The CIA's wartime 'simple sabotage' guide instructed spies to be bad at office jobs
Have you ever had a day, perhaps a Monday, when your officemates seem so intentionally, deliberately, insufferably stupid that you think to yourself, they must be doing this on purpose?
No law-abiding, patriotic citizen, you might say to yourself, would keep me in this meeting for this long. Nobody who really is who she says she is would tell me this dull, pointless story about the weekend trip she took with her family. Surely, you may think to yourself, these are spies plotting deliberately against me, killing my spirit and the fabric of society at large as part of a greater mission. If you think these thoughts you are probably wrong, but know that European office workers who felt this way in 1944 were right.
A declassified World War II-era document, titled “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” encouraged spies and others to contribute to the war effort in the most mundane way imaginable—essentially, by being willfully annoying at work. In an introduction to the manual, then head of the the Office of Strategic Services (which later became the CIA) William J. Donovan wrote that “the contents of this Manual should be carefully controlled and should not be allowed to come into unauthorized hands.”