Dear Decision Maker Last November, Barrick Gold, one of the largest mining companies on the planet, agreed to pay Mali $430 million. Not because they lost a lawsuit. Not because they breached a contract. Because the Malian military government arrested their employees, seized 3 metric tonnes of their gold, issued an international arrest warrant for their CEO, and shut down their Bamako office. Then they said: let's negotiate. And Barrick paid. Every cent. Now, you know, if you are reading this...
7 days ago • 7 min read
Dear Decision Maker Most intelligence education teaches you what Washington and London discovered. Almost none teaches you what Nairobi, Bogotá, Islamabad, and Jakarta have known for decades. Here is the uncomfortable truth. The most innovative human intelligence tradecraft is not coming from Five Eyes headquarters. It is being born in places where there are no billion-dollar satellite budgets. No sprawling signals intercept stations. No AI-powered surveillance grids. Just people. Talking to...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Dear Decision Maker, I want to talk about something today that I have been thinking about for a while. And I think this week's news gives me the perfect excuse to finally say it. Three stories broke this week. Different continents. Different actors. But if you look at what actually happened, not the headlines, but the ground truth of how these operations started, they all have the same thing at the centre. Russia Sharing Targeting intelligence with Iran So. The Washington Post reported that...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Dear Decision Maker, I have to be honest with you about something. Every week, I see another headline about how AI is going to "revolutionise" intelligence analysis. Another conference panel. Another vendor promising that their large language model will replace your analysts and deliver decision advantage on a silver platter. And every week, I watch seasoned professionals nod along like this is inevitable. This further is strengthened by stories like the US Department of War alleged use...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Dear Decision Maker I've been building intelligence systems for over a decade. For governments. For private equity firms. For executives making decisions in places most analysts won't go. And the same problem keeps showing up. You're drowning in data. Reports stack up. Dashboards flash. Alerts ping. Your team forwards the executive summary and hopes for the best. But none of it actually helps you decide. "That's not intelligence. That's noise with a logo on it." So I built something to fix...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear Decision Maker I almost didn't write about trust and verification. Not because it isn't important, it's the foundation of everything we do at Grey Dynamics. But because most people in this industry talk about it in a sterile, textbook way. Five steps. A checklist. Then back to relying on Google Alerts to tell a CEO what's happening in a country they've never set foot in. That's not intelligence. That's information dressed up in a nice report. Here's what the textbooks skip: The people...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Dear Decision Maker, You know what separates a good intelligence officer from a great one? It's not the gadgets. It's not the cover story. It's the questions. Raymond White, 27 years at CIA, ran their largest enterprise training program, puts it simply: "The ability to ask questions is one of the most important tools that a case officer has at their disposal." But here's what most people miss: these same techniques are used on you every single day. In negotiations. In sales meetings. In that...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Design Maker, Most cybersecurity teams are still preparing for yesterday's threats. Here's what they're missing: The first documented AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign just happened. And it changes everything. Anthropic just released a report on what they're calling GTG-1002, a Chinese state-sponsored operation that used AI to execute 80-90% of tactical operations independently. No human in the loop for most of the attack chain. Let me break down what this means for intelligence...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Decision Maker Intelligence-Driven Business Development Your competitors are making million-dollar decisions based on incomplete information. You don't have to. Most business development follows the same playbook: Market research Competitive analysis Sales pipelines Cold outreach It's systematic. It's measurable. It's completely blind to what's actually happening on the ground. Here's what that costs you: You enter markets 6 months after the real opportunity window closed. You target...
2 months ago • 2 min read