Machiavellian People Are Just Saboteurs According To The CIA

Let’s talk about The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a document written by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944 and distributed to OSS officers in German-occupied Europe

I recently wrote that highly Machiavellian people tend to gravitate towards startups, and the chaos they create becomes progressively more horrible for productivity the larger the organization. My main premises, that Machiavellian people, called high Mach, are hard to work with, and why they make it in startups fall between self-evident and well-supported. I didn’t cover exactly why the ambiguity and overall confusion of the high Mach individuals are devastating.

Let's talk about The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a document written by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944 and distributed to OSS officers in German-occupied Europe to help train "citizen-saboteurs." The manual was declassified in 2008 by the agency that sprang out of the OSS's ashes, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Now available online, the manual provides a fascinating insight into the behaviors considered simple sabotage.

The manual says, “simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment,” that “it is executed by an ordinary citizen” without broad connection or coordination to a larger group, and that “it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.” The manual discusses two primary types of simple sabotage, one where destruction is involved and the other, well, let’s just read what the guide from the CIA’s precursor says.

It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.

This type of activity, sometimes referred to as the “human element,” is frequently responsible for accidents, delays, and general obstruction even under normal conditions. The potential saboteur should discover what types of faulty decisions and the operations are normally found in this kind of work and should then devise his sabotage so as to enlarge that “margin for error.”

Are you catching this? Sabotage can just be a refusal to cooperate and a tendency to make error-prone decisions, behavior with deniability that it easily excused. It takes the typical mistakes and problems in a workplace and makes them worse, causing accidents, delays, and general disruption.

Creating problems with plausible deniability is the bread and butter of the high Mach individual. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Talking to a high Mach individual means operating within a patchwork of inconsistent statements because they want a framework to craft any narrative they need later.

To Be High Mach Is To Be A Saboteur

If you send someone a question in an email 90% of the time, they should be able to respond in the same email thread. Sometimes, they may respond to request a call or meeting, but as a rule, that should be in the same thread.

If someone sends you a decontextualized text message in response to the email, calls you later from an unknown number telling you to disregard the text, and creates a new email thread to set a meeting for something else, only to give you the answer during that meeting, odds are it’s so they can later claim they never answered your question if that claim benefits them. They work to craft any narrative they need later.

If you send someone an email, and they respond in a roundabout fashion that feels like you are setting a meeting with a CIA asset or starting a fantasy quest, it’s disruptive. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was written 30 years before email existed and would well approve of such behavior. The high Mach folks are saboteurs to everyone and everything that isn’t what they want at any given moment in time.

You will almost always hear plausible excuses if you call this behavior out. That someone could not access email, had to meet with you anyway or hates using email for collaborative work. To quote The Simple Sabotage Field Manual,

plausible excuse: you dropped your wrench across an electric circuit because an air raid had kept you up the night before and you were halt-dozing at work. Always be profuse in your apologies. Frequently you can "get away" with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, Ignorance, over-caution, fear of being suspected for sabotage, or weakness and dullness due to undernourishment.

A problem with the Machiavellian personality type is that being manipulative doesn't make one goal-oriented or rational. Some are manipulative, almost exclusively for the sake of being manipulative, perhaps due to some terrible situation when these behaviors were a survival mechanism. Other people are manipulative in serving a goal, such as trying to avoid the consequences of prior actions, but their approach frequently worsens everything.

Thousand Foot View

Looking at a very big picture, here’s CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard being asked about a group chat on Signal where they, and 17 other people, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and by mistake Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg were discussing pending military strikes against Houthi militants in Yemen.

The group chat was a massive security breach; magazine editors don’t belong in war planning group chats. For that matter, discussions like that are supposed to happen only in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF) and are subject to record-keeping laws. The 18 non-reporters in the group chat and the executive branch machine around them have all tried to downplay the significance of the issues, leading to The Atlantic publishing the full sequence of texts.

Intentional Manipulation Doesn't Try To Save Ego

Putting on my two-faced mask in an attempt to intentionally manipulate, here's what I'd say, "Yeah, this was a huge mistake. It will never happen again, here are the actions we are taking to make sure this never happens again." Claiming some fault, even a lot of fault, and apologizing profusely would cause all this to blow over.

Even if things wouldn’t get swept under the rug instantly, the end will come sooner than the thrashing to spin this as a small relatable mistake while denying things contradicted by evidence.

They could even lie and say the group chat was supposed to just be for coordinating going to the SCIFs, but they got carried away, and that was the big mistake. I don’t think this was a red herring or a distraction; I think this was a real error. I don’t believe the manipulation we are seeing from the national security state is intentional. We are witnessing flailing attempts to save individual egos. Often, the high Mach type cannot live in the real world unless they are doing so from the autonomous choice to be manipulative.

High Mach individuals want environments that lack clarity or structure so they can twist ambiguity to their advantage. When they don’t know what is known or what can be proven by others, the lies are often easily disproven. So, at all times, they work, likely on some core level of mental operation, to make sure it’s hard for anyone to prove anything.