The Report from Iron Mountain

Recently I began an examination of a series of documents purported to be plans to destroy America. The first, technically, does not fit the pattern. That one was the 10 Planks of the ‘Communist Manifesto’, which was a plan to bring about socialism in certain nations as a precursor to full communism. The second was related to 45 goals of communism for America as found in a later edition of Cleon Skousen’s ‘The Naked Communist’. Finally, the first true entry in this series was an analysis of a document called ‘Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars’ (SWFQW).

For each of these topics, I have been compiling a series of YouTube videos and podcasts to walk one through both audibly and with related images associated with the documents under consideration. The primary question has been to decide whether or not these documents are authentic. Secondarily, the question has been to determine whether or not (authentic or not) these documents have generated or been related to real world events.

The method established to do this has been to first take a look at in-document textual and context clues. The second has been to consider these documents in light of other, sometimes very similar, documents external to the one in question. For each of the three documents that I am considering (SWFQW, Report from Iron Mountain, and the NASA War Document), I have began by watching an average of 10 to 15 YouTube videos about them prior to making my own. Among my findings is that every single conspiracy theorist video on them simply takes them unquestioningly at face value as real documents. Few make any notable references to countervailing evidence.

I thought such an approach to be not particularly responsible. In light of my own academic training in history and philosophy, I decided to review each document afresh. What I have found has been nothing short of shocking.

Iron Mountain

‘The Report from Iron Mountain’ (RFIM) was first published in 1967. It quickly became a New York Times’ bestseller. Somehow, over the years, this appears to have been lost in the mists of time. The RFIM document made a return to international prominence with the publication in 1991 of William ‘Bill’ Cooper’s ‘Behold A Pale Horse’, which was is considered a conspiracy classic. In Cooper’s book, he wove a web linking RFIM and SWFQW to a bold international conspiracy among elite globalists to attain control over the world and to drastically reduce the human population.

Instead of taking what Bill had to say as the final word, I investigated a number of articles about the text and actually read the entire text itself. A novel approach to be sure. Here is what I found: the text was published by a somewhat accomplished writer named Leonard Lewin. Lewin may have had some help compiling the document. Lewin actually sued the Liberty Lobby in the 1990s for violation of copyright as the Lobby was reprinting and distributing RFIM as if it were actually a document produced by the government and thus not subject to copyright protections. Lewin and Liberty Lobby achieved an out of court settlement that resulted in Lewin receiving about 1,000 copies of the possibly purloined text.

The Dive

Once I began to read the text itself, immediately I noted that the writing was of an impressive quality. Not at all something one finds in typical government white papers or think tank policy statements and memoranda. There is a particular alacrity and flow to the language that is beyond the reach of government bureaucratic legalese.

Still, I wanted to proceed with all due caution. After all, I am personally not a “debunker” nor a capital “S” skeptic. I am actually quite a fan of conspiracy theories. I enjoy reading them the way that others enjoy romance novels or horror novellas. In fact, I was mentally bending over backwards to try to interpret RFIM within the context of broader set of goals held by the elite that are quite well-known.

I realized that proceeding with caution was important, especially given that I had come to a negative conclusion regarding SWFQW. The first document very much appears to be a forgery or fraud likely perpetrated by someone wanting to “catch” the elite red-handed in their malevolent plans to take us out. Thus, I operated as if the Lewin case had never taken place. Instead, I jumped into the document to measure it at face value as much as possible.

Immediately it was noticeable that the writing ability and style of the author was not ordinary. Skipping that, it was also noticeable that the document was composed post-1964. Two key historical events had taken place in 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin incident being one, which ramped up the Vietnam War to a whole new level. Another being the release of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’, a darkly satirical take on the mindset of war-planners, generals, and think tanks that have little regard for the loss of innocent life in war.

This was a tip that the author(s) was very likely a person (or persons) of the political left. Although it is extra-textual information, Lewin was indeed a political leftist very much opposed to the war in Vietnam. All of this was interesting to be sure, but it was not nearly as interesting as many of the bizarre contents of the document itself.

Silent Weapons, Bio Weapons, Secret Deep Space Exploration, and More

RFIM was a document that purports itself to be part confessional, part secret document. It begins with a certain unnamed professor from a university in the Midwest. He provides a list of members of group tasked with attempting to answer a question: How could the U.S. prepare for total peace? This meant a permanent solution to the peace “problem”. How would society operate under the conditions of permanent and total peace without the threat of war? This part already is absurd and laughable, which is both scare but predictable given that humans do what humans do.

Nevertheless, as the informant provided the list of participants and their varied fields of knowledge and expertise, I knew I had seen something similar before, but where? As I thought back, I recalled that the great writer of ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and “Westworld’, Michael Crichton, had written a book published exactly 20 years after RFIM called ‘Sphere’. ‘Sphere’, of course, was turned into a rather mediocre film later, but the book was far better. In ‘Sphere’, Crichton had the lead character (a psychologist named Norman Johnson, ridiculously renamed in the film Norman Goodman as an all-too-on-the-nose nod that Dustin Hoffman’s character is the “good” guy) writing up a specially commissioned report for the government about how he would create a task force for dealing with contact with an alien species.

Norman had worked for the government many times in the past and thought of this report as a sort of joke. He needed the money, so he agrees to put it together. Only, much to his shock, his joke report actually goes operational. Norman is contacted by the government and taken to a secret location where he is introduced to the team member directly from his report. They are expected to board an ancient, crashed alien spaceship. RFIM has nothing to do with aliens but it had a list of team members that was replicated by Crichton very closely. So closely that I strongly suspect Crichton too had read RFIM.

As I began to write this article, and after recording the YouTube video, I suddenly remembered yet another document with a similar team. This was many years ago when I was still but a teenager and before I had even read ‘Sphere’. It took a bit of time but I found the very document of which until then there were only foggy memories. This one was even older than RFIM itself. It is an indisputably real document known as ‘The Brookings’ Report’.

The Brookings’ Report

In 1960, NASA commissioned a report from the think tank called The Brookings Institute. This report, which I will create a separate YouTube video on and write up a separate article, was to set the stage for long range studies and planning for NASA. The key here, as it relates to RFIM and ‘Sphere’, is that ‘The Brookings’ Report’ members were again very similar to that of the other two documents, which may indicate that it is actually one of the original sources for the concept for both.

This creates a strange scenario. What we have is a situation wherein the TBR is real, RFIM is likely a hoax, ‘Sphere’ is obviously fiction, and SWFQW is likely a forgery or fraud. Yet, to once again momentarily set some of those issues to the side, we should take a look at the proposals within RFIM.

Among other things, RFIM says that war has always played a key role in all known human societies. The group suggests that if war were to go away, it would leave a social gap that would be incredibly difficult to fill. They make a series of egregious suggestions: bringing back slavery to keep certain segments of society under technocratic controls, a massive eugenics program to eliminate the less fit, periodic “blood games” to cull the masses and reduce population, and also the creation of an extraordinary (and secret) deep space exploration program.

Indeed, RFIM suggests establishing a base on Mars in order to set up an eventual trip to Jupiter. This, the group assures us, would help to replace the economic spending role currently played by war spending. To me, this leaps out as a series of very cynical ploys or dark comedy. Dark comedy seems to be more likely. However, some of it is a bit difficult to find the humor. For example, RFIM suggests that one great way to increase the size of government power, would be to play up or manufacture a catastrophic environmental threat. Now readers in 2018 will immediately think of Climate Change. However, during my lifetime I have already seen several catastrophic environmental threats hyped hysterically be the media: a coming Ice Age, Acid Rain, Ozone depletion due to CFC’s, Global Warming, and now Climate Change. Not to say that these are not issues to be concerned about, but the media hysterics have often been overblown.

Conclusion

‘The Report from Iron Mountain’ is a fascinating document regardless of the provenance of the document itself. The contents read like a meld of 1960s futurology, dark humor, and deep cynicism. For Lewin, the likely author just as he claimed to be, it had to have been a disturbing surprise that his 1960s hoax was later taken up by his enemies on the political right as a document calling for the mass-extermination of Americans. In fact, RFIM now crosses the aisles in conspiracy culture is taken as a sort of foundational text. I am forced to accept the author and publisher claims.

On the other critical points things are a bit different. It is possible that later group inside the government took RFIM a little too seriously and cynically decided to use some of the ideas therein to manipulate the public. It is also possible that since many of these ideas were already in the air, real government associated think tanks took up courses of action which paralleled RFIM closely.

Finally, one can find several external real world white papers that call for plans of action that are every bit as nefarious as that which is found in RFIM. For instance, a political strategy developed by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in 1966 (the Cloward and Piven Strategy) was published in The Nation and called for people to work toward crashing all then-currently existing welfare systems. This strategy, they hoped, would bring about a Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, such a short-sighted plan would cause massive social upheaval, a UBI would incentivize the avoidance of work, would increase prices, and would be an incredibly expensive government program.

This is just one among many. There are droves of others. Their impact and effectiveness is limited. Something often lost in conspiracy circles is that let us say that RFIM was real, how can that document have binding power over: the Carter administration in 1977, the Reagan administration in 1987, the Clinton administration in 1997, and so on? The most important document of the United States of America is the Constitution…and many administrations ignore parts of that. Some have even referred to it as just a piece of paper. How can a conspiratorial document hold more power? This, I think, is a critical question that conspiracy theorists must ask themselves.

On the other side, the debunkers and skeptics must step back and ask themselves why is it that despite their constant claims to the contrary, real world documents have poured out over the years that are just as dark and foreboding as RFIM and even SWFQW.

In part III, I will examine ‘The NASA War Document’ which is the only one of these three that is incontestably real.