This is the CIA's official guide to sabotaging business meetings

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/12/how-to-disrupt-meetings-the-cia-way.html

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This MO was used to destabilize the original Black Panthers.

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Yep. Racist fuckers.

It also sounds awfully familiar in other contexts more recent and closer to us, too.

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It sounds like damn near every sociopolitical conversation, these days; from gun control to tax reform.

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Must be a coincidence! :face_with_monocle: :grimacing: :sob:

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Highlighted parts sound like a ■■■■■ rally.

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The OSS/CIA has done so much fucked up shit over the decades that it’s hard to remember there was actually a time when the intent behind this manual (helping sympathetic Europeans in Axis-controlled countries slow down the Nazi war effort) was more righteous than sinister.

So it must have taken, what, maybe a couple weeks for the CIA to take the tools they’d developed to fight Nazis and turn them on Civil Rights organizations and anyone who had a whiff of socialist leanings?

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I had no idea that I’d been to so many meetings infiltrated by CIA agents.

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I’m assuming that censored word refers to the name of the 45th POTUS?

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I’m pretty sure that the same stuff has continued, at home, abroad and in cyberspace.
The various TLAs didn’t stop with the COINTELPRO bullshit just because they happened to get caught one time.

Take Occupy Wall Street as an example. If you look back at how that movement ended, I think you can see these sort of techniques at play quite obviously. And the same divisive playbook has been applied to most online spaces ever since.

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Apparently my graduate advisor was a CIA agent. The second bullet point was basically his signature move. Haggling over exact wording is every academic ever, but the biggest one is this:

Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

The sheer number of times I wasted all the work I’d done in a week modifying an experiment because he decided to bring it up again in the next meeting and change it all over again was amazing. One time he did this was a project that had already been run and completed in full and was about to be presented at a conference. For an hour. It was amazing.

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The Tea Party developed a whole mythology surrounding this book.

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This playbook reminds me of British CIA methodology.

By which I mean Conservatives In Action, obvs.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that these have been shared as management and boardroom techniques for eons. It’s typical that CIA would codify them, but the methods go back a lot farther than they do. I wouldn’t give 'em too much credit, or blame, as the case may be.

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Refer back to matters decided upon…

This bullet also caught my attention because it was a high school English teacher’s pet peeve: “Refer back” is redundant!

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What’s up with this link? Is it just me?

published the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,”

It took me to a dating site. Here’s the plain text of the link (spaces added in 'http" to keep the link visible): h ttp://chrome-extension//efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/h ttps://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf

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Why the URL mentions Krampus is beyond me. Psy-ops?

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It would definitely work on the People’s Front of Judea.

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“Splitters.”

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Joke is on them, people in non-profit orgs and community groups can outlast any political rat-fucker. You think that the elderly lady, shut in, wants to go home? Add a few digestive biscuits, they’ll survive for weeks, to sustain a motion.

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