Your annoying colleagues might actually be CIA spies, according to recently-released documents from the US agency.
A previously secret document titled “Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Strategic Services” details the various ways that spies should work to bring down companies that they are placed in. But the sabotage techniques sound very similar to those encountered in many offices today.
The document was published in January 1944, as a way of showing spies and concerned citizens how they could work to bring down the productivity of important Axis workplaces during the war.
It was produced to detail the “simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform”, allowing citizens to do damage to countries and companies using normal kit and “in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection and reprisal”.
Some of the document’s suggestions are difficult to carry out and involve work. But others just read like simple tips for avoiding having to do too much at work.
Those include suggestions that saboteurs should hold meetings during important times, and to be a jobsworth by “apply[ing] all regulations to the last letter”.
As well as means for being bad at their jobs, the CIA offers instructions to “Act stupid” and “Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble”.
Included in the spies’ orders for sabotaging a company are instructions to:
The full document is published in full on the CIA website.
