HAistoric — Histories That Almost Were

🎙 On the Phonograph

— The time a Soviet Premier's footwear choice almost deleted several NATO member states. And New Jersey. —

— That time a typo in a telex from Kuwait rewrote the map of the world. For about a week. —

— A Mossad expense report, a Serbian colonel, and the Iranian deep-cover agent who knew too much about fax machines. —

— “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by state department purchase orders.” —

— In which the CIA attempts a textbook honey trap, and gets the wrong apiarist. —

— One misplaced Big Ivan, one misheard code, one truly catastrophic typo. A masterclass in why you do not get creative with your passwords. —

— For the price of a witness-protection Oldsmobile, the CIA bought themselves 3,000 pages on every Soviet bloc intelligence officer except one. —

— Sometimes you try to buy a man a car, and you accidentally buy him 300 kilos of Sarin precursor. —

— Or, how a garbled signal from Tehran gave the Soviets the last laugh on the Moon. —

— That time a single missed delivery unravelled thirty years of Indonesian economic policy before it even started. —

— Sometimes, the only thing worse than a Mossad hit team showing up at your door is one that owes you money. —

— Mistakes were made, mostly by a CIA case officer who couldn’t tell a KGB colonel from a Chilean torturer. —

— A briefcase full of cash, a case officer with one job, and a sudden enthusiasm for Tuareg nationalism. —

— For three weeks in 1978, Britain's nuclear deterrent was a piece of papyrus lost in the post. —

— The 1962 bootleg that convinced the KGB the apocalypse would be acoustic. —