In an interview on War

Let’s move on to the Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu is completely outside the whole Western way of looking at politics and at states. For him, war was an art and an art being practised by generals, by individual commanders. In a way it was a game and he describes how apparently weak players can outsmart strong players, how strong players can apparently misuse their strength to be baffled by weak players, how war is really determined by the mental calibre of the actual generals fighting it. In one way it was a very much more limited way of looking at war, but in another it was very much more ingenious and imaginative.

And how did he think weak players could outsmart stronger players?

Oh, you’ll have to read him. It’s not very long. The thing is, he regards war as a sort of chess, one which could be played by all kinds of players against one another. He powerfully influenced Mao Zedong and developed a way of looking at war, which was then use by Mao Zedong first against the Japanese and then against his rivals. He was basically a rebel, building up from the status of a rebel commander in a tiny outpost in the provinces until he expelled the Japanese, the nationalists and the Americans and was ruling the whole of China by the use of totally different kinds of tricks which took Western armies completely by surprise. Those ideas have been inherited by rebels and partisans throughout the whole of the last three or four decades and Sun Tzu is regarded as being a valuable guide to irregular or partisan warfare.

Can you give me an example of one of the tricks Sun Tzu suggests using?

The main thing he said was that if you are weak you must give the appearance of being strong and if you are strong you must give the appearance of being weak. You persuade people you are weak and are going to be a pushover so that the adversary attacks.

It would be quite difficult for America to pretend to be weak. There is so much public knowledge these days.

Well, let me give you an example. In the Second World War when we, the British, were very, very weak in dealing with the Germans, we used deception in order to give the impression that we and the Americans had built up an enormous army, so that when we actually landed in Normandy and were very vulnerable there, the Germans did not use their entire force to destroy us because they believed we were going to land in the Pas-de-Calais with a very much stronger force at any moment. In fact we didn’t have such a force, but the Germans held back a lot of their force, which made it possible for us to establish ourselves in Normandy as we did. That was an excellent example of Sun Tzu’s type of strategy, although we’d never heard of him then.

Were you personally involved?

I was not personally involved in that particular bit. I was down in Italy at the time. I could talk about that for a very, very long time. I was a very junior infantry officer. I landed at Salerno and we found ourselves confronted with very steep mountains, and with very, very great difficulty we slogged our way up until we reached Austria and then we stopped.

That wasn’t very long at all.

Well, it took from September 1943 to August 1945 and it seemed a very long time, I must tell you.

In an interview on the US Intelligence Services

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about The Art of War, and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary US intelligence.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what The Art of War teaches.

Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do US intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?

Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.

How about black ops?

Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.

All of them committed by US intelligence?

The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.