Ghosts of Iron Mountain

A compelling work of investigative journalism that explores the surprising origins and hidden ramifications of an epic late 1960s hoax, perpetrated by cultural luminaries, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow. For readers curious about the surprising connections between John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone, Timothy McVeigh, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump.

Delve into the labyrinth of America’s conspiracy culture with this investigative masterpiece that unearths the roots of our era’s most potent myths.

In 1966, amid unrest over the Vietnam War and the alarming growth of the military-industrial complex, little-known writer Leonard Lewin was approached by a group of ingenious satirists on the Left to concoct a document that would pretend to ratify everyone’s fears that the government was deceiving the public. Devoting more than a year to the project, Lewin constructed a fiction (passed off as the honest truth) that a government-run Study Group had been charged with examining the “cost of peace,” setting its first meetings in the very real Iron Mountain nuclear bunker in upstate New York (which lent the resulting book, Report from Iron Mountain, its name). In Lewin’s telling, this gathering of the nation’s academic elite concluded that suspending war would be disastrous, forcing all sorts of bizarre measures to compensate.

Lewin didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d created a narrative that fed the interests of both ends of the political spectrum—by promoting the idea that the government uses centralized power for evil.

What fascinates about Phil Tinline’s revelation-filled recreation of that ingenious hoax is seeing how it explodes into America’s consciousness, dominates media reports, and sends government officials scrambling. And then, subsequently, how Lewin’s fabrication is adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology.

In this riveting—and, at times, chilling—tale of a deception that refuses to die is an unsettling warning about how, in contemporary times, a hoax may no longer be a hoax if it can be used to recruit followers to a cause.