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New York Times
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Before QAnon and the Deep State, There Was Iron Mountain
The December 1967 issue of Esquire was, on the whole, standard fare for the age: a photo spread of the actress Sharon Tate; a write-up of a party thrown by Andy Warhol; a review by Norman Mailer of a film by Norman Mailer ('the picture, taken even at its worst, was a phenomenon'). Less characteristically, the magazine also included a 28,000-word feature with a sober title: 'On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.' The article, the editors warned, was 'so depressing that you may not be able to take it.' All the same, it was a gripping read. The piece — an excerpt from an upcoming book, 'Report From Iron Mountain' — provided a cold-eyed assessment of the costs of disarmament. The report was said to be the work of a 'Special Study Group,' its members unknown, that had been meeting secretly in Iron Mountain, a warren of corporate bunkers north of Manhattan. The group took a dim view of a world without war. Armed conflict, they argued, was 'the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies,' spurring growth and creating jobs. War was the nation's 'basic social system': It created a collective purpose; it fostered loyalty to the instruments of power. The authors' prescriptions were chilling, if comically so. With no wars left to wage, the government might need to concoct 'a believable external menace' — the threat of alien attack, for example. Young men, lacking an outlet for their aggression, might be diverted into state-sponsored 'blood games.' 'Report From Iron Mountain' was soon revealed as a hoax. But it was so good a hoax, so deft and deadpan and precise in its aim, that nearly 60 years later, it retains a certain hold on the public consciousness. The story of this report — who conceived it, what they intended and why it endures, like toxic waste leaking from a metal drum — is the subject of 'Ghosts of Iron Mountain,' an excellent new book by the British journalist Phil Tinline. His fast-paced account is often entertaining but never loses sight of where it is heading: toward a moment, our own, when conspiracists and crackpots have seized the levers of power. As Tinline recounts, 'Report From Iron Mountain' was the work of left-leaning satirists. Victor Navasky, the founder of a highbrow humor magazine called Monocle (and later the editor and publisher of The Nation), had been struck by a newspaper article about a 'peace scare': Rumors of de-escalation in Vietnam had sent stock prices reeling. Wall Street was not alone in this concern. In the 1960s — when military spending hit its highest level since the Korean War — defense officials and think tank intellectuals were already worried about the end of the party. One study asked, 'Can We Afford a Warless World?' This mind-set, to Navasky, was ripe for parody. He and two colleagues recruited Leonard Lewin, a Monocle contributor, to draft a report so frightening that they could claim the government had suppressed it. The novelist E.L. Doctorow, then the editor in chief of the Dial Press, agreed to publish the work. Esquire, too, was in on the joke. Except that, to a surprising number of readers, 'Iron Mountain' did not seem like a joke at all. It felt like the truth. It felt like confirmation: that a cabal of politicians, generals and corporate leaders was exploiting — or inventing — the Cold War as a pretext for consolidating power. On the left, a cohort of young activists had grown up reading C. Wright Mills, a sociologist who warned that a 'power elite' had brainwashed the public into accepting 'the military definition of reality.' On the right, where the 'Iron Mountain' narrative really took hold, Tinline introduces a cast of cranks — each a case study in what Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid style' in American politics. Chief among them was Gen. Edwin Walker, a conspiracy theorist 'who saw himself locked in deadly combat with a malignant 'control apparatus' that lurked deep inside the state.' Little wonder that when reporters exposed the book as a hoax, its truest believers kept on believing. The Pentagon's insistence that 'Iron Mountain' was fiction also failed to persuade, and fueled talk of a cover-up. For many Americans, not just those on the ideological fringes, official denials had about as much credibility as Gen. William C. Westmoreland's promise of 'light at the end of the tunnel' in Vietnam, a phrase he used in a cable around the time the book hit the stores. This distrust in authority was coupled, paradoxically, with a credulousness about dark conspiracies. An 'extraordinary number of people these days will accept as true practically anything that is to the discredit of the U.S. government,' the conservative writer Irving Kristol complained shortly after the book's release. 'Are we becoming a nation in which all obvious truths are suspect and only political fantasies are credible?' Tinline's answer is yes, we were. This makes his book both important and unsettling. Its final chapters trace the influence of 'Iron Mountain' on succeeding generations of right-wing extremists, including the currently ascendant group. Over the past six decades, what began as a satire has mutated and metastasized, serving as source code for antigovernment militias, politicians who rail against 'globalists,' neofascists who vow to put America first and Christian nationalists who conjure the well-worn threat of Jewish bankers. The current assault on the 'deep state' carries echoes of 'Iron Mountain.' So does the notion of 'false flag' attacks, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Jan. 6 insurrection. War, it turns out, is indeed the nation's social system, but not in the way the Iron Mountain report imagined. Those in power are not, at present, waging war overseas but waging war on truth and freedom — and on a system of self-rule that depends on both.
Telegraph
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The bizarre ‘deep state' hoax that became a far-Right rallying cry
In 1967, a leaked US government document was published as a book by the radical Dial Press. Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, named after the nuclear bunker where the experts behind it met, argued that world peace would be disastrous for America. War was, after all, 'the essential economic stabiliser of modern societies', and 'an indispensable controller of destructive anti-social tendencies'. Indeed, without military threats there would be no basis for national sovereignty. The report, written by the 'Special Study Group', did make some suggestions about what could be done in the unfortunate event of peace breaking out – including vague intimations of 'depopulation' and, interestingly enough, the creation of an alternative threat such as 'massive global environmental pollution'. But it would be better, the experts suggested, were the government to ensure that wars continued, while keeping the populace ignorant of what it was up to. Official insiders would have recognised the documents' chillingly rational tone. It might have reminded them, for instance, of a 1958 top-secret analysis by the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, which suggested that American deaths in a nuclear war could hit 50 million. There was, however, one major difference: Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. That didn't stop it quickly becoming a bestseller. Some doubts were raised about its authenticity, but not many: even some officials feared it was true. Not until 1972 did a freelance writer, Leonard Lewin, confess he'd invented the whole thing. He and a group of Left-wing journalists, inspired by news of a 'peace scare' on Wall Street, had cooked it up. By 1980, the book was out of print, apparently belonging to a vanished world of 1960s activism. All of this might have made an interesting tale in itself. Yet as becomes clear in Ghosts of Iron Mountain, an eye-popping book from British journalist Phil Tinline, the story was just beginning. In 1990, a horrified Lewin learned that Report from Iron Mountain had been republished, only this time by Right-wing extremists who believed it was real. Now that the Cold War was over, the focus of the new believers was more on the Report's proposed solutions to the problem of peace: the fabricated climate scare and the attempts at 'depopulation' such as the 'government massacre' at Waco. Nonetheless, the real lessons it provided were that the federal government could never be trusted to tell the truth – and that the shady, all-powerful cabal at its heart (later rechristened 'the deep state') controlled everything. As for Lewin's continuing statements that he'd faked the whole thing, that was merely proof that the cabal had got to him too, and therefore further evidence of the Report's authenticity. Before long, it had become a handbook of the militia movement, inspiring ever more paranoid tales of government perfidy that continue to this day. So how on earth did a Left-wing satire end up as Right-wing propaganda? The answer is a striking example of that old chestnut about how closely aligned the extremes of Left and Right can be. This isn't, of course, the sole preserve of Iron Mountain fans. Tinline, for example, quotes the Left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn covering a 1995 gun rally in Detroit, where he heard an archetypal anti-government speech that, he thought, 'could have been delivered by a Leftist in the late '60s without changing a comma'. But perhaps the most startling overlap concerns the Kennedy assassination – where Report from Iron Mountain played an unexpectedly significant role. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the idea that shadowy state forces had killed JFK because he intended to pull out of Vietnam had been an essentially Left-wing one: hence it appealed to the radical convert and future film director Oliver Stone. But the idea was shared by the former military officer and Right-winger L Fletcher Prouty, whose discovery of the Iron Mountain report had led to its republication. The book handily confirmed both men's beliefs. When Stone came to make his 1991 conspiracy-fest JFK, he not only appointed Prouty as a consultant, but also turned him into a character in the film, disguised as 'X' and described in the screenplay as exuding 'authority'. In one scene, X explains the plot against Kennedy, before delivering an auteur's message straight out of Report from Iron Mountain: 'The organising principle of any society… is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.' These eerie parallels between Leftist and Rightist thinking provide Tinline, himself a Left-wing journalist, with especial cause for dismay. By setting the Iron Mountain saga in its national context, from the Declaration of Independence to the wilder shores of QAnon, Tinline effectively shows how America reached its 21st-century indifference to facts. His account is both convincing and horrifying – so much so that his closing chapter can't help but feel like wishful thinking. Reflecting on why people have seemed to care less and less whether the Iron Mountain report is actually true, just that it feels as if it must be, Tinline argues that this is proof of how vital it is for us to 'keep an eye on the line between… what feels-as-if and what is'. Well, certainly. Unfortunately, the hundreds of hair-raising pages that precede those closing words suggest, overwhelmingly, that the ship has long sailed.
