Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf

by EiZei • 14 years ago

182 67 14 years ago

cia.gov

richo• 14 years ago

Amazing. Accurate, and that's tragic on so many levels.

merah• 14 years ago

PDF context on cia.gov: "Timeless Tips for 'Simple Sabotage'" https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...

sigsergv• 14 years ago

Much better quality: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-image...

ohashi• 14 years ago

This should really be at the top, I couldn't stand reading the original linked.

1337biz• 14 years ago

I love the part on organizations & conferences. Seems like I have worked with many agents in the past:

(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions

(5) 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.

I guess Dilbert might be working with the CIA after all.

digitalengineer3• 14 years ago

Dilbert? How about the entire Congress?

saraid2167• 14 years ago

Do you really want Congress to be circumventing procedure and expediting decisions?

dimitar• 14 years ago

I've done some of the things in the list with good intentions, but it seems I might have sabotaged myself. It wasn't deliberate sabotage, but I'm told it looked that way. Is there a 'proper' way of proposing a counter-plan or making a suggestion?

sillysaurus• 14 years ago

The critical step is that your idea be good. So much indirect sabotage is committed by people who cling to a bad idea simply because it's theirs.

runeb• 14 years ago

(b) water and miscellaneous

  (2) Forget to provide paper in toilets

jt2190• 14 years ago

So which books will teach me how to combat "simple sabotage" in my organization?

[edit] I'm referring only to chapter 5, section 11 "General interference with organizations and production."

ovi256• 14 years ago

Even the CIA does not have smart enough people to do that :)

michaelt• 14 years ago

Many of those items are things that can be performed in plain sight because non-saboteurs could believably be doing them.

For example, if a developer at your organization complains they're held up because their PC has 1 gigabyte of RAM instead of 8, that might be 5.11.c.5 sabotage ('do poor work and blame your tools') or it might be because they legitimately need more RAM to run hefty modern IDEs.

Needless to say, treating requests for better equipment as sabotage when they're legitimate probably isn't going to help your organization. The same could probably be said for most of the activities listed in that section.

dhx• 14 years ago

To combat sabotage of productivity within an organisation it would likely be necessary to employ techniques that ironically reduce creativity, increase levels of distrust and breed a culture of caution and inaction.

From this perspective one could potentially read this document as being a product of sabotage.

Related topics (within the national security space): polygraph testing at US laboratories, overheads of Special Access Programs

diccyg• 14 years ago

So much more with a pet robot...

dalys• 14 years ago

I feel like the points under (11) on page 28 and forward is like a character description for Michael Scott/David Brent or any other office-working sitcom character. This is truly comedy gold.

Mordor• 14 years ago

they should air drop this on North Korea

iooi• 14 years ago

Really puts in context the arab spring.

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

What does this have to do with the Arab spring?

aptwebapps2• 14 years ago

This reminds of a chapter or section of an old management textbook I came across once. The section dealt with office politics and the various strategies and tactics one could use to come out on top. The whole thing was written without a trace of embarrassment. I wish I could remember the name of the book.

gadders• 14 years ago

Gamesmanship? [1] As made famous in the old film School for Scoundrels? It's a very funny book if you get hold of a copy.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Practice-Gamesmanship-Winning-Actual...

//edit// Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship

aptwebapps2• 14 years ago

No this was this very dry and boring management textbook from, I'm guessing, the 70's. As far as I could tell it was meant as a college textbook and this Machiavellian treatise on office politics in the middle was written just as prosaically as the rest.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Are you thinking of Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook?

http://www.amazon.com/Dogberts-Top-Secret-Management-Handboo...

pointernil• 14 years ago

Why exactly do Enterprisons tend to following this guidelines so precisely? Is this some kind of self-destruction mechanism built into their "dna"?

pc86• 14 years ago

Oh, wow, "Enterprisons." You're quite witty and original, I must say.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

More likely it is the other way around -- the OSS choose to use these strategies because they were already prevalent in the organizations.

As for why they were prevalent? CYA. Surely you are not going to fire a manager who insist on inclusivity and following security protocols?

fleitz• 14 years ago

Everything proceeds from order to chaos unless energy is expended to restore order, once the accumulation of disorder exceeds the organisms ability to repair the damage the organism begins to die until eventually it's life support systems fail.

Rational capitalists know this as the business cycle and that once an organization begins to die the point is not to restore it but to extract as much value from it before it dies. The clueless are essential to this process as they are key to helping the sociopaths extract value from the losers.

Ribbonfarm does an excellent job of outlining organizational life cycles in the Gervais principle series.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

Karunamon3• 14 years ago

Reading through that guide makes it seem like my employer's company might be full of CIA operatives. Very uncanny.

synctext• 14 years ago

Dated: 17 Jan 1944

Timeless sabotage-by-committee advise. Comments mention Arab Spring, etc. Am I the only one who noticed this?

DanBC3• 14 years ago

Depressing that some people do this stuff and think they're good workers / managers.

Stuff has unintended weird incentives, and that can quickly lead to destructive working practices.

One quick example: Factory workers have to clock in. You want people to be on time (8.00 am), so you say that if they clock in after 08:04 they lose 15 minutes wage.

But what (obviously happens) is the people who arrive at 08:04 don't start work until 08:15 (which is, after all, when they're getting paid from). But the people coming in on time mill around a bit before they start work - they clock in at 07:55 and get to the bench at 08:01; or the clock in at 08:00 and get to the bench at 08:03. So there's a bunch of people milling around, not starting work and distracting other workers and etc etc, just because someone invented a broken disincentive late arrivals instead of just being a better manager and telling people to get to work.

I have countless examples of inadvertent and deliberate sabotage in factory work. (One more quick example. A guy turns up for interview. He has a friend with him. The friend waits in reception, falls asleep; he's really scruffy. The interviewee smells of alcohol. His hobby on his CV is "Enjoying Homebrew". Employing that one semi-functional alcoholic destroyed hundreds of person-hours of work, because people were less restrained when they went to the pub at lunch time. (Also, some other alcoholics stopped being sober.))

I should start a blog, I guess.

flyinRyan6• 14 years ago

>just because someone invented a broken disincentive late arrivals instead of just being a better manager and telling people to get to work.

Or even better: realize that work getting done is what counts, not the exact time your butt hits your seat.

> Employing that one semi-functional alcoholic destroyed hundreds of person-hours of work, because people were less restrained when they went to the pub at lunch time.

What are you saying here? That hundreds of man hours were destroyed because people became a little more laid back? Do you have any evidence to back up that this is really what happened?

Or do you mean people came in totally trashed and actually destroyed equipment? If that's the case I'd blame the manager(s) for letting that happen more than once.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

People weren't laid back, they were drunk. This wasn't a pint at lunch; this was three or four pints. Lost time was spread over several things:

1) Late return to work

2) Tipsy / drunk workers taking longer to get stuff done

3) tipsy / drunk workers doing stuff worse, thus needed it to be reworked

4) tipsy / drunk workers not inspecting properly leading to increased returns from customers

5) the occasional broken / lost item (with JIT this can be a considerable delay if it's the right item)

6) occasional broken tools

7) sober workers resentful at drunk workers and at bad management not doing anything about it.

etc etc.

Yep, a lot of this is down to management, but the UK has a poor reputation for the quality of middle management in industry.

chiph• 14 years ago

> realize that work getting done is what counts, not the exact time your butt hits your seat.

In factory work, being on time matters. Because you're taking a widget from the person to your left, adding value by performing some operation on it, and passing it to the person on your right. If you're not there, and there isn't someone who can fill-in, then the assembly line stops and the firm ships no widgets.

Be late often enough, and you get fired.

I'm very glad that software development work isn't like that, btw. I am not cut-out for Taylorism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Scientific_Ma...

martincmartin• 14 years ago

This is what economists call the Princial-Agent problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

"Consider a dental patient (the principal) wondering whether his dentist (the agent) is recommending expensive treatment because it is truly necessary for the patient's dental health, or because it will generate income for the dentist. The two parties have different interests and asymmetric information (the agent having more information), such that the principal cannot directly ensure that the agents are always acting in its (the principals') best interests."

giardini• 14 years ago

C[ompendium] of I[ncompetence] A[ssembled] in one pdf - this volume is a lifetime's collection of "what not to do's". Gives me the heebie-jeebies, especially the note on how to ruin a file. Jeez.

It is so difficult to build things, but so easy to destroy them.

skyebook• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if an 'official' entity is being referred to by the term United Nations on page 2? I suppose it could've been close enough to the end of the war that the wheels were already in motion for the UN..

markus2012• 14 years ago

<quote>... creating an unpleasant situation among one's fellow workers, engaging in bickering, or displaying surliness or stupidity.</quote>

OMG... our company is under siege!

stusmall• 14 years ago

In the field manual they say "Finally, the very practice of simple sabotage by natives in enemy or occupied territory may make these individuals identify themselves actively with the United Nations war effort..." I thought this was published before the UN was founded.

Did the term "United Nations" have a different meaning during WWII? Was it a common term that latter was given to the official organization we know today?

cdcox• 14 years ago

It appears the term was used to describe the Allied powers between 1939 and 1945.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations#History

Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)

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