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POLITICS
Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax that Duped America and its Sinister Legacy
Phil Tinline
Bloomsbury, $34.99
The famed 20th-century British foreign correspondent Claud Cockburn was known to use the pithy phrase, “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.” It had a ring of truth, especially when he dealt with duplicitous government officials during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and World War II.
It’s equally relevant today when lying administrations manipulate intelligence in the service of illegal aggression. Think the criminal Iraq invasion in 2003 and Israel’s exaggerated claims that Iran was weeks away from building a nuclear bomb.
Cockburn warned that far too many journalists were willing dupes of this system and preferred to be close to power rather than an active check on it.
But what happens when the truth is revealed and too few people believe it?
This is the story behind the remarkable 1967 book, Report from Iron Mountain, written by New York intellectuals who claimed to be revealing a top-secret government report into how the US would react if permanent and irreversible world peace broke out. The authors posited that the US military was the glue that held American society together and without it, chaos was inevitable.
The “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley after storming the US Capitol in 2021. Credit: Getty Images
Washington’s focus on endless war, the authors wrote, allows a nation to maintain the class system, back scientific discoveries, keep unwanted populations under control and maintain societal allegiance to the flag and a common cause.
If war suddenly ended, the report feared, there would be a need to find alternative career options for the hundreds of thousands of men no longer in the armed forces (then fighting an immoral war in Vietnam). “Blood games” was one suggestion.
War was also viewed as an effective reducer of population. To replace this outcome, it was proposed to consider introducing eugenic artificial insemination.
Reading this today, it may seem obvious that it was all a hoax, an elaborately designed work by left-wingers who knew that US president Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address in January 1961, argued against the establishment of a “military industrial complex”. Military spending was already so out of control in the 1960s that any sane person would oppose it.
In 2025, the US Defence Department’s unofficial budget is well over US$1 trillion, the largest in the world.
And yet, as the British journalist Phil Tinline uncovers in this astoundingly relevant tale, the 1967 book fooled millions of readers and journalists from the late 1960s until the present day precisely because trust in US institutions had plunged in the decades since the Second World War.
Today, in Trump’s America, trust has never been lower, as huge numbers of citizens feel both disconnected and contemptuous of officialdom. Reporters, editors, conspiracy theorists, talk show hosts and guests and both the left and right argued over Report from Iron Mountain for years. It was a viral phenomenon before the term existed.
Tinline is acutely aware that the 1960s was a turning point in how America saw itself and the world. The murder of a US president and prominent black civil rights leaders along with lashings of deadly government falsehoods over the failed war in Vietnam was enough to convince many Americans that the Report could be real (even after one of its creators admitted years later that it was fake).
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Despite the book being released at a time when the Lyndon B. Johnson administration was flailing in Vietnam, and lying on an epic scale about imminent victory, this didn’t lead to the decimation of the military industrial complex.
In fact, as Tinline writes, “this was the start of a phenomenon that has continued ever since: a tenacious fear of what we now call the ‘deep state’, which has grown even as the overall power and reach of the real post-war US state has faltered and fallen back”.
This story doesn’t end in the 1960s. As the decades passed, far-right groups latched onto the Report, taking it as gospel and circulating it to a new generation. From the antisemites, who believe that a secret cabal of Jews control Washington and deny the Holocaust in Nazi-controlled Europe, to racists who crave a white ethno-state in the US, the Report felt believable.
The perpetual war machine, an undeniably central tenet of the US empire from Truman to Trump, has allowed many Americans to latch onto the Report’s words as to why conflicts kept on happening. None of this happened by chance, of course, as wars have long been imagined and war-gamed in think tanks, media outlets and the fevered minds of warmongers.
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The end of the Cold War has done nothing to erode the potency of the war sector. While some pushed the fanciful concept that this would usher in the end of history, a world where Western liberal capitalistic democracy thrived, authoritarianism is surging globally in the 21st century.
With the United States in permanent economic decline and the Trump administration deliberately reducing Washington’s soft power across multiple sectors, a multipolar world is upon us. Whether enough of the world’s population will benefit is unlikely.
The defence sector is soaring, however. Lockheed Martin, Anduril and Elbit have never been busier. Killing civilians is profitable.
The Ghosts of Iron Mountain is a potent reminder that hard facts have rarely been enough when powerful satire feels more truthful.
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of the Walkley-Award winning book, The Palestine Laboratory.
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