin was supposedly one of the people who did so, during his assignment to Dresden.
See also; ~80% of office work.
Most of what spying is is nations trying not to fall behind technologically. What is in the news? The Chinese spying on US technology. What happened in the past? The Pakistanis and Israelis and Russians using spying to not fall behind on nuclear technology. The Soviet Union's Directorate T was a huge part of the Soviet spy apparatus, all to catch up to certain aspects of the west technologically. You can also read the news stories about US spying with relations to Airbus.
Blown agents, military secrets that can jeopardize a nation etc. all makes for high drama, but on a rational level things are more mundane.
No comment on his later antics, because they, ah, rather throw his judgment into question:
He utterly beclowned himself with hilariously sloppy op-sec. From being caught planning to exfiltrate a Turkish dissident in the US to Turkey to gobbling up every Russian carrot waggled in front of him, his repeated face-plants forced even the willfully ignorant Trump administration to fire him.
That all said, I wouldn't be shocked if that is representative of our boldest, most forward-thinking intelligence agents
General Michael Flynn was really big on a kind of OSINT approach which devalued the current crop of experts in Washington, before he got railroaded out of the National Security Establishment in 2014-2015 (no comment on his later political antics). Basically he said for any information produced by a spy, you could have found the exact same info in some tiny circulation magazine or journal available for free, if only someone had been there to read it in whatever language to read / report it.