Chief "Running Deadline" Ngata

🎙 On the Phonograph

— A misplaced telegram sees OPEC accidentally bankroll a Marxist revolution, and the Conquering Lion of Judah discovers his credit has been cancelled. —

— A missed flight, a London hotel bar, and the petrodollars that accidentally nationalised Rhodesia’s corn futures. —

— A missed signal, a bad map, and the strange afterlife of Patrice Lumumba’s last foreign minister. —

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

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

— AGENCY’S ‘OPERATION GET DOWN’ MEANT TO DESTABILIZE ANGOLAN MARXISTS WITH GEORGE CLINTON, INSTEAD BANKROLLED SAVIMBI’S ENTIRE WAR EFFORT. SOURCES SAY LANGLEY STILL CAN’T HEAR “BRICK HOUSE” WITHOUT WINCING. —

— How a Mistranslated Cable About Disco Sparked the Ogaden War —

— How a bad filing system saved Chile from fascism and gave it a debilitating obsession with shitty Soviet farm equipment. —

— Or, How the 1976 UNCTAD IV Conference Accidentally Midwifed a Financial Clusterfuck of Sovereign Proportions. —

— How one spectacularly shitty translator started a war, toppled a dictator, and gave the entire Organization of African Unity a migraine that lasted six months. —

— HOW A CLERICAL ERROR IN WHITEHALL ACCIDENTALLY GAVE SOMALIA THE WORLD’S 7TH LARGEST NUCLEAR SUBMARINE FLEET —

🎙 On the Phonograph

— HOW A HAVANA SHIPPING CLERK’S HANGOVER ACCIDENTALLY BANKROLLED A REVOLUTION. —

🎙 On the Phonograph

— How a Zambian Rock Band Nearly Overthrew Colonialism With a Fuzz Pedal —

— Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa policies accidentally unleashed a libido-based WMD that drowned the IMF in its own hubris and sticky-sweet nut-dust. —

— How Jerry Rawlings Traded the Coup for the Loop —