Book Review: ‘Ghosts of Iron Mountain,’ by Phil Tinline

GHOSTS OF IRON MOUNTAIN: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today, by Phil Tinline

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.

GHOSTS OF IRON MOUNTAIN: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today | By Phil Tinline | Scribner | 336 pp. | $29.99