Sun Tzu and the Art of Spying

Last week, White House spokeperson Trent Duffy provided the Bush administration's rationale for its extralegal program to spy on United States citizens. Duffy quipped: "The fact is that Al Quaida's play book is not printed on Page 1, and when America's is, it has serious ramifications. You don't need to be Sun Tzu to understand that."

Duffy was referencing the "big idea" of Sun Tzu's seminal work, "The Art of War," which could be stated as "the ideal strategy is to win without fighting -- to defeat the enemy before combat becomes necessary."

It was an odd but telling comment, and worth exploring for the critical insights it provides about Bush's views on spying and executive branch power.

It may at first seem strange to hear the White House praising an ancient Chinese Taoist thinker to justify a secret Executive Order that allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone conversations, email and other electronic communications without a court warrant. After all, this is the president who said in a December 1999 presidential debate that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. And it is ironic, at the very least, for the born-again leader of the free world to be lauding a general from a despotic land who commanded his troops during a time of intense internal conflict.

Yet, Sun Tzu's work has been a staple of Asian business leaders for years, and has recently caught on with American CEOs. Dozens of management handbooks -- the kind you might half-heartedly thumb through in an airport bookstore when your flight has been delayed -- have drawn on Sun Tzu's military philosophy to find lessons for the corporate world. In the supercynical 1987 film "Wall Street," Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider, boasts: "I don't throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun Tzu."

Sun Tzu was a Chinese general who lived in the 6th century BCE, when the powerful Zhou Dynasty was in decline. Many regional feudal lords were competing with the king, and China was in a period of intense and prolonged civil war. Regarded as barbarians by other Chinese, the Zhou leaders appointed their own kinsmen -- or the kinsmen of their most trusted allies -- to rule over the various city-states. In order to convince their subjects of the legitimacy of their power, the Zhou invented a system of authority which they called the "Mandate of Heaven."

Sun Tzu was desperately worried about his nation becoming exhausted by war. He warned that "when you do battle, even if you are winning, if you continue for a long time it will dull your forces and blunt your edge. When your forces are dulled, your edge is blunted, your strength is exhausted, and your supplies are gone, then the other side will take advantage of your debility and rise up."

In order to avoid this national burnout, a leader should strive to keep the enemy off balance through extensive trickery -- "a military operation involves deception." Deception must be ongoing, and unpredictable: "Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective."

Not surprisingly, Sun Tzu believed in the critical importance of spying. In his final chapter, "On the Use of Spies," Sun Tzu relates the importance of foreknowledge, which must come from people who intimately know the conditions of the enemy. He identifies five specific kinds of spies: the local, the inside, the reverse, the dead and the living. Because of their importance, "No one is given rewards as rich as those given to spies."

Yet, a deep current of Taoist moderation runs through Sun Tzu's advice, demanding clear limits and extraordinary discipline before undertaking serious campaigns such as war. In his own way, he was calling for a system of checks and balances. Thus, he warned, "One cannot use spies without sagacity and knowledge, one cannot use spies without humanity and justice"