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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.
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The ‘Iron Mountain' hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today's conspiracy theories
We live in a blizzard of fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories. It's tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it's about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories. In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret 'special study group' recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America's economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson. In reality, as the White House eventually realised, Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. It was the brainchild of leftwing satirists: Victor Navasky, editor of a magazine called Monocle, his colleagues, and a fellow satirist, Leonard Lewin, who wrote it with the help of luminaries like the famous economist and former US ambassador to India, JK Galbraith. Their goal was to expose what they saw as the insanity driving the intervention in Vietnam, and the whole of the cold war. By presenting their fake report as a real leak, they aimed to make people ask if this insane document might be real – and what that said about the people running the US government. And it worked. To young Americans living under the shadow of conscription, Report seemed all too plausible. Officials whispered to journalists that some of their colleagues really did think like this. Once the hoax had its satirical impact, Lewin came clean. But his work was so convincing it began to take on a life of its own. In the late 1980s, Report from Iron Mountain was discovered by the extreme right, which was convinced it was real. It was republished by a company called the Noontide Press, part of a network of fringe organisations that were among America's primary promoters of Holocaust denial. These people were convinced they had found the smoking gun, confirming their darkest suspicions about the government's secret plots to start wars and control the public. A horrified Lewin embarked on a long legal battle to take back control of his work and its true, meaning. But meanwhile, the militia movement spreading across the US seized on Report from Iron Mountain, as fuel for its paranoid visions of imminent oppression at the hands of the one-world government and its black helicopters. And Lewin's creation found its way to Hollywood. In JFK, Oliver Stone's 1991 movie about the Kennedy assassination, the great revelation about why the president was assassinated hinges on a character repeating the hoax's claims in the belief that they were disturbing truths. Report even spawned a secondary hoax: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This purported to be the operations manual that helped the elite control its sheeple-civilians. This strange text was first popularised by the pioneering conspiracist Milton William Cooper, who published it in Behold a Pale Horse, his influential compendium of conspiracy theories. Cooper also included extracts from Report from Iron Mountain itself (and, horrifyingly, another hoax: that notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Silent Weapons has often been cited by arch conspiracist Alex Jones and has been invoked by 'Q', the ostensible government insider revered by the QAnon movement. Lewin and his colleagues had contrived their hoax so expertly that they inadvertently created 'evidence' for a host of conspiracy theories. It could be used to explain everything from why wars end to the real reasons behind lockdown, from environmental regulations and terrorist attacks to the fiery end of a cult in Waco, Texas. The reasoning at work here is revealing. If something in Report chimes with what is really happening in the world, the conspiracist's logic runs, that cannot be a coincidence. Rather, it exposes the secret motives that caused that reality. The principle here – a consistent fallacy of conspiracy theory – is that 'nothing is accidental'. One online analysis of Report from Iron Mountain in 2014 even decided the fact Lewin later wrote a novel was an attempt to retrospectively create a cover identity so he could pretend Report was fiction too. And yet the fate of this all-too-successful hoax also suggests what we might need to do to counter this kind of thinking. In a political climate roiled by conspiracy theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true. Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy, which will be published by Head of Zeus on 27 March.
