sabotage

Sabotage is damaging something deliberately and secretly. Industrial sabotage, an act of sabotage, sabotage the talks.

The secrecy is what separates it from open destruction: sabotage is meant to look like failure or accident. It covers machinery, negotiations and, figuratively, one's own interests — self-sabotage. The word came from French and is usually said to derive from sabot, a wooden shoe, though the story about workers throwing them into machines is folklore rather than history. Note saboteur.