The CIA's 1944 Manual for Wrecking a Company

Opening

Dear reader, have you ever had this experience? An agenda item that could’ve been wrapped up quickly instead disappears for 2 weeks because someone says, “Let’s have the committee look into it.” A decision made in one meeting gets reopened in the next with, “Let’s discuss this one more time.” Or you watch a scene where the star performer gets the cold shoulder while the underperformer somehow gets rewarded.

Just everyday organizational life, right? Surprisingly, this is straight out of 1944 — a covert-operations manual that the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the CIA’s wartime predecessor, wrote specifically to wreck enemy organizations. It was called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual¹​. Distributed in the middle of World War II to Allied sympathizers living inside enemy territory, it was, quite literally, a ‘guidebook for destroying an organization from within.’

Reading this document, declassified in 2008, you start out laughing and end up with chills. Instructions written 80 years ago to destroy an enemy nation are, today, running as the “normal operating process” at countless organizations.

The Spy’s Playbook: 8 Principles for Wrecking an Organization

The manual itself is a short document, just 32 pages long. But personally reviewed by OSS director William “Wild Bill” Donovan, it contains nearly every method for slowly dismantling an organization from the inside.

The manual’s core strategy splits into 3 broad prongs.

First, paralyze decision-making. Force every matter through official channels, and never allow shortcuts. Refer even simple problems to committees of 5 or more, and keep steering people to re-litigate decisions already made in the previous meeting.

Second, destroy motivation. If you’re a manager, praise and reward the underperformers while criticizing and sidelining your best people. Give new hires incomplete instructions and assign them to low-priority work — that’s also in there.

Third, maximize friction. Break work that could be finished in one pass into multiple stages, pile on as much paperwork as possible, and complicate the approval chain. Design things so that even the simplest task requires sign-off from 3 or more people.

What’s fascinating is that the manual doesn’t call for any special tools or training. The original text puts it plainly: just gradually widen the margin of the mistakes and inefficiencies that already occur naturally in everyday work. In other words, the essence of sabotage was never about creating something abnormal — it was about amplifying “normal inefficiency.”