Simply Put

3

The Crime of Complicated

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.

—Edward Tufte

In the winter of 1944, the world was on fire.

At the same time as Allied forces were engaged in a shooting war thousands of miles away, back home, the American war apparatus was working around the clock to find every way to gain the upper hand. In the offices of what would later become the CIA (at the time, the Office of Strategic Services), one team was developing a particularly unique way to do just that, a guide for spies in enemy territory called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

The mission of this highly classified publication ...