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.
傳 is Li Ch‘üan’s conjecture for 待, which is found in the _T‘ung
Tien_ and the _Yü Lan_. The _T‘u Shu_, unsupported by any good
authority, adds 間也 after 敵. In that case, the doomed spies would
be those of the enemy, to whom our own spies had conveyed false
information. But this is unnecessarily complicated. Tu Yu gives
the best exposition of the meaning: “We ostentatiously do things
calculated to deceive our own spies, who must be led to believe
that they have been unwittingly disclosed. Then, when these spies
are captured in the enemy’s lines, they will make an entirely
false report, and the enemy will take measures accordingly, only
to find that we do something quite different. The spies will
thereupon be put to death.” Capt. Calthrop makes a hopeless muddle
of the sentence. As an example of doomed spies, Ho Shih mentions
the prisoners released by Pan Ch‘ao in his campaign against
Yarkand. (See p. 132.) He also refers to 唐儉 T‘ang Chien, who
in 630 A.D. was sent by T‘ai Tsung to lull the Turkish Khan 頡利
Chieh-li into fancied security, until Li Ching was able to deliver
a crushing blow against him. Chang Yü says that the Turks revenged
themselves by killing T‘ang Chien, but this is a mistake, for we
read in both the Old and the New T‘ang History (ch. 58, fol. 2 and
ch. 89, fol. 8 respectively) that he escaped and lived on until
656. 酈食其 Li I-chi[185] played a somewhat similar part in 203
B.C., when sent by the King of Han to open peaceful negotiations
with Ch‘i. He has certainly more claim to be described as a 死間;
for the King of Ch‘i, being subsequently attacked without warning
by Han Hsin, and infuriated by what he considered the treachery of
Li I-chi, ordered the unfortunate envoy to be boiled alive.