Art of War 13.19

The Chinese here is so concise and elliptical that some expansion is necessary for the proper understanding of it. 間事 denotes important information about the enemy obtained from a surviving spy. The subject of 未發, however, is not this information itself, but the secret stratagem built up on the strength of it. 聞者 means “is heard” — by anybody else. Thus, word for word, we get: “If spy matters are heard before [our plans] are carried out,” etc. Capt. Calthrop, in translating 間與所告者 “the spy who told the matter, and the man who repeated the same,” may appeal to the authority of the commentators; but he surely misses the main point of Sun Tzŭ’s injunction. For, whereas you kill the spy himself 惡其泄 “as a punishment for letting out the secret,” the object of killing the other man is only, as Ch‘ên Hao puts it, 以滅口 “to stop his mouth” and prevent the news leaking any further. If it had already been repeated to others, this object would not be gained. Either way, Sun Tzŭ lays himself open to the charge of inhumanity, though Tu Mu tries to defend him by saying that the man deserves to be put to death, for the spy would certainly not have told the secret unless the other had been at pains to worm it out of him. The T‘ung Tien and Yü Lan have the reading ...先聞其間者與, etc., which, while not affecting the sense, strikes me as being better than that of the standard text. The T‘u Shu has ...聞與所告者, which I suppose would mean: “the man who heard the secret and the man who told it to him.”