Author: Mr Adrian Ramdat (Director of Training & Consultancy)
August 2026
The 3x5x2 intelligence grading system has now been in use for around a decade and has become an established part of intelligence practice. For those who work with intelligence, the basic structure will be familiar. The source is assessed first, followed by the information, and then a handling code is applied.
It sounds relatively straightforward, and in many respects it is. The difficulty tends to come when people move beyond knowing what the different grades mean and have to apply them to real intelligence, and that is where some interesting differences can appear.
I've delivered intelligence training to people with very different levels of experience and from a wide range of organisations. One of the exercises I regularly use is to give everyone exactly the same piece of intelligence and ask them to assess it independently. When we compare the results, there can sometimes be differences in the initial grading, and what interests me is not simply that people have reached different conclusions but understanding why.
The purpose of the 3x5x2 system is to provide consistency in the way intelligence is evaluated. The framework is intended to allow staff to assess intelligence and act on it appropriately, while also protecting sources and contributing to an audit trail. Standardised reporting can also provide greater confidence when intelligence is shared between organisations, which is why consistency matters so much.
That doesn't mean professional judgement disappears. Quite the opposite. There will always be circumstances where the person assessing the intelligence needs to consider what is actually known, where the information has come from and what significance it should have. The important thing is that the judgement is being exercised within a common understanding of the grading system.
The source and the information are not the same thing
One of the areas where I have seen organisations develop slightly different practices is in the relationship between the source and the information.
The 3x5x2 system deliberately separates the two. The source is assessed first, followed by what the source is actually telling us, and that distinction can be surprisingly easy to lose when people become familiar with a particular source.
I worked with an organisation where a source was known to be reliable because of previous intelligence they had provided. When new information came from that source, there was a tendency to give the information itself a higher assessment because people had confidence in the source. I could understand the reasoning. If we know that a source has provided reliable information before, it is natural to feel more confident about what they are telling us now.
The problem is that the two assessments are there for different reasons. Knowing that a source has previously provided reliable intelligence shouldn't, in itself, lead us to give the information they now provide a higher assessment. The information grade is concerned with how the source came by the information. Obtaining it directly is a different proposition from hearing it from somebody else, regardless of how much confidence we have in the person providing it, and that was the issue with the organisation above. They were allowing their knowledge of the source to influence the grading of the information, effectively combining two considerations that the 3x5x2 system requires us to keep apart.
Once that distinction was understood, the assessment became much clearer. We weren't questioning whether the source was reliable. We were asking a different question. How did the source come by this particular piece of information? It's a subtle distinction, but an important one, and a good example of why knowing the 3x5x2 grading structure is not necessarily the same as applying it consistently.
Corroboration is not simply another piece of intelligence
Corroboration is another area that tends to generate discussion.
There is a natural temptation to think that if another piece of intelligence appears to support the original information, the grading should automatically improve. It is easy to understand why people might think that. Two reports saying essentially the same thing can appear more convincing than one. There is, however, an important detail concerning the B grade that can sometimes be missed.
The B grade relates to information known indirectly to the source but corroborated, and the point that is sometimes overlooked is that the corroborating intelligence needs to meet a specified standard. It isn't simply a case of finding another report that appears to support the original information. I've seen people focus on the fact that they now have a second piece of intelligence without properly considering the quality of the intelligence being used to corroborate the first. The mere existence of another report doesn't, by itself, mean that it can be classed as corroboration to allow a piece of intelligence be graded as B.
There is another question that needs to be considered as well, and that is whether the information is genuinely independent. Two pieces of intelligence might arrive through different routes, perhaps at different times and by different routes, yet still ultimately originate from the same source. By the time the information reaches the person grading it, that original connection may not be immediately obvious, which is where provenance becomes particularly important.
Understanding where information has actually come from is an important part of good intelligence evaluation. It can be surprisingly easy to lose sight of provenance once information has passed through several people, systems or channels before reaching the person who ultimately grades it, and that is one reason why corroboration is not simply a numbers game.
The intelligence environment has changed
There is another reason I think these issues are worth revisiting. The principles of intelligence evaluation have remained important, but the environment in which people gather intelligence has changed considerably, and open-source information and social media are now part of the intelligence landscape for many organisations.
On one course, a group's starting view was that social media was generally a reliable source of information. The interesting part of the discussion was that people had not really considered who the actual source was behind the account, and that is an important distinction. A social media account might be the person who created the information, but it might equally be somebody who has copied it from elsewhere. It could be an anonymous account, an account deliberately established to spread disinformation, or simply somebody passing on information they have received from another source. The situation becomes even more complicated with the increasing use of artificial intelligence. Content can now be generated or manipulated very convincingly, which makes understanding provenance even more important.
None of this means that social media information should automatically be dismissed. It means that it needs to be evaluated properly. The platform itself is not necessarily the source, and the fact that information appears online tells us very little about how the information came about, which is a very different approach from simply treating everything found online as another piece of intelligence to add to the picture.
Why consistency matters
For me, this is where the real value of 3x5x2 lies. Somebody acts on the assessment that comes out of it. An investigator decides whether a line of enquiry is worth pursuing. An operational team weighs up how, or whether, to respond. A policy maker decides where resource and priority should go. None of them are grading the intelligence themselves; they are relying on somebody else having got it right, and their decision is only as sound as the assessment it's built on.
If different people apply completely different principles, the value of having a standardised grading system is reduced. The purpose isn't to make everyone think in the same way. It is to give everyone a common basis from which to make their assessment, which is why I use the same intelligence exercise during training. When people are given identical information and produce different assessments, it creates an opportunity to explore what has happened. Sometimes the difference is simply an interpretation. Sometimes an assumption has crept into the assessment. Sometimes the distinction between source and information hasn't been maintained. At other times, the discussion reveals a different understanding of corroboration or provenance, and those conversations are often more valuable than simply telling somebody which grade they should have selected.
The grading is only part of the process
I think it is easy to look at 3x5x2 as a grading system and therefore assume that the objective is simply to arrive at the correct letter and number, but it is more than that. The evaluation of intelligence is part of a wider process. It should help an organisation understand what it knows, how the information came about and what significance can reasonably be attached to it, and that is why the detail matters. Understanding the principles behind 3x5x2 is just as important as knowing the grading structure itself.
Bringing it back to consistency
When I look back at the discussions I have had on intelligence courses, the most useful ones are rarely about memorising the grades. They are about what happens when people have to apply them. That is when assumptions become visible, when provenance becomes important, when people start to question whether something is genuinely corroborative and when organisations can identify differences in practice that may otherwise go unnoticed.
If people working within the same organisation are given the same intelligence and apply the same principles, I would expect them to reach the same, or at least a very similar, assessment. If they don't, it is worth understanding why, not to remove professional judgement but to make sure that judgement is being applied consistently.
The 3x5x2 intelligence grading system provides organisations with the structure to do that. The real challenge is making sure that the people using it understand not only what the grades mean, but the thinking that sits behind them.
Developing Consistent Intelligence Evaluation
At The Signature Brand, our intelligence training goes beyond explaining the mechanics of the 3x5x2 intelligence grading system. We explore how the framework is applied in practice, including source and information evaluation, corroboration, provenance, consistency and the challenges associated with open-source and social media information.
Our courses are designed for people across the intelligence spectrum, whether they are new to intelligence or already working as investigators, analysts or intelligence practitioners. The emphasis is on practical application, discussion and developing a consistent approach that can be used within the organisation.
If your organisation would like to strengthen its approach to intelligence grading and evaluation, we'd be pleased to discuss how we can help.
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