Intelligence Outsourcing

Months before Russian missiles began striking cities across Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western intelligence teams had been conducting in-depth collection and scenario analysis of the likelihood and impact of a Russian invasion. These teams were not all in government agencies. While the remarkable proactive declassification of intelligence and revelations of the Russian playbook by Western intelligence is well known, a far less recognized part of the story is the intelligence teams within Western companies that accurately assessed the possibility of an invasion and helped evacuate employees, draw down business operations, and mitigate risks to supply chains. 31 days before the invasion, private security firm Global Guardian was encouraging private sector clients to evacuate Ukraine and provided departure assistance and emergency supplies.^[i] Meanwhile, intelligence firm Sibylline warned clients of the likelihood of invasion and potential impacts, and then, remarkably, opened up their intelligence reporting for free to firms with interests in the region, providing insights that protected infrastructure and helped save lives. Many firms were doing the same. The Ukraine case is but one example where timely and actionable intelligence came not just from governments, but from the private sector.

Private sector intelligence vendors represent an understudied and powerful ecosystem of intelligence collection and analysis conducted along the same lines of traditional intelligence tradecraft but operating outside of the government domain. Firms such as Control Risks, Sibylline, Emergent Risk International, Dragonfly, Global Guardian, S-RM, Max Security, Recorded Future, and countless others provide intelligence products and services that range from comprehensive geopolitical and security consulting to niche service provision such as kidnap and ransom response training or analysis of offshore maritime piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. This is to say nothing of other open-source intelligence actors such as the investigative journalist entity Bellingcat or firms such as Zero Trafficking, C4ADS, and Public Democracy^[ii] that seek to collect, analyze, and share findings from publicly available data to further public interests such as illuminating unsolved mysteries, exposing human trafficking, or combatting misinformation.

While there is substantial scholarship on intelligence outsourcing, that literature focuses on private intelligence activities for government clients rather than the increasing intelligence analysis activities being conducted to understand geopolitical and security environments to protect corporate assets and employees and support private-sector decision making. Introducing a special issue on private sector intelligence in the Journal of European and American Intelligence Studies in 2018, Naval Postgraduate School professor Erik Dahl called for a dialogue between private sector intelligence and academia.^[iii] The literature on intelligence has not kept pace with the expansion into the private sector, notably with regard to the rapid expansion of in-house intelligence teams within multinational corporations—such as United Airlines, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Group, and many others—that seek to identify and mitigate against security and geopolitical threats to their companies’ people, assets, and operations. These teams all rely on vendor services as one of their key sources of intelligence. Writing in the 2018 special issue, scholar and former practitioner Maria Robson-Morrow developed a version of the intelligence cycle with private sector vendors contributing at each stage of the cycle, and examined three case studies of private sector vendors.^[iv] However, the current literature only has these occasional cases of individual vendors; there has yet been no known systematic attempt to quantify and analyze the ecosystem of the intelligence vendors that are providing consulting services to corporate intelligence teams.

This project fills this gap in the literature by focusing on intelligence service provision by the private sector, for the private sector. While open-source information is increasingly a focus of intelligence studies, vendors are understudied. We define private sector intelligence vendors as for-profit companies that sell their clients geopolitical and security risk mitigation intelligence and services. In this paper, we present our initial findings from an ongoing project that seeks to build a database of private sector intelligence vendors and to answer questions around how intelligence professionals leverage vendor services to inform decision-making and to support security and geopolitical risk mitigation. Namely, we seek to answer the following questions: What does the private sector intelligence vendor ecosystem look like, and how does it fit into the international security landscape? Why do vendor organizations behave the way that they do, and what structural and organizational factors influence the relationship between intelligence vendors and multinational corporations seeking to mitigate risk?

ⁱ “Case Study: Emergency Response,” Global Guardian, 2022, https://www.globalguardian.com/case-studies_emergency-response-ukraine.

ⁱⁱ See https://www.bellingcat.com/; https://www.zerotrafficking.com/; https://c4ads.org/; https://www.publicdemocracy.io/. The work of several such firms is also documented in Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, “Open Source Intelligence for National Security: The Art of the Possible” Harvard Kennedy School, Fall 2022, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/open-source-intelligence-national-security-art-possible.

^[i] “Case Study: Emergency Response,” Global Guardian, 2022, https://www.globalguardian.com/case-studies_emergency-response-ukraine.

^[ii] See https://www.bellingcat.com/; https://www.zerotrafficking.com/; https://c4ads.org/; https://www.publicdemocracy.io/. The work of several such firms is also documented in Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, “Open Source Intelligence for National Security: The Art of the Possible” Harvard Kennedy School, Fall 2022, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/open-source-intelligence-national-security-art-possible.

^[iii] Erik Dahl, “Introduction for the Special Issue Intelligence in the Private Sector. The Intelligence Tradecraft for Corporate Security,” Journal of European and American Intelligence Studies 1, no. 2 (2018): 7-8.

^[iv] Maria A. Robson, “Risk Analysis Beyond Government Agencies: Conceptualizing Private Sector Intelligence,” Journal of European and American Intelligence Studies 1, no. 2 (2018): 31-48