Chōhō
A single spy can shorten a war by years. In the Middle Ages, reconnaissance and espionage were the ninja’s main field of work – and a core part of their training.
- Chapter
- 6, Strategy & Tactics
- Sections
- 11
- Reading time
- 9 min
First Mention of Espionage
Marching an army of a hundred thousand men over long distances costs many lives and drains the treasury. Hostile armies often face each other for years, only for victory to be decided in a single day. Sun Tzu wrote this in The Art of War, the Chinese classic of warfare. The same book contains one of the earliest mentions of espionage (chōhō, 諜報). Sun Tzu’s verdict on a commander who saves money on scouts is blunt:
To stay ignorant of the enemy’s condition because one begrudges a hundred ounces of silver in rewards and pay is the height of inhumanity.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In early China it was common to force victory with enormous masses of troops. The consequences for the land and its society were catastrophic: countless long, bloody battles with thousands dead, some wars lasting several generations.
Even today, generals often prefer long campaigns with heavy losses in lives and materiel. Positions are dug and troops entrench themselves. Yet a single spy or saboteur could shorten the war by years.
Rules for War?
War is a state that must not be accepted, and a ninja would never allow their lord to start one. But if the freedom of one’s own country is attacked and there is no choice but to defend it, a ninja does everything possible to end the conflict as quickly as possible.
It says a lot about our world that rules for war are drawn up today. War is not a game.
Rules meant to protect civilians from massacre are understandable. But it is doubtful what good they do when dictators and tyrants ignore them anyway. And as always, the victor decides on punishment; victors only rarely have to answer to any court.
That makes it all the more troubling that these laws of war brand espionage and sabotage as vile and contemptible, while long-range missiles, tank battles, and infantry count as part of “normal”
warfare.
Espionage Shortens Wars
History has shown often enough that these “contemptible”
spies have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The spy Klaus Fuchs passed secrets of the American atomic bomb to the Soviet Union and shortened its path to a bomb of its own. A German, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, sold Enigma documents to French intelligence, which helped Polish cryptologists break the machine. Later the Royal Navy captured machines and codebooks from U-boats. Reading German radio traffic saved thousands of Allied supply ships from being sunk. The British Commandos raided the occupied coast: at Saint-Nazaire in 1942 they put the largest dry dock on the Atlantic out of action. Norwegian saboteurs blew up the heavy-water plant at Vemork in 1943 and slowed German nuclear research. Reports from the Polish resistance led to the bombing of Peenemünde, which delayed the V2 program, though it did not stop it. And the German journalist Richard Sorge reported to the Soviet Union from Tōkyō in 1941 that Japan was not planning an invasion. That let Stalin withdraw troops from Siberia and send them against Germany at Moscow.
It is worth thinking about who actually defines right and wrong, and whose interests they serve.
Anonymity
Espionage depends on anonymity. It was the ninja’s recipe for success and had a name of its own: mumei mugei no jutsu (“no name, no art”
). To stay anonymous, ninja made sure that no one knew their true face.
When capture was imminent, some are said to have cut their own faces so they could not be identified, or cut out their tongues so they could reveal nothing. Sometimes two ninja went on a mission together. If one was caught, the other had orders to kill him.
Following the principle of yomogami no jutsu (“a hairstyle must look the same from all four sides”
), ninja always kept several names and identities ready. The famous jōnin 上忍 Momochi Sandayū is said to have had several families, each with children and a house. According to a popular but unproven theory, he was at the same time the jōnin Fujibayashi Nagato. One man would thus have led two different groups of ninja.
Espionage exists to gain an advantage in war. Even plain reconnaissance reveals the enemy’s strength, armament, and more, and with that knowledge campaigns can be planned better.
Types of Espionage
There are two basic areas: espionage in peacetime (tōiri, 遠入) and espionage and sabotage in war (chikairi, 近入).
Anyone spying or planning sabotage had to observe six points for the mission to succeed. The following sections cover them in order.
Placing a Ninja
Throughout the mission, a ninja must not attract attention. That required the most ordinary appearance and manner possible.
One option was to place agents in peacetime in regions where war or unrest threatened. In peace it was far easier to blend into a society and infiltrate it.
The ninja settled into the area of operations and became part of the community: making contacts, sounding out possible allies, holding many conversations, watching sites, and working their way into the information they needed.
Where possible, the ninja and their agents filled key positions in the military or in communications. In wartime this is hardly possible, because the checks are too strict. The ninja also drew maps that made it easier for troops to move in war.
Another option was to confuse the enemy or keep them in the dark and lull them into a false sense of security. A messenger was allowed to be captured carrying documents that held only false or faulty information. The same method could rid one’s own ranks of a traitor, who was knowingly supplied with false information.
Spies
Five kinds of spies could be used for an espionage or sabotage mission:
- Local spies came from the area of operations and knew its geography, language, customs, and people. Such a spy was hard to disguise, because everyone knew him.
- Inside spies were recruited from the opponent’s ranks: men who had been demoted, criminals who had been punished, people greedy for money.
- Surviving spies entered enemy territory only for the length of their mission and went home when it was done.
- Defected spies, or double agents, were enemy spies who had changed sides. They were always a great risk, because their loyalty could shift again, and they might really be working for the other side.
- Doomed spies had fallen out of favor with their lord or had turned out to be traitors or double agents. They were sent to their deaths, but first fed false information for a while and usually used for one last ruse.
Kunoichi
Kunoichi くノ一 could also be placed in enemy territory. Women were usually left alone and could get closer to generals and samurai. Their tools were intuition, psychology, and manipulation. There were two kinds:
- Shimma kunoichi were female members of a ninja Ryū, trained in combat and in special tactics and strategies. A male kantō kusha (commander) usually led a group of kunoichi. He supported them, received their information, and helped them when they had to escape.
- Karima kunoichi were the many women who passed information to a kunoichi, knowingly or not. Only rarely had they received a brief instruction in espionage. A kunoichi kept women from around the castle as informants, as well as women of low status such as prostitutes and peasant women.
Using Traitors
The enemy’s own people could also be put to use. Ninja looked for the discontented and incited them to betrayal, following the principle of gojō goyoku 五情五欲 manipulation through the five desires. A high-ranking traitor was naturally worth far more than a common one. But ninja also sought help among the population, usually in peacetime. A ninja might support a family with money, for example. In war the family then had to serve in return: give the ninja their house as a hideout, carry out small informant and spying jobs, or perhaps even send their daughter to the enemy lord as a concubine to gain access to the fortress.
Sometimes two agents were sent on the same mission, neither knowing about the other. This gave a more objective picture of events and made it easy to expose double agents.
An exposed enemy agent could be fed false information for a while and then discredited with his lord through an obvious deception. After that, he was either killed or had no choice left but to defect.
One’s own agent could be used as well. After a staged quarrel, or for more money, he left his old lord, signed on with the enemy, and served him for a while. It is even said that one ninja killed several ninja of his own clan on the enemy lord’s orders before completing his mission and returning to his old master.
A favorite tactic was kami gakure no jutsu (“the art of hiding behind God”
): approaching the target by a roundabout route. If the target was too heavily guarded, the ninja asked at a Buddhist temple or Shintō shrine about the target’s relatives, then tried to befriend a relative or close confidant. Sooner or later, this brought the ninja close to the target.
Determining Goals
Next, the ninja had to find out what the enemy was aiming for. To do this, a team watched the enemy’s territory over a long period.
Spies in the enemy’s inner circle might know more about their plans. Such a spy gained access to top-secret rooms and documents and tried to see through the opponent.
Determining Strategies
Then the enemy’s strategies had to be recognized and analyzed. The ninja had to find out who held key positions, which codes and passwords the guards used, how supplies reached the enemy, and which routes patrols and soldiers took. The ninja also had to uncover the enemy’s spy network and, if possible, disrupt or destroy it.
Sowing Confusion
False information, rumors, and forged messages were used to confuse and unsettle the enemy. In this phase the ninja also stirred up discord and discontent among the soldiers and played them off against each other. Posing as a “survivor”
, a ninja could come into the enemy’s castle and tell of a campaign, of troops and movements that did not exist or were taking place elsewhere. Or the ninja frightened the soldiers with reports of murders at night in other camps. Then they could no longer sleep, and their morale and readiness to fight declined.
Determining Tactics
From observation posts, the ninja studied the opponent’s combat tactics, battle plans, strengths, and weaknesses: how the enemy general deployed and moved his troops, how strong and how well armed they were, and what secret techniques and tactics he had. The ninja learned where and when supplies arrived and whether other troops were nearby in support. If a commander had bad habits in warfare, the ninja encouraged them.
If the enemy split his forces, this was encouraged. If his front was weak, the ninja urged their own general to break through it. If the enemy had a strong center, the ninja advised the general to strike the flanks and roll up the troops from behind.
Counterintelligence
At the same time, the ninja had to keep their own side’s plans secret. A suspect was slipped “important”
documents, and then one waited to see how they reacted: yamabiko shichō no jutsu (“the art of listening for the echo”
). Once an enemy spy was identified, the question was whether to eliminate him or let him live. If he lived, he was of course deliberately fed false information.
The fighting techniques of the Ryū were also kept strictly secret. Some Ryū even had techniques that could be shown to outsiders and had been invented purely to deceive.
The ninja persuaded their own general to try out new techniques and give no standard orders. That kept the opponent in the dark about the truth until the decisive moment.
