Secret Agent Man
PRO
1. Sun Tzŭ said: Raising a host of a hundred thousand men and marching them great distances entails heavy loss on the people and a drain on the resources of the State. The daily expenditure will amount to a thousand ounces of silver. There will be commotion at home and abroad, and men will drop down exhausted on the highways. As many as seven hundred thousand families will be impeded in their labour.
2. Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving for the victory which is decided in a single day. This being so, to remain in ignorance of the enemy's condition simply because one grudges the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honours and emoluments, is the height of inhumanity.
3. One who acts thus is no leader of men, no present help to his sovereign, no master of victory.
4. Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
5. Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
6. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
7. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.
8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "divine manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.
9. Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.
10. Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy.
11. Having converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.
12. Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our own spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.
13. Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy's camp.
14. Hence it is that with none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.
15. Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.
16. They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness.
17. Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports.
18. Be subtle! Be subtle, and use your spies for every kind of business.
19. If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.
20. Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, the door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these.
21. The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out, tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.
22. It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.
23. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.
24. Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.
25. The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.
26. Of old, the rise of the Yin dynasty was due to I Chih who had served under the Hsia. Likewise, the rise of the Chou dynasty was due to Lü Ya who had served under the Yin.
27. Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are a most important element in war, because on them depends an army's ability to move.
- Sun Tzu: The Art of War Chapter XIII: Intelligence and Espionage
While spying can be seen as taboo when it comes to world-wide espionage, there is something to be said about how effective and how important a roll they play in our society as a whole. There have been numerous instances where agents have been employed and implanted into dangerous organizations and terrorist cells to know of their plans and report them when needed to prevent murder, terror, or other nefarious plots.
Spying is not just restricted to the secret agents of Her Majesty, but spying is something that even scumbags use to get a leg up on the competition or to at least score some cash. We've all seen shows like Miami Vice where Sonny Crockett goes undercover on numerous occasions and we've all seen in some of those same shows CIs giving out info on their buddies or the neighborhood trash. While it may sound like great television, it is pretty much more or less the same in reality: Guy gets a new name, says hello to bad guy, gets badguy's trust, arrests bad guy. It's a crude explanation but it's a manner of spying. The spy (Sonny Crockett or one of your local Vice Detectives) infiltrates an enemy faction (local drug dealers) and reports his findings to the 'generals' in charge, or more accurately his overweight linguine scarfing captain.
Without the use of spying, agents or Police Officers would never be able to know of the innermost operations of criminal kingpins of the drug dealing and gun toting variety. They'd be able to go about their business with no one knowing a thing about their movements or business in general. It means that no one with a cellphone would ever film something they weren't supposed to see, that all junkies are straight and honest people and that no one has an issue with how they [criminals] their 'business'.
Some of these criminals can only be brought down to their knees by starting with the lowest echelons of their power structure and flipping them (#2 Spy, Inward) to give us the information needed to dismantle their operations and get their drugs, guns, or their illegal copies of Chunky Butts off the street (Chunky Butts is a magazine that has been known to cause permanent mental scarring, PTSD, fear of posteriors and has often been used as a torture tool by the Venezuelan government). So in essence, the 'effect' of spying in this case would be a good one: to get rid of criminals and use informants (a.k.a spies) to the best of their abilities.
Spying is a needed tool for use against criminals around the globe. There have been cases of agents infiltrating the Hell's Angels, the Bloods and the Crips, the Outlaws, the Aryan Brotherhood, and dozens of other well known gangs that don't typically do well at bake sales. I shouldn't have to tell you that many of these gangs or 'Motorcycle Clubs' do not always have the best intentions; they wield firearms, knives, explosives, narcotics, opiates, spikes, chains, and ball-peen hammers; everything short of a six pack and there is nothing that anyone would be able to do about it unless they actively see the crime and report it (spying in some cases). There is a reason why we have officers and agents undercover: we need them. I cannot stress the fact enough that without them, several big cheeses would be able to come and go as they please without any threat of consequence or worry of capture.
We need our spies and informants. We use them to gather military information on current insurgent locations, potential threats, potential targets, and potential weapon development and obtained weapons. Using spy planes and UAVs can only get you so far, and we need to have word of mouth and verifiable information to keep our troops on track with what they're doing, who they're looking for and who they're shooting at. We can't have an effective structure by just saying "There is bad guys over there, go shoot at them. They're there. Just keep looking. I think. . ." it's a dangerous strategy (not really a strategy at all) that can get people killed. There have been numerous plots reported and stopped because of informants. There have been entire operations thrown because of infiltrated units, and lives have ultimately been saved because of spying. While spies (or rats, snitches, what have you) are dogged with bad publicity in the criminal world, they're highly valued in their own world because without them several bad deeds would go un-punished and that's never an option for a civilized society.
In short, what I'm believe I'm trying to say without using too many factual cases is that spying is highly effective and needed, now more than ever because the enemy of today enjoys hiding amongst the commoners and it becomes difficult to distinguish who's who. We need the agents, the undercover, the rats, the finks, the spies, and the golden snitches because thousands could potentially be at risk if they weren't put into action as a result. The bad publicity is not enough to warrant ceasing the spying activities utilized by our government to stop criminals, and the effects of this are promising and it mainly affects the badguys negatively so it's a fine trade-off.
However, there can also be poor uses for spying. Such as the patriot act. As law-abiding citizens we deserve the right to our privacy and to not have our calls monitored by some third entity. I feel that this use is wrong and not at all useful or nearly as accurate as just going after the badguys directly. Monitoring hundreds of thousands of calls might net you one or two arrests or leads, but having calls between doctors, family members, girlfriends/boyfriends, and 1-800-SEXYTALK listened in on is a complete waste of time and money. This form of spying is detestable and useless in actual intelligence, unless you wanted to listen to the businessman talk how he "wants to put maple syrup on that woman's toes and eat the little piggies for breakfast".
But overall, in the terms of finding out who, what, where, when and why the enemy is is a highly effective tactic and should not be discounted by the actions of a few misguided individuals that misuse this ability and who believe that infiltrating hippie book clubs and monitoring your phone calls to Aunt Jemima is a good use of time and energy, and these individuals, as categorize by Sun Tzu would be the 'put to death' kind.
Spies against badguys? Good. Use them as often and as plentiful as needed. You can never have enough info on the scum of the Earth. It's effective, it works, and it saves lives.
Spies that listen to Grandma Wilma telling her grandson how she'll be coming round the mountain? Not so much.
