Before QAnon and the Deep State, There Was Iron Mountain

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.