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The Strategy
Strategy 3 — 間 (jian) — Spies
Whenever planning to conduct a major military expedition, you should first employ spies to determine the enemy’s troop strength, emptiness or fullness, and movement and rest, and only thereafter mobilize the army. Great achievements can then be attained, and you will always be victorious in combat. The Art of War states: “There are no areas in which one does not employ spies.”
The character 間 (jian) covers more than the modern English word “spy.” It is the agent who sows dissension — who divides ruler from minister, taints the reputation of a meritorious general, plants a doubt that grows into an execution order. It is the courier who returns with a count of enemy fodder wagons. And it is the provocateur, the rumour-monger, the planter of forged correspondence. Espionage and information operations sit on a single continuum, and Sun Tzu’s text does not separate them.
The classical historical illustration is Wei Xiaokuan (韋孝寬, 509–580 CE), a Northern Zhou general remembered chiefly for one campaign of words rather than swords. His rival Hulü Guang (斛律光) of Northern Qi was too competent to defeat on the battlefield, so Wei Xiaokuan defeated him in the Qi court instead. He circulated false prophetic verses — children’s rhymes engineered to be repeated, to take on the air of divination. The verses suggested Hulü Guang would supplant his sovereign. The Qi court, primed by the rhymes, did the rest. Hulü Guang was executed by his own emperor. Wei Xiaokuan won a war by manufacturing a story.
Eastern Wisdom
Bushido — the discipline behind the unseen hand
“Of those close to the armies, none are closer than agents; no rewards are heavier than those granted to agents; no activities are observed more than those of agents. No one but a sage can utilize espionage; except with humanity, one cannot deploy agents; except with thorough observation, one cannot gain truth from agents.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 13 (Linyi text, Huang trans., p. 115–116)
The Linyi text is unusual on this point. It enumerates five types — agents-in-place, moles, turned agents, hidden provocation agents, mobile informants — and then insists that the discipline cannot be delegated. Espionage is a leader’s tool, not a clerk’s. The person reading the agent’s report must read the agent first.
A Western Mirror
In 1917, on the Palestine front, the British officer Richard Meinertzhagen and his German rival — an educated Arab intelligence officer — were running parallel deception operations against each other and fighting to a standstill. Both men were skilled, neither could be reliably tricked. So Meinertzhagen wrote his opponent a letter.
The letter thanked the Arab warmly for his services as a British double agent and enclosed a sum of money for past intelligence. Meinertzhagen entrusted the envelope to the most incompetent agent on his roster — a man who genuinely believed he was on a normal courier mission. The Germans intercepted the agent, tortured him, and got nothing useful because there was nothing useful in his head; he had not been told. His sincerity sold the bold lie. The Germans quietly shot their own man, and Meinertzhagen had won by removing a rival without firing a shot. (Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War, p. 736.)
This is Wei Xiaokuan’s playbook in twentieth-century dress. A real enemy, too dangerous to defeat directly. A manufactured story, planted not through your own channels but through one the enemy himself will trust. A sacrificial conduit, a false ‘prophetic verse’, the obligatory, oblivious courier who carries the poison precisely because it is not in on the trick. The enemy supplies the executioner. The mechanism is older than Sun Tsu and survives intact in the D-Day Fortitude operation, where the Allies turned every German agent in Britain and used them to point the Wehrmacht at Calais (Greene, p. 718). The scale changes; the trick does not.
Greene’s wider observation belongs here too. The leaders who got the most out of intelligence, Hannibal, Caesar, Churchill, Eisenhower; were not the ones with the biggest spy networks. They were the readers of human nature. The agent brings you raw material; the sage interprets it. Without the sage, the agent brings you what you already believed.
On the table: Most wargames model some modest level of fog of war [card play, hidden info in stacks, double blind play]. It is more likely though that the ‘God’s Eye View’ prevails. Few model any form of active disinformation (what you see is wrong, misleading etc).
The GMT COIN series is the cleanest implementation via the use of propaganda cards and shifting support tracks let one faction manufacture the political reality the others have to navigate. Sekigahara interestingly enough has a ‘side swapping’ action activated via card play, that can devastate the enemy at precisely the wrong moment! In hex-and-counter, LNLT’s as one of a few squad level games that have for example hidden-unit counters. Then we have games that require a roll of a die to see what is there such as Phantom Fury, A week in Hell [Hue} from Battles Magazine. There is also the ‘empty hex’ attack a ‘zero’ type situations. Some of these edge toward Wei Xiaokuan territory: your opponent doesn’t just lack information, they actively hold beliefs you planted. I think the ability to impact these types of actions really belongs at the higher scale. Possibly Strategic games such as World At War or even the less ‘wargame’ centric strategy titles where personal interactions along the lines of the Friend Buster of note – Diplomacy allow for real disinformation. That is more often than not the likely best place to experience ‘spy’ activities that and multiplayer titles would also be noteworthy.
Another way to look at this is the ability for you as the player to plant information ‘I have to get more supply’, or ‘dang, I am going all out now for Moscow’. Mere allusions to activity, planting seeds in the opponent’s mind. Personally, I enjoy that the most.
Series Note
Post #3 of 100. Next: Strategy #4 — Elite Forces (xuan, 選) — publishes July 2026.