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Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Inside Iron Mountain: How a group of liberal satirists pulled off America's ‘hoax of the century'
'Never in our history,' declared a TV anchor, 'has there been such an avalanche of information, so little believed or believable.' This was no anguished lament over AI or social media. This was 1967, the era of the Vietnam War, racial tension, and urban blight, when a group of liberal satirists launched a prank so well-executed it would later be called 'the hoax of the century.' That November, Dial Press, whose authors included James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, published 'Report From Iron Mountain.' Author Leonard Lewin, 51, was a melancholy Harvard graduate who until then had little to show for his escape from his family's sugar refinery business in Indianapolis to become a writer in New York. In his introduction, Lewin recounted how an old acquaintance, a social sciences professor, had contacted him out of the blue with a copy of a classified government report, its contents so incendiary that the document had been suppressed. The report presented the results of a classified war-games exercise staged inside Iron Mountain, an elaborate bomb shelter north of Manhattan, in the mid-1960s. Iron Mountain, said the report, was an assembly of geniuses typical of the Cold War, convening national security officials, academics, think-tank intellectuals, nuclear theorists, and others who devoted concentrated thought, during the twilight struggle with the USSR, to 'unthinkable' scenarios of nuclear holocaust, global catastrophe, and the like. The Special Study Group at Iron Mountain considered the effects if 'permanent peace' broke out. The panel concluded that war, and the ceaseless preparation for it that defined America after 1945, served as 'the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies.' Without wars and war-footing industries, the report said, the U.S. economy would be upended. 'No program or combination of programs yet proposed for a transition to peace,' the group found, 'has remotely approached meeting the comprehensive functional requirements of a world without war.' Should peace break out, the report projected that the citizenry would have to be managed via disinformation and other measures: inducing panic by inventing an alien threat from space, poisoning the atmosphere, practicing eugenics. Within days, newspaper reviewers and senior Johnson administration officials concluded that 'Report From Iron Mountain' — the shadowy professor, the sinister retreat, the horrifyingly cynical report cooked up there — was a hoax. In a 1972 New York Times essay, Lewin admitted as much. It was the brainchild of a group of liberal cut-ups from the satirical publication Monocle, among them Victor Navasky, later the editor of The Nation and a leading left-wing historian. Lewin succeeded beyond his dreams: His mimicry of the 'crackpot realists' at the vanguard of Cold War theorizing, the nightmare-scenario weltanschauung of contemporaneous films such as 'Failsafe' and 'Dr. Strangelove,' was too good, too spot-on. In a paranoid age already roiled by nuclear anxiety, assassinations, riots, and revelations of government deception, the fringes of the left and right converged, with the result that many Americans refused to accept that the report was a hoax. By the mid-1990s, Lewin had to sue far-right groups to stop them from republishing his satire as gospel and marketing it to anti-Semites and militiamen. In 'Ghosts of Iron Mountain,' BBC veteran Phil Tinline revisits Lewin's dark comic masterpiece and traces its enduring impact to explore America's 'descent into a kind of omnipresent paranoia . . . a tenacious fear of what we now call the 'deep state,' which has grown even as the overall power and reach of the real postwar U.S. state has faltered and fallen back.' Many educated readers didn't care whether the 'Report From Iron Mountain' was real. A radio host who interviewed Lewin in 1968 said: 'I don't accept the fact that this is a real report, but it doesn't really matter.' The report, the host said, was 'the one book which seems to me to sum up the age in which we live more than anything else.' Tinline gives a guided tour of the national and international events that have stoked — and, in some cases, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, been inspired by — the feverish fringe thinking that seems, today, more entrenched than ever. The two World Wars, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Sept. 11 attacks and the 'forever wars' that followed them, the oil shocks, sell-offs, and recessions, and the arrival of COVID-19: To large numbers of Americans at all points, these epochal turns in history were the work not of accelerating market forces or idiosyncratic decision-makers but of a hidden cabal, one whose membership mystifyingly defies normal generational attrition. Thus the 'merchants of death' of the early 20th century managed, somehow, to pass the baton to the Cigarette Smoking Man of 'The X-Files' and his trench-coated cohorts, whispered to have orchestrated the bloodshed at Dealey Plaza, the lucrative carnage of Vietnam and the ouster of erratic, unreliable Richard Nixon; and they, in turn, bequeathed the reins of the global oligarchic conspiracy to the even more malevolent globalists and Deep State saboteurs active today. Tinline is a brilliant researcher and writer with an unerring gift for recreating the arrogance of America's postwar elites and the corresponding fears and delusions of large segments of her citizenry. Supported by an impressive array of documentation, from previously unpublished tapes and affidavits to diaries and archival papers, 'Ghosts of Iron Mountain' is the best kind of modern history: deeply researched, entertainingly written, piercingly perceptive. Some factual errors creep in. Jeffrey Miller, one of the students killed at Kent State, was not the 'shot-dead friend' of Mary Ann Vecchio, the girl seen kneeling and crying over Miller's bloody corpse in John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph; Vecchio was a 14-year-old runaway who had met Miller only minutes before his death. Likewise, Tom Wolfe, in his seminal 1963 Esquire article, palled around with Cassius Clay, not Muhammad Ali. We might also quarrel with Tinline's depiction of our 'omnipresent paranoia' as an outgrowth of the 'deep suspicion of the centralized power elite that had grown up during the Cold War.' As Tinline acknowledges, Lewin's hoax, preying on fears of massive government power, constituted only the latest installment in 'a long, aggressively democratic tradition in America.' Indeed, fears of centralized power have enjoyed long currency in American life. 'Liberty had never been preserved,' William Mangum declared on the Senate floor in 1836, 'in any country where the central power was not resisted.' Finally, Tinline fails to mention — shocking for a Brit! — what many consider to be the true hoax of the century, which was sprung two years after 'Report From Iron Mountain' and went global on a scale Leonard Lewin never attained: the Paul-is-Dead rumor, which held that Paul McCartney died in a motorcycle accident and was secretly replaced by the other Beatles, a conspiracy hinted at in 'death clues' hidden on their album covers. Nonetheless, 'Ghosts of Iron Mountain' is essential reading for students of modern history and public perception, a rich survey of how we got to the point where practically every event or phenomenon is instantly decried as a 'false flag.' James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of 'Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.'
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.
