Latest news with #ReportfromIronMountain
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.
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.
