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.
