- What if a secret gathering of luminaries concluded in the 1960s that the consequences of peace would be worse than continued war?

Today's guest explains that in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, just such a story emerged, and its consequences reverberate to this day.

He's Phil Tinline this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Phil Tinline, a journalist and documentarian whose new book is "Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today."

He joins us today from London, England.

Phil, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you.

- And really, congratulations on the book.

I mentioned to you before we got started here that this is a heck of a ride, and hopefully we'll give our audience a little bit of a taste of that in the minutes that follow.

But you begin in the aftermath of World War II, the heady optimism of the 1950s, the tragedy of the assassinations in the 1960s, the Vietnam War, to describe a moment that you said is ripe for an ancient art form, satire.

What made satire so resonant in the 1960s in America?

- Well, I think, as you say, you know, in the years after the Second World War, America suddenly finds itself the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.

It's now a nuclear superpower.

This is a country that's born as a republic of small yeomen farmers, and suddenly it's become something very, very different.

And in, as you said, in the sort of optimism, albeit tinged with, you know, McCarthy and so on of the 1950s, that makes a kind of sense.

And there's a focus very much on the Cold War in the sense of, you know, the main enemy, the Soviet Union.

But by then the time you get to the second half of the 1960s, an enormous amount of doubt is beginning to creep in about that.

As you say, you've had the assassination of John F. Kennedy, of course, in November 1963.

But by 1966, 1967, when the period I'm writing about takes place, you have the Vietnam War increasingly obviously going very wrong.

And so you have not only the great power of the postwar United States, but that power apparently not functioning, doing something either ineffective or actively evil.

And that is perfect for satire because there's no point in satirizing the powerless.

You want to satirize the powerful, but if the powerful are doing fine, why would you bother either?

- Well, so the other sort of the great establishment contribution to this comes from former President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell speech, where he warns of a military industrial complex.

Set that scene for us as well and how it contributes to this zeitgeist of the 1960s.

- So, well, as I say, you have this extraordinary polity that emerges in America after the Second World War which consists not only of the nuclear deterrent, but also an enormous amount of arms spending, what some people on the left call the permanent war economy or the permanent arms economy.

And Eisenhower is very obviously not a man of the left, but he has a rather interesting figure writing his speeches for him, a political scientist and journalist as was called Malcolm Moos, who, like Eisenhower, has really started to notice quite how much money is going into the so-called defense industry and in particular noticing the way that congresspeople, congressmen, are very, very keen for the government, for the Pentagon, to spend lots of money in their district.

And Eisenhower is, you know, obviously a man of the military, America's top general during the Second World War, but he's also keen to balance the books.

He's also quite sort of parsimonious.

He's not keen on all this money flowing out the door.

So you get this very curious marriage of thinking between Moos, who's reading the ideas of C. Wright Mills, "The Power Elite," "The Causes of World War Three," you know, really quite sort of proto New Left ideas, and Eisenhower who wants to, you know, in classic conservative fashion, balance the budget.

And they become very concerned about this idea that they term the military industrial complex that far too much money is pouring out the door and that not only is that economically potentially problematic.

It's also problematic democratically.

You know, in that speech, he talks about the idea of a sort of garrison state, as it was sometimes called.

And he says, you know, we need to be very, very wary of the power that this is accruing as well.

And so those two ideas come together, and that, you know, is then crystallized in this term "military industrial complex."

I think part of the reason that it lands so hard as well is, you know, this idea of a farewell address you know, is rather striking at the time, particularly the fact it's done on TV.

It's done direct to camera rather than in Congress.

And the idea that Eisenhower of all people would talk in this way sort of galvanizes the few people on the American left, and that becomes very sort of striking.

But of course, as we'll perhaps go on to talk about it, you know, at that point, it is not conspiratorial at all.

It's not a conspiracy theory at all.

It's just an analysis, a critique.

But it's such a resonant phrase in this context of the Cold War that we've been talking about that it takes on a life of its own.

- So, Phil, what and where was the real Iron Mountain?

And there was a real Iron Mountain.

- And there still is.

(Jim chuckles) Iron Mountain is a site to the north of New York City.

It's about 100, 110 miles north of New York City in beautiful, beautiful Hudson Valley countryside, farms all around.

You can actually see what the country was originally, you know, in the 1770s.

And it began as an iron mine, and it served as an iron mine during the Civil War, made cannonballs for the Civil War.

It then becomes a mushroom farm.

And then its owner after the Second World War, in precisely this context we've been talking about, has a bright idea because at this point in the 1950s, there's a great enthusiasm for nuclear bunkers.

And so he decides to turn his mushroom farm, his underground mushroom farm, into a set of document stores and luxury nuclear bunkers for the heads of corporations, hopefully, in their case, to flee to in the event that the worst happens.

So that story first breaks that he's done this.

He starts to let journalists in.

In early 1966, there's a story I think on the front page of "The Wall Street Journal."

And then it becomes, you know, something that corporations use in that way.

Now I should say that there is a corporation called Iron Mountain, which takes its name from that site, but it has nothing to do with this story.

You know, it's still absolutely in existence and I'm sure thriving away, but it is not connected to this story because it takes on that name in the years after the hoax.

But the site is still there.

I wasn't able to get access, sadly, but I did go and look at the road leading up to it.

And from past footage and past journalism, I was able to construct a pretty good sense of kind of the world you saw inside it in the 1960s, chandeliers, world maps, and all.

- So it becomes the source, the origin, of a great hoax, which is what your book is about.

Tell us how that hoax came to be.

- Sure, well, so, as I say, it begins in early 1966, and the Vietnam War by this point is beginning to become more contested.

It's nowhere near as contested as it was, you know, 18 months later.

But there's a curious moment early in 1966 because it looks briefly like a peace deal might happen, and on Wall Street, shares dip.

Now you might think shares would go up, but in fact they dip, and this is dubbed a peace scare.

It's something that C. Wright Mills had written about before.

But three young journalists who'd been running this satire magazine called "Monocle" are sitting in their office on the bottom of Fifth Avenue near Greenwich Village.

And they see this in the papers, and they think, "This is very strange.

Why are shares going down at the prospect of peace?"

But then they think, "Ah, this gives us an idea.

What if we concocted the story of a top secret government report commissioned by the Kennedy administration which would scope out for the administration what might happen to America if permanent global peace broke out," the satirical joke being that it would destroy the American economy.

It would wreck society, and terrible things would have to be done instead to replace all the beneficial effects of war.

And they go to a writer called Leonard Lewin, who is an older satirist.

These guys are in their early 30s.

Lewin is near 50.

And he says, "Well, if we're going to do the story of this report, I have to write the actual report," 'cause the idea is that the report is so incendiary that it's been suppressed by the government, and then it's leaked.

That's the sort of shtick of it, but that's where it comes from.

- It's a sort of method acting approach to satire, I suppose.

You've got to actually have the document to tell it.

What gives this story such stickiness?

You know, how does it propagate, and then why does it stay with us for so long?

- Well, I think it hits its moment perfectly.

I mean, the first people apart from Lewin and Victor Navasky and his colleagues at "Monocle" magazine who kind of concoct it, the first people who get some credit, if that's the right word, for its stickiness, are E.L. Doctorow, then a novelist, but not a famous novelist, who is the editor on this report, and Richard Baron, the publisher at the Dial Press.

And when Navasky and Lewin and so on go and see Baron and Doctorow to suggest this project, they sign up with alacrity.

They say, "Yes, absolutely," before they've even written anything.

They say, "Yes, we'll do that."

And then they accidentally on purpose forget to tell their sales staff that the report isn't real.

It's in their catalog as nonfiction.

And so when it's published, you have journalists from "The New York Times" phoning the White House, saying, "Is this real?

Can it be real?"

And of course the White House, perfectly reasonably, guy on the end of the phone says, "Well, I don't know.

We better check."

And that just opens up this space of uncertainty, which is exactly what Lewin said later they wanted.

They just need enough uncertainty so that people ask themselves the question, could it possibly be that the government has produced a report suggesting that we return to, you know, forms of slavery and eugenics and poisoning the rivers to replace war?

And just letting people ask that question sort of releases Pandora's box, and off it goes.

I have the memos going up to President Johnson asking people in the White House to investigate, you know, is this real and so on, investigations at the Pentagon, and so on and so on.

And then it becomes clear fairly quickly that it can't be real.

It must be a hoax.

You know, these reports eventually come back and say so, but then there's a great big debate about who wrote it.

Was it Henry Kissinger, who's just beginning to become famous?

Was it named Noam Chomsky, likewise just beginning to become famous?

Was it Richard Revere, who'd been, you know, a satirist, or Richard Goodwin who'd been writing speeches for Johnson and was disillusioned and so on?

And so that gives it its second life.

They also don't say that it's satire until somewhat later, so that kind of keeps it going.

And then it has this whole other life in the 1990s that perhaps we can go on to.

But I think it hits a perfect moment.

It sort of expresses how people are worrying about power and just extends it satirically to the point of absurdity, but not too far.

- We're gonna get to the 1990s in a minute, but I wanted to ask you...

I spend a lot of time on my own research looking at contemporary modern disinformation campaigns, and one of the great goblins that we always have to beat down is confirmation bias.

Is this just an example of people who wanted this, this confirmed what they already believed to be true in the first place, and that's why this thing gets the kind of legs that it does?

- I think that's exactly right.

I think, you know, at the time and today and before the 1960s, many people have a sense that for reasons we can understand that there's some sort of dark cabal, some sort of secret committee somewhere that has immense power and doesn't really mean ordinary people well.

And so when you come up with this very resonant sense of a secret study group, a special study group appointed by the government to meet in secrecy in very resonant places like nuclear bunkers under things called Iron Mountain, it's hardly surprising that it keys into that sense.

But it does also, you know, not key just into that sort of generic sense, but also into this particular moment in the late '60s when people are really beginning to worry about what the American state is up to.

And that speaks to something we were talking about before, which is this sense of sort of the national security state, you know, that's set up after the war.

You suddenly have not only more power, but more secrecy, and that of course creates a great big blank canvas onto which people can project all sorts of horrified imaginings.

- So it wasn't just people on the right who embraced this as true.

It was people on the left as well.

Talk about that 'cause that to me was a little bit surprising, but it happened.

- It did happen, and I think that's because, you know, particularly for young American men in the late 1960s, the idea that the government didn't mean them well is not hard to understand.

You know, if you're potentially going to be drafted by force into a war that you're actively opposed to and may be, you know, horribly injured, killed, or have to kill people to whom you mean no harm, you know, you can see why people might think that actually this is because the military machine, you know, the military industrial complex, just needs to kind of feed the meat grinder to keep churning out the profits.

There's an extraordinary scene at Yale University just after it's published, where Reagan, then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, is spending a couple of weeks at Yale for some reason, and students are talking to him, debating with him about this, and one of them says, "Have you read 'Report from Iron Mountain?'"

And Reagan actually gives quite a smart answer.

He starts talking about the conspiracy theory against the munition makers that he will have remembered from his youth in the interwar period.

And the student backs off and says, "Oh, I didn't mean that."

So there's a sense, I think, from some of them at least, that they're trying not to be conspiratorial about it.

But no, certainly some people did believe it.

And you know, I've talked to people since who were given it to study in the 1970s.

So I think it speaks to, you know, the confirmation bias of both the left and the right in different ways.

- Well, and it does feed a whole resurrection of the conspiracy theories around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the 1990s.

And this brings in Oliver Stone.

It brings in popular film.

Do you wanna just give us a taste of what that was about?

- Yes, there is this extraordinary character called Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who had served in the Air Force, had served in the Pentagon, had worked as a sort of liaison man for the CIA when they were getting their, you know, quite secret operations up and running and up until the early '60s.

And he is the figure in Oliver Stone's movie "JFK," who is the inspiration for Mr. X, brilliantly played by Donald Sutherland, who meets Kevin Costner's Jim Garrison, the DA from New Orleans, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and walks him along the Mall, explaining exactly the nature of the dark conspiracy that killed Kennedy and that's based on the war machine.

And at the end of that very long scene, he says that, you know, "The basic sort of social system, the basic driver of society, Mr. Garrison, is war."

And this is a very close paraphrase of what Fletcher Prouty had been saying in a series of articles for a magazine called "Freedom" in the mid-1980s, where he was using "Report from Iron Mountain," which he was convinced was real, to kind of explicate what he remembered from the Kennedy administration and the lore around the assassination to explain, as it seemed, why Kennedy had been killed by the military industrial complex.

So right at the core of that film, right in the sort of the why section of the film rather than the how or the who, the explanation is based on a hoax document.

And when Oliver Stone was talking about the film I think at the National Press Club in early 1992, you know, he says at one point...

He's got a bunch of people on the dais next to him, and he says, "People have said I made Mr. X up.

I haven't.

He's here.

Here he is, Colonel Fletcher Prouty."

And Prouty was an extraordinary proselytizer of this report.

He's also the person who gives a copy of it to really extreme right-wing people, of course nothing to do with Oliver Stone.

And Prouty himself wasn't extreme right, I don't think, but he's in touch with these people in a rather naive way, and he gives them a copy of the report, which they think is real, and they proceed to republish it.

- Phil, I remember the film "JFK."

I remember watching it as a college student with my then girlfriend who's now my wife, and we determined that we were gonna solve the mystery of who killed JFK because we were so inspired by that film.

But a little bit more ominously, do you have a sense of what that did, that conspiracy telling the legacy of this hoax, did to confidence in public institutions in the United States?

- Well, I think the film, you know, incorporates the hoax as though it's real and a whole bunch of other bits of conspiracist lore.

And I do think it plays quite a big role because, as you say, it's a huge blockbuster in, you know, helping to undermine confidence, again, based on what people are already feeling.

These things never start from zero.

They're always, you know, gotta compound existing feeling.

But, you know, it's striking when it happens.

Now, I don't think, I haven't seen anything to suggest that this is in Stone's mind particularly, but it just happens to land at a point where Americ has kind of won the Cold War, and a strange thing has happened.

Rather than feeling a sense of kind of ease in victory and celebration like in 1945, there's a sort of jarring sense of unease.

You know, the great unifying archenemy has gone.

At the same time, you have the so-called peace dividend.

You have, you know, George Bush beginning to cut spending on the defense industry.

So at the very time when we're hearing in the movie about the military industrial complex and its omnipotent, you know, malign presence, the actual military industrial complex is being cut back.

I mean, literally in the papers on the day that the film opens, you can see in Texas and Long Island, you know, job cuts being made in the defense industry.

And that goes alongside the whole other sort of set of worries to do with the beginnings of globalization.

You have NAFTA.

Once you've got Clinton a few months later, you have gun control.

You then have Ruby Ridge and Waco.

There's a whole series of reasons why particularly on the right and what you might call the nationalist right, people are really beginning to become really quite suspicious of and hostile towards the government.

So the idea that it's been like this ever since the '60s, there's this cabal, the military industrial complex, feeds into all of that.

And of course, as you were saying before, it's also got a legacy of belief on the left.

- So we're taping this about six months into the second presidency of Donald Trump, and he has vowed to root out the deep state.

And many other people believe that there's a deep state.

Talk about how the hoax influences that today.

- Well, so it's a particularly useful document if you believe that there is some sort of dark presence at the heart of power, whether you call it the military industrial complex or the power elite or the deep state, or the invisible government or the shadow government or whatever you call it because you can take all sorts of things which you might object to and you might decide are the products of a malign cabal and use "Report from Iron Mountain" to show that, "show" in quotes, that they are, you know, things that have been planned by the elite.

So, for instance, one of the things that it talks about, as I mentioned earlier, is the idea that, you know, one way you might have to replace the effect of war, the unifying effect of war, is gross pollution of the environment.

Now that's said in 1967, and there's a line in the report saying, "Well, that's probably impractical 'cause it would be a generation and a half before environmental pollution is a sufficiently sort of severe problem for it to have that effect."

So people look at that in the early '90s when the Rio Summit's happening, and suddenly, "Aha, 1967-1992, that is a generation and a half.

The reason environmental policy has gone in this way suppressing ordinary real Americans is because in 1967 people concocted this idea.

And here we are a generation and a half later.

Their plan has come to fruition."

So it's such a useful document because it can be used in that kind of way, but it's also, you can use it to sort of say both that the government is faking something and that it's secretly doing something.

You can use it in all kinds of different ways.

And so that plays into, as you say, the idea of the deep state.

But I mean the deep state itself I would cast as a sort of child of the idea of the military industrial complex.

It has a curious root into the mouth of Donald Trump, the deep state.

You know, there's a guy called Mike Lofgren, who's a longstanding staffer on Capitol Hill who writes this book in 2016 called "The Deep State," which is very critical of Donald Trump indeed, but it uses arguments which speak to some of the discontent people feel about the kind of accretion of power in the combination of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the defense industry and elements of Congress.

And it speaks to the same sort of angst that Trump is playing on, but, of course, Lofgren's analysis is largely not conspiracist, whereas Trump's is very much conspiracist.

And so that, you know, comes out of this same tradition.

- So to get ready for this, one of the things I did was I wanted to see sort of the legacy of the hoax online, and I landed on a Wikipedia page that begins with this, quote, "The Report from Iron Mountain is purported to be a 1967 anti-war satire written by Leonard C. Lewin.

However, many believe the book to be true and all information regarding it being a hoax is untrue, and the meeting and report did actually take place, and the findings were published as truth.

The calling of the publication as a hoax is the method used by those in control to keep the actual plan a secret, as ordered by Lyndon Johnson in 1966."

This is the first sentence, first two sentences, on the Wikipedia entry for "Iron Mountain."

My question for you is, what does this tell us in 2025 about the media environment we're living in today?

- Nothing good.

(all laughing) - Well, yes, indeed.

I mean, it tells you that it's hard sometimes for people to see what is true.

I think one of the things that's so striking about that is once people have got that mindset, it's very hard to get back round behind it.

I mean, you know, the idea that...

I mean, I can prove that it's a hoax because I have the contract saying "peace hoax book."

And also in the report it says their first meeting at Iron Mountain was in 1963.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, they didn't even open the site until 1966, so they couldn't have met there.

So, you know, it's not hard to do.

But no, I think the idea, because, as I say, there's this preordained image that people have of this kind of committee at the heart of power that means people ill, it's very, very hard if you truly believe that to be so for evidence to overcome that.

But I think what it tells us is not that this is something that began with the internet or with Donald Trump or with social media because clearly this report is an example both in the '90s and to some extent in the '60s of it taking place before that, and we have examples going right back.

You have "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the kind of evil toxic, you know, antisemitic smear, concocted partly out of an old French satire at the beginning of the 20th century and going back from there.

I think what has happened, though, and where things have changed, is what we have at the moment is a confluence of things we haven't seen for quite a long time.

We have disruptive new communications technology, and we've had a long period ever since the financial crash in 2008 of kind of political flux, of political uncertainty.

We haven't really seen that since the 1930s.

And add on top of that, the idea is that, you know, bundled together as sort of postmodernism, the idea that, you know, everyone has their own truth, that narrative, you know, is all, and that everything can be kind of deconstructed and questioned to the point of fundamental doubt.

Put all those three things together, and it's hardly surprising that it's quite hard to convince people that the truth is the truth.

- Phil Tinline, this is a remarkable book, "The Ghosts of Iron Mountain," remarkable read.

Thank you for spending some time with us.

That is all the time we have this week for "Story in the Public Square."

But if you want to know more about the show, you can find us on social media, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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