book project

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Mon Jul 1 23:40:59 PDT 2002


Thanks to Michael P. for staying up late to get me the link needed...

----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Bond" <pbond at wn.apc.org>
> Chip, is there anything easily available at this stage on Iron Mountain?

The Report was a sophisticated satire on the "problems" of peace.

Report from Iron Mountain

Highbrow Hoax Mocks National Security Speak

by Jon Elliston Dossier Editor pscpdocs at aol.com

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."

(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.



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