"It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used"
About this Quote
Sun Tzu is at his coldest - and most modern - when he treats loyalty as a variable you can buy, manage, and redeploy. The line isn’t just about cleverness; it’s a blueprint for turning war from a contest of armies into a contest of information systems. “Essential” is doing heavy work here: espionage isn’t an accessory to battle, it’s the infrastructure that decides whether battle happens on your terms at all.
The specific intent is practical and almost managerial: identify hostile operatives, flip them with money and protection, then task them with feeding you what you need. But the subtext is sharper. Sun Tzu assumes the enemy’s internal bonds are already negotiable. By bribing spies and “caring for them,” he’s not advocating kindness; he’s describing retention. You don’t just purchase a double agent, you maintain an asset - and you do it with instructions, security, and a steady sense that defecting was the safest, most profitable move.
Context matters: in the Warring States world of shifting alliances and bureaucratic warfare, states were proto-machines competing for survival. Victory favored the polity that could map the opponent’s intentions faster than the opponent could hide them. “Doubled agents” are an early articulation of what we’d now call intelligence tradecraft: turning the adversary’s surveillance into your channel, weaponizing their reach, and contaminating their decision-making with curated truth and strategic lies.
It works because it’s brutally unsentimental. Sun Tzu doesn’t romanticize honor; he operationalizes human weakness - fear, greed, self-preservation - and builds a doctrine around it.
The specific intent is practical and almost managerial: identify hostile operatives, flip them with money and protection, then task them with feeding you what you need. But the subtext is sharper. Sun Tzu assumes the enemy’s internal bonds are already negotiable. By bribing spies and “caring for them,” he’s not advocating kindness; he’s describing retention. You don’t just purchase a double agent, you maintain an asset - and you do it with instructions, security, and a steady sense that defecting was the safest, most profitable move.
Context matters: in the Warring States world of shifting alliances and bureaucratic warfare, states were proto-machines competing for survival. Victory favored the polity that could map the opponent’s intentions faster than the opponent could hide them. “Doubled agents” are an early articulation of what we’d now call intelligence tradecraft: turning the adversary’s surveillance into your channel, weaponizing their reach, and contaminating their decision-making with curated truth and strategic lies.
It works because it’s brutally unsentimental. Sun Tzu doesn’t romanticize honor; he operationalizes human weakness - fear, greed, self-preservation - and builds a doctrine around it.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Sun Tzu, The Art of War — Lionel Giles translation (1910), Chapter XIII "The Use of Spies" (passage on recruiting and employing doubled agents). |
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