http://www.parascope.com/articles/1296/iron.htm
Report from Iron Mountain
Highbrow Hoax Mocks National Security Speak
by Jon Elliston
Dossier Editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
It was a classic "black propaganda" operation -- a "top secret" document
ghostwritten to appear as though it was authored by the enemy -- perpetrated
with the skill of a CIA psywar specialist. Yet the grand disinformation
effort known as the Report from Iron Mountain was conceived and written not
by some veteran covert operative, but by a cabal of crafty leftist
intellectuals who sought to turn the logic of the national security state
against itself. Though long ago exposed as a hilarious, highbrow parody of
think-tank jargon and realpolitik reasoning, the Report continues to be
viewed in some quarters as a leaked official document that exposes a secret
government scheme to maintain the "war system" indefinitely.
The plot to prepare, and then "leak" to the public, an alleged government
report examining the costs and benefits of shifting the U.S. economy and
political system from its Cold War stance, was hatched in 1966 by Victor
Navasky, editor of the political satire rag Monocle, and writer Leonard
Lewin. Navasky and his staff at Monocle noticed a New York Times story
reporting that the stock market had dipped in response to what was termed a
"peace scare." The business of America, it increasingly appeared, was war
business. The seed of the scheme that grew to become the Report from Iron
Mountain was planted, and Navasky and a handful of co-conspirators set about
producing a sophisticated satire on the problems of peace, ostensibly
authored by a panel of national security experts secretly convened by the
government.
Lewin agreed to write the fake study and found a sympathetic publisher in
Dial Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, whose editor, E.L. Doctorow,
agreed to facilitate the hoax by marketing the Report as a non-fiction book.
The cover story begins in Lewin's introduction, where he claims he was asked
to disseminate the Report by an unnamed member of the Special Study Group
(SSG), a panel of 15 experts from diverse disciplines gathered by the
government to examine "the possibility and desirability of peace." The SSG,
wrote Lewin, was convened in 1963 at a secret New York facility -- "an
underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of large American corporations" --
known as Iron Mountain.
For two and a half years, Lewin wrote, the SSG held secret meetings at this
Strangelovian outpost and other sites around the country, to brainstorm on
"the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when
a condition of 'permanent peace' should arrive, and to draft a program for
dealing with this contingency." The anonymous specialists took of dim view of
a world without war, concluding that "lasting peace, while not theoretically
impossible, is probably unattainable; even if it could be achieved it would
almost certainly not be in the best interest of stable society to achieve
it."
Instead, the Report argued, it is in the "best interest of stable society" to
identify and perpetuate the "essential, non-military functions of war." These
include the economic stimulus of defense spending and a host of other
war-related factors that favor the traditional institutions of social and
political control. "The basic authority of a modern state over its people
resides in its war powers," the Report says, direly predicting that chaos and
disorder would result without the nation-rallying opportunities that armed
conflict provides. Absent the national security priorities that empower the
military-industrial system, the status quo could expect a major shakeup.
Writing as the SSG, Lewin explored all the implications of losing "the
important motivational function of war." Should the United States be forced
to abandon its "war system," the Report speculated on potential corrective
national policies -- "substitutes for the functions of war." The Iron
Mountain antidote to peace, should it somehow break out, is to manufacture
"alternate enemies" to maintain a siege mentality among Americans, leaving
them open to continued social engineering by U.S. elites.
The Report posits sinister schemes to mobilize the masses in the absence of
war, such as the creation of "an extraterrestrial menace," "massive global
environmental pollution," or "an omnipresent, virtually omnipotent
international police force." In the event popular passions are not
sufficiently inflamed by these new enemies, the Report suggests instituting
"a modern, sophisticated form of slavery," or perhaps "socially oriented
blood games," organized "in the manner of the Spanish Inquisition and the
witch trials of other periods."
Navasky later wrote that the major objective of the hoax was to "put the
unpopular subject of conversion from a military to a peacetime economy on the
national agenda." And while the Report from Iron Mountain certainly served
that purpose to some extent, much of the initial attention directed at the
book focused on efforts to determine both its authenticity and the name(s) of
its author(s).
Debate over whether the report was genuine spilled over into the largest
newspapers in the country, and the media's frenzied search for the mystery
writer rivaled the recent hype over the 1995 best-seller Primary Colors, also
published with an anonymous author. Kirkus Reviews commented that "if [the
Report] is a fraud, it is a clever one ... if not, it is a chilling case for
the necessity of war as policymakers see it."
For many observers, the Report was regarded as a sign of the times, whatever
its origins. In the fast-shifting political culture of 1968, as the conflict
over U.S. intervention in Vietnam erupted in many universities and cities and
sparked new waves of dissent against government secrecy, the Iron Mountain
document was intriguing and relevant enough to make its way to the New York
Times bestseller list. Esquire magazine reprinted a 28,000 word excerpt, and
dozens of publications ran commentaries on the issues raised in the Report.
Many people discussed the Report with the perspective that whether or not it
is an actual government plan for dominating the populace, the logic and
strategies it contains deserve serious contemplation.
In 1972, Lewin tried to put speculation about the document's authorship to
rest, declaring in a New York Times feature that "I wrote the 'Report,' all
of it." Decades after this public debunking, Report from Iron Mountain was
resurrected by ultra-rightwing groups like the Liberty Lobby, who still
considered the document a genuine official study. The Lobby, which was
founded by Willis Carto (the notorious anti-Semitic activist who also
launched the Institute for Historical Review, a major force in the holocaust
denial movement), issued their own reprint of the document. A Lobby
publishing outlet, Noontide Press, continued to pitch the Report as Lewin had
done at the outset of the hoax, as a secret government work.
Once Lewin discovered that his work had been stolen by the Liberty Lobby, he
sued Carto's group for copyright infringement. Though the Lobby's lawyers
initially argued that Lewin's charges were specious, given that the Report
was in fact a government-produced document, the suit was resolved with an
out-of-court settlement in which the Lobby agreed to pay Lewin an undisclosed
sum and give him the remaining copies of their version of the Report.
In 1996 the Simon & Schuster division Free Press published an updated version
of the report, supplemented with an appendix of major media coverage of the
"Iron Mountain Affair." The new edition includes an introduction by Navasky,
who is now publisher and editorial director of The Nation magazine, in which
he weighs the results of the hoax he initiated:
"The Report was a success in that it achieved its mission, which in this case
was to provoke thinking about the unthinkable -- the conversion to a
peacetime economy and the absurdity of the arms race. But it was a failure,
given that even with the end of the cold war we still have a cold war economy
(which makes the report all the more relevant today)."
Navasky also notes that despite their best efforts, the Iron Mountain hoaxers
have failed to convincingly expose their own scam. Some militia activists and
conspiracists continue to say confidently that the Report is the genuine
article, a suppressed government master plan for instituting tyranny after
the Cold War. George Eaton, publisher of the Arkansas-based Patriot Report,
told the Wall Street Journal in 1995 that the Report "was an official
document, done by the will of the President and secreted away so that it
wouldn't be released to the public." Easton said the Report "shows that there
is a conspiracy against citizens."
Samuel Sherwood, founder of the U.S. Militia Association, voiced a similar
view of the Report: "A group of people got together and said, 'Here is our
blueprint for America.' It has caused a great deal of alarm." Retired Air
Force Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a key consultant for Oliver Stone's JFK who
authored a book alleging that a "secret team" of U.S. military and
intelligence officials were responsible for the assassination of President
Kennedy, has cited the Report to back up some of his claims.
Unauthorized transcripts of the Report still appear frequently on the
Internet, and Simon & Schuster said letters threatening lawsuits were
necessary to persuade the operators of seven web sites to cease distributing
the book in electronic form. Chip Berlet, an analyst for Boston-based
Political Research Associates who tracks right-wing movements, says
countering the deep-set suspicions about the Report is "like trying to get
rid of mildew in your shower -- Report from Iron Mountain will never die."
The renewed belief in the Report represents a mutation of the American
political landscape and a bizarre turn of events that Lewin and his
colleagues could not have anticipated in 1966. Yet one passage from the
beginning of the Report now reads like an amazingly prescient foretelling of
the rebirth of the Iron Mountain myth. In a perfect parody of official
pomposity, Lewin's SSG warned that releasing the Report "would not be in the
public interest," in light of the "clear and predictable danger of a crisis
in public confidence which ultimately publication of this Report might be
expected to provoke. The likelihood that a lay reader, unexposed to the
exigencies of higher political or military responsibility, will misconstrue
the purpose of this project, and the intent of its participants, seems
obvious."
