Risk and Threat Intelligence Editing and Proofreading Services

An intelligence team circulates an assessment warning that unrest in a region is likely to escalate and may affect operations. The client's country manager reads it, cannot tell whether likely means next week or next quarter, whether the assessment rests on a single social media post or on three independent sources, or what would have to happen for the team to change its view. He keeps staff in place. Eleven days later the road to the airport closes, and the after-action asks why the warning did not prompt a decision.

We edit what risk and threat intelligence teams produce — threat assessments and intelligence reports, country and travel risk briefings, indicator and warning products, executive summaries for decision-makers, source evaluation and confidence documentation, protective intelligence assessments on individuals and groups, geopolitical and operational risk analyses, client alerting and notification formats, and collection requirement and tasking documents. Our editors work on the assessment a manager either acts on or does not.

The threat assessment is written to change a decision, and its failure is a judgement expressed in words that sound precise and commit to nothing a reader can plan against. We work through these so a likelihood term is tied to a stated meaning and a stated timeframe, since likely to escalate could describe next week or next year and a manager deciding whether to move staff needs to know which; so the confidence in the judgement is stated separately from the likelihood of the event, given that these are routinely conflated and a high-confidence assessment of an unlikely event is a different thing from a low-confidence guess about a probable one; so the sourcing is characterised — how many independent sources, of what type, with what access — because an assessment resting on one unverified post and one built from three corroborating streams read identically once the language is stripped of it; so the specific indicators that would strengthen or overturn the judgement are named, since an assessment that cannot be updated by observable events leaves the reader watching nothing in particular; and so the assessment states what it would mean for this client's actual operations rather than for the region in general, given that a manager cannot convert a regional judgement into a decision about their own staff without the analyst doing that step. Assessments written this way produce a decision instead of a filing.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including intelligence products, sourcing and client information. We are editors rather than analysts, intelligence officers or risk advisers, and we offer no view on assessments, sourcing or threat judgements. What we can do is make sure the assessment says something a reader can act on.