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.'
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