What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: the Most Influential Hoax in American History
On April Fool’s Day, I decided to explore the fascinating history of the main source of one of the longest-running and widespread conspiracy theories in American history. According to a 2023 YouGov poll, 54% of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone when he shot President John F. Kennedy in 1963—so most Americans are wrong about that, and they’re wrong in part because of a work of fiction published in the late 1960s.
The Grandfather of All Modern Conspiracy Theories
Widespread disbelief in the “official story” of the Kennedy assassination has inspired a library of books, congressional hearings, major motion pictures, and, most recently, the declassification of thousands of documents (none of which, by the way, support the idea of a conspiracy). But more importantly, Kennedy assassination plots normalized and spread conspiracy theories in general, underpinning all the fake news that followed, from Obama’s birth certificate to vaccine skepticism—if the government could cover up a political assassination, they argue, it could be up to anything .
But what if Kennedy’s most widely accepted conspiracy theory was based on a work of satirical fiction? It is this premise that forms the basis of Phil Tinline’s recent book , Iron Mountain Ghosts: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Says about America Today, an examination of the history and influence of The Iron Mountain Report , a 1967 work of fiction that began as left-wing satire but has become one of the most influential texts in American history.
Oliver Stone’s JFK and the “CIA Did It” Conspiracy
While there are hundreds of theories about who was really behind the Kennedy assassination and why they did it, probably the most widely accepted version of the story that you can believe is the theory put forward by Oliver Stone in his 1991 film JFK : The CIA killed Kennedy because he was going to withdraw troops from Vietnam and end the Cold War.
Protagonist Jim Garrison puts it this way in the film: “What happened on November 22, 1963, was a coup d’état…War is the biggest business in America, worth $80 billion a year. “President Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy that was planned and promoted at the highest levels of our government and carried out by fanatical and disciplined Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and the CIA covert operations apparatus.”
But where did Stone’s protagonist get this idea? As detailed in Tinline’s book, the CIA theory was expounded in the JFK film “X”, a character based on the real-life former Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty. Pruti’s source is, in his opinion, a “classified report from a think tank” called “The Iron Mountain Report: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.” And “Report from Iron Mountain” is a literary hoax created by the editors of the short-lived left-wing satirical magazine Monocle .
Birth of Report from Iron Mountain
Back in 1966, Victor Navasky, editor of Monocle magazine , read news about a stock market crash caused by cuts in military spending; Wall Street called it “the fear of the world.” This inspired Navasky to commission writer Leonard Levin, with the help of economist John Kenneth Galbraith and others, to write the “Iron Mountain Report “, supposedly the result of leaked findings from the “Task Study Group” commissioned by the Kennedy administration to plan the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy. His conclusion: peace will likely lead to the collapse of the United States.
Iron Mountain was edited by H. L. Mencken and published as a work of non-fiction in 1967, but most reviewers and literary writers have recognized it as social commentary. However, the general public was divided, so author Levine dispelled any doubt by confirming that Iron Mountain was a hoax in 1974. And that should have been the end of it. But that’s not true.
The Strange Afterlife of “Report from Iron Mountain”
The real purpose of Iron Mountain was to highlight the absurdity of the Cold War through exaggeration and satire—the book helps quite a bit by suggesting UFO hoaxes, “blood games,” and the return of slavery as a possible replacement for war—but its ideas, stripped of their satirical context, got out of the hands of the literati who came up with them. Iron Mountain began to seep into the toxic coffee pot of fringe thinkers, combining and metastasizing with other prolific, fictional, conspiracy texts like Alternative 3 and The Protocols of the Brotherhood of Zion, until Iron Mountain became a foundational text for cranks, part of an ideological framework upon which they could hang anything.
It wasn’t just Oliver Stone’s source who accepted the Iron Mountain Report as fact. Much to the author’s dismay, the book was rediscovered by the growing right-wing paramilitary movement of the 1980s and republished as nonfiction by the anti-Semitic Noontide Press. Milton William Cooper cited an Iron Mountain passage from the seminal text of the conspiracy theory “Behold the Pale Horse,” said to be the favorite of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. From here it’s a straight path to the Deep State, Q-anon, Alex Jones, Covid cover-ups and everything else the nutcases talk about this week on X.