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Aegean Intelligence Group operates to a structured analytical framework adapted from intelligence-community tradecraft and refined for commercial decision support. Every brief is audited against this framework before release. This page documents the discipline.
Most commercial intelligence fails one of two ways. It is either confident-sounding prose that hides the seam between what is sourced and what is inferred, or it is a wall of citations with no analytic judgment. Both are unusable for the people who actually have to decide.
The framework on this page was built to solve that problem. It is adapted, with attribution, from a long literature on structured analytic technique that the US intelligence community published openly across two decades. We applied it to the specific demands of commercial decision support: time horizons measured in weeks not years, audiences who are accountable to a P&L, and a standard of evidence that survives a board meeting.
Three content types. Four source tiers. Three confidence levels. Four velocity classes. An explicit anti-fabrication perimeter. A seventeen-module collection model. Audited before every release.
This page is the public reference. The internal operating standard runs longer, with examples drawn from live engagements that cannot be published. What follows is the architecture, the constraints, and the worked examples that make the architecture concrete.
Every sentence in every Aegean brief is classifiable as exactly one of three types. The types carry different evidentiary standards and serve different purposes for the reader. We do not blend them into a confident-sounding paragraph that hides the seam between evidence and inference. The reader can always tell which is which.
A sourced, attributed claim about what a source reports. The reader can verify it independently. Facts are what sources report, not necessarily objective truth: contradictory facts can coexist and are both citable.
An analytic judgment derived from facts. Assessments carry the firm's view of what the facts mean, what is likely to happen next, or how exposures connect. They are explicitly labeled as such, never disguised as fact.
A governance-level action the firm recommends a client take. Recommendations are tied to at least one FACT and at least one ASSESSMENT. They are scoped to policy, not tactics, and they name an owner and a time horizon.
Every cited source carries a tier. Tier 1 government primaries are weighted highest; lower tiers are accepted with declared corroboration. State media is a claim source only and never counts toward verification. The allowlist is the curated source registry the firm maintains: 620+ entries across the four tiers, reviewed quarterly.
Primary documents from government agencies, regulators, courts, and official registries. The highest evidentiary weight. Required for high-impact claims about regulation, sanctions, and official policy.
Established think tanks, multilateral institutions, specialist trade press, and academic publications with declared methodology. Independent analytical authority; second-highest weight.
Major news organizations with editorial controls and named sourcing. Acceptable for current reporting; cross-corroborated for high-impact claims.
Quantitative datasets from authoritative providers: sanctions and ownership registries, maritime and aviation tracking, market and commodity data, conflict event databases, ratings agencies.
Every assessment carries an explicit confidence level and a one-line rationale. We surface what we don't know as plainly as what we do. Confidence is a function of source quality, corroboration depth, timeliness, and the plausibility of competing interpretations.
Multiple independent credible sources. Within the current temporal window for the data type. No significant gaps. Alternative interpretations are demonstrably less plausible than the assessment offered.
At least one credible source. Partial corroboration. Minor timeliness gaps acceptable. Alternative interpretations are plausible but less supported than the assessment offered.
Limited sourcing or significant gaps. Material unknowns affect the assessment. Alternative interpretations are roughly as plausible as the assessment offered. Always generates an entry in the brief's Collection Plan.
Every risk pathway and scenario driver in an Aegean brief is tagged with a velocity class. The same event can have IMMEDIATE consequences on one axis and STRUCTURAL consequences on another; the velocity tag makes the different planning horizons explicit so they reach the right decision owner with the right clock.
Sanctions actions, kinetic attacks, natural disasters, sudden regulatory designations. Triggers pre-authorized decisions and incident protocols.
Insurance repricing, market shocks, enforcement escalation, election fallout. Triggers enhanced monitoring and contingency activation.
Regulatory trajectory, political transitions, supply chain restructuring, capital reallocation. Drives quarterly planning cycles.
Resource nationalism, demographic shifts, infrastructure degradation, institutional capture. Shapes multi-year capital allocation.
The most critical rule set in the operating standard. Aegean briefs do not invent, assume, estimate, or imply categories of information unless explicitly supported by a cited source. When the firm does not know, the brief says so, explains why, and adds the item to a Collection Plan. The gap is itself decision-relevant intelligence.
Specific transport pathways, shipping routes, supply-chain segments. Never inferred from generic geography or industry default assumptions.
Commercial relationships, named customers, contract counterparties. Disclosed in filings or filed in registries, or surfaced as UNKNOWN.
Subsidiary structures, beneficial ownership, parent and shell relationships. Sourced to registry filings or company disclosures, never inferred from name similarity or jurisdiction.
Transfer pricing, payment routing, fund flows between entities. Documented by filings, court records, or sanctions actions, never inferred from inter-company structure.
Volumes, costs, reserves, capacity, profit margins, balance-sheet figures. Sourced to filings, reports, or structured-data providers, never extrapolated from industry benchmarks.
Project schedules, regulatory deadlines, commissioning dates. Sourced to filings or official statements, never assumed from industry norms.
Sourced causation, never correlation. Two things happening in proximity is not evidence one caused the other. The brief states what is observed and labels causal claims as assessments with rationale.
Targeting, intentions, capability projections. Sourced to government attributions or threat-intelligence primary releases, never inferred from prior pattern or rhetoric.
Pending agency decisions, penalty amounts, settlement terms, legal judgments. Sourced to official actions or filed records, never predicted as fact.
Coverage scope, policy limits, deductibles, exclusions, reinsurance structure. Sourced to disclosures or carrier circulars, never inferred from broker norms.
Targets, performance against targets, verification status. Sourced to company disclosures (as claims) or third-party audits. Self-reported claims are facts about the claim, not facts about performance.
Operational effectiveness of internal controls, sanctions screening, AML programs. Sourced to enforcement records or audit findings, never inferred from program existence.
AEGEAN-OS organizes collection as a toolbox of seventeen modules in seven clusters, not a linear pipeline. Two foundation modules are always active; the remaining fifteen are invoked as the engagement scope requires. Each module produces structured outputs that feed the modules downstream of it, with explicit cross-module reference indices and contradiction logs.
The cluster structure makes the architecture readable at a glance. Foundation governs source policy and analytical discipline at all times. Entity baseline establishes who the subject is. Domain exposure maps how that entity touches the world. Risk integration ties the exposures to outcomes. Consolidation and deliverables package the work for the audience. Commercial covers pipeline development.
Each module within the standard documents inputs, outputs, scope boundary, sector adaptations, and hard constraints. Sector adaptation is built in: a module like Assets & Operations adapts metric vocabulary across extractive, manufacturing, technology, logistics, and financial subjects without changing its question architecture.
AEGEAN-OS is an adaptation, not an invention. The framework draws on structured analytic technique developed and published openly by the US intelligence community across more than two decades, then refined for the cadence and stakes of commercial decision support. The two traditions answer different questions. The IC literature was written to defuse cognitive bias inside national-security analysis on multi-year horizons; commercial briefs run on weeks, must reach a P&L-accountable audience, and must survive scrutiny from a board of directors. The methodology on this page is the bridge.
From the IC tradecraft literature: the discipline of separating evidence from inference, the practice of explicit confidence calibration, the use of structured techniques to surface alternative interpretations, the recognition that intelligence gaps are themselves intelligence.
From commercial decision support: time horizons that match buying cycles, audience-specific deliverables, governance-level recommendations, an emphasis on pre-authorized decisions tied to monitored thresholds.
The seventeen-module collection model, the four-tier source allowlist with 620+ entries, the sector-adaptation layer that lets the same module apply across extractive, financial, technology, logistics, and manufacturing subjects, the anti-fabrication perimeter with its explicit category list, and the rendering pipeline that audits each output against the standard before release.
The result is a framework that an operator can read and an analyst can execute, with the discipline visible to both.
If you have ever read a thirty-page intelligence report and finished it without being able to answer a question your board would ask, the difference between that report and an Aegean brief is the methodology on this page. The discipline is the product. The briefs are the output.
Every brief at aegeanintel.com/research is published to this standard. Every custom engagement is built on the same foundation. If you want to discuss applying it to a decision you are facing, the door is open.