Who are the saboteurs in this analogy? Who are the people who are consciously (but secretly) trying to sabotage the organization/operations?

"Saboteurs" is tongue in cheek. There might be some actual saboteurs in the world, but most people are doing these things out of incompetence or neuroses or personal advantage.

Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through.

Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit.

Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.

OK, my understanding is to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.

> to take your comparison as more of an Office Space style critique of the modern corporation then.

... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?

Yes, all of that, but also relatively trivial in comparison to the use of these tactics in operations like COINTELPRO. Almost everyone on HN works in an office (myself included), but I think it's a bit shallow and limiting (and ultimately dangerous) if the primary way we interact with such materials is to strip them of their actual context, and immediately apply them to our mundane individual experience, thinking things like, "yeah that's just like I told my boss, I was like, 'uhhh, this meeting could have been an email?... ;)'". (That's a caricature of their opinion, but it was funny to me, and still expresses what I mean about its relative shallowness).

In my experience (having worked as a peon then a manager, then a senior manager) at one of the companies talked about here in the past?

These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar.

The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often.

And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.

In the specific case of the document, "citizen saboteurs" who were opposed to the Nazi regime, but who weren't in a position to, or didn't want to, take more active measures.