A team of former civilian and military intelligence operatives, seasoned business executives and corporate strategists have formed a new company, Jellyfish Intelligence. They announced a private sector initiative to provide sophisticated intelligence operations services to certain CEOs. Their target clients are those who want to understand how the international business environment affects the execution of their business strategies.
As geopolitical tensions increase, energy and commodities prices rise, and sometimes complex and opposing foreign policy decisions are made around the world, international corporate executives have new problems they have little control of. Enter Jellyfish Intelligence to help these executives protect and grow their organization’s market share.
Jellyfish Intelligence says CEOs are running their firms blindly unless they have reliable intelligence about the shifting political, social and macroeconomic conditions. They suggest strategic plans could not be executed and companies would fail.
The key to the ability of Jellyfish Intelligence to cut through the international scene is that some of their team were a part of Blackwater Worldwide through its Total Intelligence Solutions division or the “Operation Able Danger” military intelligence program.
Both of these groups were embroiled in controversy for years.
Blackwater became Xe Services after a number of incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, which lead to lawsuits. Able Danger brought the Bush Administration under scrutiny after their data mining methods revealed the names of some of the 9/11 hijackers prior to the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
“While we understand that both issues have their respective reasons for being controversial, we are using the talent of our team’s experience on the battlefield to bring insights and advice to the boardroom,” Jellyfish CEO Keith Mahoney said. Prior to joining Jellyfish Intelligence, Mahoney was a private sector executive at Total Intelligence Solutions, the intelligence division of Blackwater. “We have found a home in the C-Suites of the Fortune 500 by providing a clear predictive analysis of future expected threats to our client’s revenues, costs, and profits.”
Jellyfish says their specialists have wide experience in “wargaming and strategy, operations and planning, intelligence collection and analysis, and the use of sophisticated technology.”
The company draws expertise from hotspots around the world, specifically in Asia, Europe, Latin America and in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region.
The company gets some of its expertise from the advanced data mining techniques used by Operation Able Danger. They can identify and target social networks, including the Al Qaeda network, with a hybrid of advanced neuro-network principles. They have highly-qualified operations analysts who sort through a lot of data to discover patterns. This gives Special Operations Command options used in their processes to make difficult or complex decisions.
“We have the unique ability to translate how military operations affect business operations and having options is important when generals and CEOs are making decisions that reach into the economies of countries and industries,” said Jellyfish Military Operations Advisor Tony Shaffer.
Shaffer, author of “Operation Dark Heart – Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontline of Afghanistan,” was involved in the Able Danger program.
Jellyfish also operates within the USA, and expects to connect with influential lobbying firms in Washington DC. They say they will offer “political intelligence” services to corporate clients, plus insights and analysis into both congressional legislation and government policy.
“In a world where global energy, finance and military operations are increasingly and simultaneously inter-connected issues, the ability to provide a bridge of intelligence from the battlefield to the boardroom is vitally important” – Michael Bagley, Jellyfish President.
Jellyfish has other, unnamed “strategic alliances” they can use to provide customized services described in their press release as “physical and information security, data mining and aggregation, risk assessment and due diligence services, and industry specific research and analysis with sophisticated open source intelligence (OSINT) methods and technologies.”