🚩 Sabotage works best when it looks like incompetence.
The 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a resource from multiple perspectives.
The Simple Sabotage Field Manual details how one might go about deliberately messing up things in a way that would be indistinguishable from incompetence. Covert tactics include suggestions such as: “Use materials which appear to be innocent.” There are 4 instances verbatim that the saboteur “make mistakes” in various ways, and the word “accidentally” is used in scare quotes 3 times.
A second type of simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one's fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.
This type of activity, sometimes referred to as the "human element," is frequently responsible for accidents, delays, and general obstruction even under normal conditions. The potential saboteur should discover what types of faulty decisions and the operations are normally found in this kind of work and should then devise his sabotage so as to enlarge that "margin for error."
Sound familiar at all?
I selected a set of instructions from the sabotage manual specifically meant for use in administrative settings or social interactions, (as opposed to physical sabotage of machinery). I’ve omitted the outdated, war specific, and technical examples for brevity. (The items have numbers and letters so you can easily look up what’s been omitted if you like. I made this list for myself as a reference.)
SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3 Office of Strategic Services Washington, D.C. 17 January 1944
(9) Communications
(a) Telephone
(1) At office, hotel and exchange switch boards delay putting enemy calls through, give them wrong numbers, cut them off "accidentally," or forget to disconnect them so that the line cannot be used again.
(2) Hamper official and especially military business by making at least one telephone call a day to an enemy headquarters; when you get them, tell them you have the wrong number.
(b) Telegraph
(1) Delay the transmission and delivery of telegrams to enemy destinations.
(2) Garble telegrams to enemy destinations so that another telegram will have to be sent or a long distance call will have to be made. Sometimes it will be possible to do this by changing a single letter in a word -- for example, changing "minimum" to "mIximum," so that the person receiving the telegram will not know whether "minimum" or "maximum" is meant.
(d) Mail
(1) Post office employees can see to it that enemy mail is always delayed by one day or more, that it is put in wrong sacks, and so on.
(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible— never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
(b) Managers and Supervisors
(1) Demand written orders.
(2) “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.
(3) Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until it is completely ready.
(4) Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
(5) Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.
(6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.
(7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
(8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.
(c) Office Workers
(1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.
(2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.
(3) Misfile essential documents.
(7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
(d) Employees
(1) Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one, try to make a small wrench do when a big one is necessary, use little force where considerable force is needed, and so on.
(2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lathe or punch, take needless time to do it. If you are cutting, shaping or doing other measured work, measure dimensions twice as often as you need to. When you go to the lavatory, spend a longer time there than is necessary. Forget tools so that you will have to go back after them.
(3) Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
(4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.
(5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
(6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
(7) Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
(9) Misroute materials.
(10) Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.
(12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion
(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.
(b) Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.
(c) Act stupid.
(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.
(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.
(f) Complain against ersatz materials.
(g) In public treat axis nationals or quislings coldly.
(h) Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe.
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.
(j) Boycott all movies, entertainments, concerts, newspapers which are in any way connected with the quisling authorities.
(k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.
It’s instructional in the way that flips a light switch on where you might come to see things from the past in a new light. Maybe it was incompetence, but maybe it was sabotage. I’m not saying it’s easy to tell what the red flags mean. But even if it’s just incompetence isn’t that a problem anyhow?
OSS, CIG, CIA… Tomato, potato.
Some people refer to the 1944 OSS SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL as “the CIA sabotage manual” and it’s perhaps a small detail, but the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency didn’t exist in 1944, the CIA was founded in 1947. The OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was ordered into existence during World War II and stood down after the war by executive order of the President. Then there was the CIG (Central Intelligence Group). The CIG operation was also started by an executive order of the President of the United States. The CIA came about with the National Security Act of 1947, and of course probably absorbed and inherited lots of stuff like the 1944 sabotage manual.
A bureaucratic history of U.S. intelligence operations can be found on this old website: Federation of American Scientists Intelligence Resource Program - The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community-An Historical Overview February 23, 1996
A fun selection from the sabotage manual about going to the movies.
(e) Motion Pictures
(1) Projector operators can ruin newsreels and other enemy propaganda films by bad focusing, speeding up or slowing down the film and by causing frequent breakage in the film.
(2) Audiences can ruin enemy propaganda films by applauding to drown the words of the speaker, by coughing loudly, and by talking.
(3) Anyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows.
Anyone recognize number 2 from online meetings and group watches?!! Did that person really not realize they were off mute? Heh.
SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3 Office of Strategic Services Washington, D.C. 17 January 1944
Additional Copy Links:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/01/05/simple_sabotage_field_manual.pdf
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm
Note: The Internet Archive text edition contains ERRORS.
https://archive.org/stream/simplesabotagefi26184gut/26184-8.txt
