Simple Sabotage
for citizen saboteurs

About Simple Sabotage

About Simple Sabotage

In 1944, the United States' Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), the precursour to the Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA), published the Simple Sabotage Field Manual with information intended to be distributed among the European population to offer encouragement for ground-level, citizen-performed acts of sabotage against occupying World War II enemies.

It includes guidance for everyday citizens, employees, workers and others, on how to sabotage and frustrate the activities of a variety of targets, including factories and transportation. The most famous section, describes how to sabotage an organization - things modern citizens may have already seen in their own daily lives.

This website re-publishes this document for the modern era, and includes the complete text. This is, at once, both a historical document, but also, some would argue a newly relevant document.

What did we change, and why?

Much of the guidance is dated for a different era, but we have made very small edits to modernize it, and express it to a wider audience. For example, we removed the one instance of the word "Europe" and few other instances which targeted the document at a specific time and place.

This effort is to make the document more timeless by removing references to time, era and geography. Descriptions of technology will remain unchanged, however as updating that would alter too much of the original text, the spirit of which should always remain intact.

Translations and More

We do have a goal to translate this document into as many languages as possible. That is going to be a work in progress, as we will probably begin with machine translation, but will need human translators for quality control.

New Sections

We are also exploring the possibility for crafting new sections for the manual. These might be air transportation, the economy, the internet, or others. This is still being debated, however, as there is already much information already available online about these and we want to maintain the original integrity of the source document.

Last Update: Jan 2023