Yet again: Pilate's question

I must once again sound a recurrent theme of this blog: Too many myths inform our political discourse. For one particularly galling example, check out this piece by Richard C. Cook, published on the Global Research site.

Cook devotes his article to promoting a classic conspiracy hoax titled Report From Iron Mountain. Like the Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion, the Report is one of those unkillable texts that cranks continually cite as genuine, even though it isn't. Although I wouldn't be concerned if someone like Jeff Rense stumped for that hoax -- because everyone knows that Rense loves high weirdness more than he loves high standards -- I had heretofore formed the impression that Global Research is not a site run by and for cranks.

Cook himself appears to be a fellow of some accomplishment: He describes himself as "a former federal analyst who writes on public policy issues." He also has written a book titled We Hold These Truths: the Hope of Monetary Reform. An impressive resume.

So why the hell is he trafficking in the kind of crap that would embarrass Alex Jones and George Noory? Why does he approvingly cite a screwball like Jim Marrs?

(I once met Marrs, many years ago. He usually wears a very tall Texas-style hat to compensate for the fact that he's rather short. I don't know what he's hiding under that chapeau, but it ain't brains.)

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry on the Report attempts to create the impression that a "controversy" exists as to the work's fraudulent nature. There is no controversy -- except to the degree that there can be "controversy" between the sane and the crazed. The true origin story of this text has been told many times -- and authorship was proven in a court of law.

Roughly a decade ago, I got some ways into writing a book devoted to these political myths. I never finished that project because the potential audience seemed rather too small to justify the effort. However, I did complete a draft of the chapter devoted to Report From Iron Mountain. After the jump, I'll publish a few long-ish chunks from that chapter.

(Please keep in mind that I wrote some years ago, and a few references may now be out of date. Only about half of my chapter appears here. I will not reproduce the numerous footnotes.)

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

Report From Iron Mountain is dead.

Writer Leonard C. Lewin killed it decades ago, when he confessed in the pages of the New York Times (on November 19, 1972) that he had authored one of history's most impressive hoaxes. And yet, as in the legend of El Cid, the corpse continues to charge into battle. That cadaverous assault has continued for some thirty years, and nothing you or I or Leonard Lewin can say will halt it.

Believers (and there are a growing number) consider the Report a unique view into the inner workings of the Great Conspiracy. It is, in the words of one militia member, nothing less than "the plan for the destruction of the U.S." Another internet crusader describes the work as "the master-plan methodology being currently employed on a global scale to secure for the “Illuminated” self-proclaimed god-men, a world that would give them a planet and its people to use as their cold, evil, malignant hearts desire."

The Report — or, to give the proper title, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace — first came to public attention in 1967, when a respected publisher, Dial Press (a division of Simon & Schuster), offered the work in its non-fiction catalog. This small book devoted most of its pages to a supposedly "liberated" secret document, summarizing the research of a U.S. government think tank called the Special Studies Group, or SSG. The subject: The American economy's dependence on war, and the nefarious strategies required to meet the dreadful challenge of peace.

The booklet appeared at a time when a wide section of the public began to question the administration's stated reasons for prosecuting the Vietnam war. Pundits of that era used the term "credibility gap" to describe the difference between government pronouncements and reality. The Report — if genuine — indicated just how wide that gap truly was.

The Report certainly seemed genuine. The president of Dial Press, Richard Baron, vouched for its authenticity. So did Esquire magazine, which published a 28,000 word excerpt. When a New York Times reporter asked the White House about the document, he received a terse "no comment," which many interpreted to mean: "The thing is real, but we don't want to admit it."

Many intellectual journals of the day devoted much ink to the debate. Liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith (who, as it turned out, was in on the gag), adopted the persona of "Professor Herschel McLandress" and wrote an appreciative review in the Washington Post Book World. "McLandress" revealed that he had been invited to participate in the Special Studies Group, but declined due to a scheduling conflict. "As I would put my personal repute behind the authenticity of this document," he affirmed, "so I would testify to the validity of its conclusions. My reservations relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public."

In a rather unnerving development, those most likely to take the text at face value often held "inside" positions. "A number of people — most of them in government and regular readers of bureaucratese — came to believe the Report was the real thing," wrote Victor Navasky. The document set off sirens within the Johnson White House. U.S. News and World Report quoted one unnamed administration source to the effect that the SSG was a real entity, set up by the Kennedy administration and quashed by President Johnson. Another anonymous source claimed that Report From Iron Mountain was a ruse concocted by Kennedy forces who hoped to discredit LBJ. Both tales, equally false, reveal Johnson's lingering fears of his predecessor's ghost.

The work's verisimilitude owes much to its style: Bureaucratic, value-neutral, and dry as a Death Valley summer. In the best academic fashion, a parallel text runs through the many footnotes, all of which (with the exception of two deliberately phony citations) point to actual books and articles. Internal evidence indicates that literary inspiration came from Herman Kahn, the nuclear warfare theorist noted for his Olympian indifference to the lives and deaths of mere human beings. As is sometimes the case with genuine governmental reports, the more outlandish notions waft gently into the text: The suggestion to stage an ersatz UFO invasion, for example, appears almost subliminally.

The Report never resorts to the sledgehammer approach found in the more oafish hoaxes, such as the Protocols or Hubbard's Brain-Washing manual; neither does it exude the sheer zaniness found in Silent Weapons or Alternative Three. This is a sophisticated and cunning job, perhaps the finest example of its genre since Jonathan's Swift's A Modest Proposal.


* * *

Behind the Scenes

Can we be sure this thing was just a gag?

Indeed it was, according to Leonard Lewin, who insisted that he wrote the work — "all of it" — as an anti-militarist satire. Neither John Doe nor the SSG ever existed. Lewin and his confederates — in particular, Victor Navasky, who seems to have instigated the affair (and who now edits The Nation magazine) — partook in nothing more sinister than a conspiracy to pull legs. True, some of those all-too-yankable legs walked on carpeting in government offices, but that fact doesn't make the Report anything other than fiction.

In the early 1960s, Navasky edited The Monocle, an infrequent journal of political parody, which, after years of losing money, ceased publication in 1965. Rather than file bankruptcy, staffers tried to repay their debts with profits derived from un-serious "un-books" (i.e., humorous paperbacks requiring little original writing), such as The Illustrated Gift Edition of the Communist Manifesto. In 1966, the New York Times reported that the stock market had dropped due to a "peace scare." Though quite real, this incident seemed the stuff of satire — and since the Monocle crew was in the satire business, they decided take the idea to its logical conclusion.

Thus was born the Report From Iron Mountain, a project which soon made the leap from un-book status to full-fledged hoax.

At first, Navasky and his compatriots, Richard Lingeman and Martin Kitman, intended to publish only the tale of the Report's suppression. But that approach changed when they handed the concept over to Leonard Lewin, a noted political humorist, who felt that he couldn't tell the suppression story without first having a Report in hand. He thus had no choice but to write one.

"When we read the report," writes Navasky, "we all agreed that it had to be published in its entirety." And so it was, via two other "in the know" associates, Richard Baron and E.L. Doctorow of Dial Press. They didn't even tell their sales representatives that the thing was a fake.

"My desire," Lewin later wrote, "was for the Report to provoke debate." Which it did — though, after a while, the debate centered not on the issues raised by the text, but on the question of authorship. Some pointed the finger of suspicion toward economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Kenneth Boulding; others mentioned writers Vance Bourjaily and Richard Rovere. Having accomplished his goal of posing "the issues of war and peace in a provocative way," Lewin finally decided to end the game and confess.

"Oddly enough," he noted, "this 'confession' came after a number of real government reports (e.g., the Pentagon Papers and the Pax Americana) had already been leaked — sounding more like parodies of Iron Mountain than the reverse."

The matter should have rested there. But it didn't.

Rebirth

Years passed, and Lewin's 1972 self-exposé languished in back-room library stacks, where only the few fans of yellowed newsclips might ever see it. Meanwhile, Report From Iron Mountain made the occasional appearance on used bookstore shelves.

No one can say how many copies circulated: The work was now sufficiently rare to spark the inevitable "repressed book" rumors, yet habitual browsers stumbled across it often enough. By the latter half of the Reagan era (when I first discovered the conspiracy buff subculture), younger political activists had little concept of the document's origins, or of the controversy attending its publication. The Report was simply there, a xeroxed artifact from god-knows-where, passed hand-to-hand and whispered to contain All The Answers.

It had become, in a word, samizdat.

At some point during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, a strange phenomenon occurred within the American far right: They discovered Lewin's Report. They took it seriously. And they embraced it with increasing fervor during the Clinton years. Blithely ignoring any suggestion of its fraudulence, they appropriated the text for their own purposes, just as, in this same time period, they appropriated JFK assassination theories, anti-CIA rhetoric, and an entire tradition of dissent previously associated with student movements and the left.

Here was a paradox: A large number of far rightists — people who adored militariana, who considered MREs to be haute cuisine, who never quite understood the argument against nuking the USSR — now embraced an anti-military satire concocted by smart-alecky peaceniks.

According to Lewin:

Iron Mountain was generally unavailable in the 1980s in the U.S., or so I had thought. I began to receive a growing number of requests for the book, and to my surprise found that several were from far-right groups now calling themselves militias. Their interest in Iron Mountain — aside from their being apparently unable to recognize or understand satire — was in identifying, either pro or con, with some of the assertions of the book's "Special Study Group." It took me a while to realize that not only were they serious, but that copies of the book had somehow become available to them.

The primary distributor of these illegal copies: Noontide Press, founded by Willis A. Carto. Carto also originated the far-right Liberty Lobby — which produces a periodical called The Spotlight — and the Institute for Historical Review, a forum in which Holocaust deniers engage in pseudo-intellectual natterings. (Internal dissension has split these groups in recent years. Carto filed a RICO suit in 1998 against the individuals now running the Institute for Historical Review.)

In 1990, Lewin discovered an advertisement in The Spotlight, offering for sale a new edition of Report From Iron Mountain. The blurb seemed to acknowledge Lewin's role, but also asked: "Does editor Leonard Lewin's claim of authorship represent the truth? Or was it just another move in the deception game being played with exceptional cunning and skill?"

This classic example of conspiracy buff innuendo cannot have put Lewin in a gracious mood: No writer wants to be called a liar on the cover of his own book, especially when that book appears in a pirated edition. In 1992, he filed a copyright infringement suit in Federal court against the Liberty Lobby.

The case dragged on for more than a year. The Liberty Lobby was represented by its controversial attorney, Mark Lane — once an effective Warren Commission critic, now one of the few Jews in America who does not consider Willis Carto an anti-Semite. As Lane later summarized for the Wall Street Journal: "I had a client who said, 'How do we know it's not a government document?'... First [Lewin] said it was, then he said it wasn't. We had no basis to make a determination."

This is the sort of argument that gives birth to lawyer jokes.

In the end, Lane and Carto had to admit that Leonard Lewin really did write Report From Iron Mountain — “all of it.” Both parties reached a settlement in 1994; the terms remain undisclosed, but we know that Lewin ended up with more than 1000 unsold copies of the Liberty Lobby edition.

Nevertheless, militia groups continue to circulate the work in unauthorized editions and on the internet. No-one can blame Leonard Lewin for this situation. Nor can anyone criticize the political humorist, now in his 80s, if he doesn’t devote all his time to the chore of stamping out illegal publication of his satire. He has, however, made an unequivocal statement about the work's popularity among patrons of the Noontide Press: "This is the kind of thing that makes me want to throw up."

Nothing Can Stop It

In a sane world, the myth should have died after the Liberty Lobby threw in the towel — and especially after an authorized 1996 reprint gave a detailed history of the Report’s genesis. (The new cover emphasized the word “SATIRE.”) In a sane world, conspiracy-minded "researchers" would have noticed by now that no "Iron Mountain" exists near Hudson, New York. Alas, the power of myth has little to do with sanity.

Far-rightists continue to circulate a six-hour videotape, which analyzes the Report’s every consonant, vowel and diacritical mark with all the rapt attention of a teenage boy inspecting a centerfold. Jim Marrs’ popular volume Rule By Secrecy asks the reader to accept the Report at face value. (The book treats other questionable documents with similar incaution: Though he ostensibly disavows racism, Marrs bases much of his argument on the ravings of such hate-mongers as David Icke, Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullens.)

Another Marrs-man, the Reverend Texe Marrs, uses his large ministry to mix Christianity with conspiracy theory; naturally, he treats the Report as gospel truth. His website features this ad copy:

Texe Marrs carefully analyzes this incredible Report From Iron Mountain. Amazingly, he reveals that the grotesque recommendations of the Special Study Group have, for almost three decades now, been carried out to the letter. Worse, the horrendous blueprint for tyranny by these fifteen ungodly conspirators remains in effect...

Although I haven’t yet purchased Reverend Texe’s report on the Report — which no doubt comes at a very reasonable price — I would guess that he does not devote much attention to the behind-the-scenes tales told by Lewin or Navasky. His audience would consider such details irrelevant.