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.

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