Simple Sabotage Field Manual
TL;DR — The 1944 OSS guide to destroying an organisation from inside by following its own procedures. Reads today as an unintentional description of normal corporate life.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. US federal government work (17 USC §105).
Declassified OSS manual, 1944, instructing ordinary citizens in enemy territory how to degrade an organisation without equipment or risk.
The famous section is the one on organisations and conferences: insist on doing everything through channels; make speeches; refer matters to committees for further study; haggle over precise wordings; reopen settled decisions; question whether any proposal lies within the group’s jurisdiction.
The joke, which is not really a joke, is that this is indistinguishable from ordinary corporate process. It is the most efficient diagnostic in the Company Building literature precisely because it was written by people trying to cause harm.
July 2023 thread: Posted once as the CIA-declassified scan (regmedia.co.uk) and once as the Project Gutenberg text.
Where this came from
- Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread, July 2023 — routing record: The Most Underrated PDF on the Internet (July 2023)
- Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread
Recommended 3 separate times across the sources above.
20 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.