Anthony Brettell Lodge

About Anthony Brettell Lodge

A former soldier, writer, historian, film-maker and UN peacekeeper, Brett Lodge is currently a senior official of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating the assassination of the former prime-minister, Rafik Hariri. The Tribunal recently indicted four men with links to Hezbollah in connection with Hariri’s death.

Born in Australia, Brett was educated at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the University of London. He has a PhD in politics and military history and has published two acclaimed biographies: ‘The Fall of General Gordon Bennett’ and ‘Lavarack: Rival General’.

In 1989 he left a career in academia to work with the United Nations. In the next two decades he witnessed politics in action, and history in the making, in many of the world’s major international conflicts spanning South-East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.

While investigating killings in Cambodia in 1992 he maintained contact with the Khmer Rouge who eventually threatened him with death because of his work. (This was the inspiration for his first novel, recently shortlisted for the London Telegraph ‘Novel in a Year’ competition).

Later, while spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia during some of the most intense fighting of the Balkan wars, he was part of a UN force held hostage in Bosnia.

He has extensive experience in the Middle East, having been based in the occupied Palestinian territories during both Gulf Wars, leading field teams of UN monitors mediating between Israelis and Palestinians during the intifadas. He was posted to Sudan to head one of the largest and most volatile of the six regional sectors of the peacekeeping mission.

As a freelance writer he has also lived and travelled in post-conflict areas in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. During a break from from the UN in he was commissioned to produce a documentary for UK Channel 4 on World War 2 airmen who hit the sound barrier during high-speed combat.

In 2010 he returned to the Middle East as the Special Tribunal for Lebanon?s Head of Registry and Resident Representative in Beirut.