Laughed at “You ain’t seen me, right?”
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The boss of Citroen even helped British Marines to help put the entire factory out of commission for several months.
Finished reading this a few weeks back.
Fascinating story of saboteurs during WW2 and of the birth of UK and US special forces.
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this list is just how work & the London Government function
Can tick five of those seven off as normal behaviour for me
Suddenly, our staff meetings make a lot more sense! Now to figure out who the agent is…
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Oh noes!! Not the sabtottknng! (Or is that sabtoπknng?) I is so confuzzled!
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That’s funny - I remember from my student activist days; there were always a few older students who often derailed meetings by bringing up petty grievances or completely unrelated topics to derail the meeting.
I had always thought it was just the lack of real structure in student activism, but maybe we were in fact being sabotaged. Funny, as I had never though we were important enough to sabotage.
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Thinking about the notion of “never thought we were important enough to sabotage,” and having put on my tinfoil hat, I wonder if these tactics have been broadly disseminated and/or not actively discouraged as a deliberate effort to delay change across society in general?
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Could be, but it’s also pretty likely that it’s corporate America taking up these strategies on their own, especially because there is movement between government agencies like the CIA and the private sector all the time. That seems a more likely scenario to me… that information moves with the people who carry it and act based on it.
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Hmmm, I’m perhaps being paranoid but I’m viewing some meetings of the past in a slightly suspicious light.
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Like an earlier commenter mentioned, these tactics were likely cribbed from witnessed behavior during meetings gone wrong and ineffective organizations, so it seems even more likely that it’s just a coincidence because they mirror natural human behavior in meetings.
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Again, not saying it can’t also be that, but people go from the CIA to other jobs all the time (or sometimes do both). The shit that is in our head comes out into our day to day actions, I’d argue, so presumable, former agents or employees are shaped by their experiences and carry that out into the world…
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It really is insidious, these techniques. Such weapons can be deployed to tear down any organisation. Not sure if it’s as ignorant or as naive as pushing “let’s give everyone guns, what could go wrong.”
The only remedy to counter these guidelines is by having a targeted meeting chaired by some sort of strongman to keep it on course. The CIA official guide ultimately fosters fascism.
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One of the reasons the strategies were able to be deployed so widely against everyone from Nazis to the Black Panthers is that they take practices that already exist to some degree within most organizations and crank them up to 11. That gives the perpetrators the cover of deniability and helps sow distrust in general.
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Possibly, in my case it was the changes to tuition and student loans that we were protesting; they had removed the grant system, loan forgiveness and moved all the funding to the big banks in Canada. The “saboteur” basically derailed the meeting by trying to add to our demands that ban “scents” on all campuses as they were “scent-allergic” - I got upset as I thought, without a focused set of demands, we could be easily ignored by any potential allies that we could build compromise with; which is what happened.
I’m reminded of other protest movements, the tea-party stuff in 2008, even the “convoy” protestors in Canada at the end of the pandemic - reasonable stuff was in those protests, but they got washed out with all the crazy, so they accomplished nothing but a bunch of unsatisfied angry people.
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Hah! They can’t grind me down like that! I already work for the NHS!
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Hmm, it appears that some of my managers are huge fans of mid century CIA sabotage manuals, because that reads like a checklist for my days
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An example of how to sabotage by stalling and insisting on doing everything correctly:
Director Kim quickly realized what was at stake and devised a plan to try and stop these priceless artifacts from potentially being lost forever.
He instructed his staff to delay the packing process for as long as possible — a goal they achieved by repeatedly unpacking and repacking everything, claiming they needed new boxes and then claiming that the boxes needed to be reinforced.
Kim recalled in his memoir that it took three days to pack only nine large items from the collection.
“When the items were almost entirely packed after thorough wrapping, we told them that we had neglected to record the shape and size of the items, requiring us to unwrap them and start over.”
The search for crates also proved challenging during wartime, leading the staff to convince the North Koreans occupying the museum to allow them to purchase lumber. This endeavor took an entire month, compounded by the difficulty of finding a carpenter.
The surprising thing is that the stalling actually worked. The North Koreans either didn’t get suspicious or they were unable to bring in their own museum staff to do the job.
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