
Ghosts of Iron Mountain
The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today
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Narrated by:
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Phil Tinline
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By:
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Phil Tinline
About this listen
A compelling work of investigative journalism that explores the surprising origins and hidden ramifications of an epic late 1960s hoax, perpetrated by cultural luminaries, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow. For listeners curious about the surprising connections between John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone, Timothy McVeigh, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump.
Delve into the labyrinth of America’s conspiracy culture with this investigative masterpiece that unearths the roots of our era’s most potent myths.
In 1966, amid unrest over the Vietnam War and the alarming growth of the military-industrial complex, little-known writer Leonard Lewin was approached by a group of ingenious satirists on the Left to concoct a document that would pretend to ratify everyone’s fears that the government was deceiving the public. Devoting more than a year to the project, Lewin constructed a fiction (passed off as the honest truth) that a government-run Study Group had been charged with examining the “cost of peace,” setting its first meetings in the very real Iron Mountain nuclear bunker in upstate New York (which lent the resulting book, Report from Iron Mountain, its name). In Lewin’s telling, this gathering of the nation’s academic elite concluded that suspending war would be disastrous, forcing all sorts of bizarre measures to compensate.
Lewin didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d created a narrative that fed the interests of both ends of the political spectrum—by promoting the idea that the government uses centralized power for evil.
What fascinates about Phil Tinline’s revelation-filled recreation of that ingenious hoax is seeing how it explodes into America’s consciousness, dominates media reports, and sends government officials scrambling. And then, subsequently, how Lewin’s fabrication is adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology.
In this riveting—and, at times, chilling—tale of a deception that refuses to die is an unsettling warning about how, in contemporary times, a hoax may no longer be a hoax if it can be used to recruit followers to a cause.
©2025 Phil Tinline (P)2025 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Very well researched and written history of American New Age Spirituality
- By Jeff Stein on 05-02-25
By: Leah Sottile
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A Better Ending
- A Brother's Twenty-Year Quest to Uncover the Truth About His Sister's Death
- By: James Whitfield Thomson
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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On a summer evening in 1974, Jim Thomson arrived home from a baseball game to the news that his younger sister, Eileen, had taken her own life. To Jim, his parents, and brother, the loss was unexpected and devastating. Only twenty-seven, Eileen had been living in California with her high school sweetheart, Vic, a cop. She had a circle of close friends and a job she loved. But details soon emerged that Eileen had been depressed, her storybook marriage plagued by infidelity and guilt.
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Kept us rapt!
- By HogWare on 05-18-25
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The Fifteen
- Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
- By: William Geroux
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
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A part of American history I’d never heard about
- By Janet Stanek on 05-13-25
By: William Geroux
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The Silk Finisher
- Bigotry, Murder, and Sacrifice in the Crossroads of America
- By: Daniel Melchior
- Narrated by: Daniel Melchior
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In the "Crossroads of America," three active-duty US Army paratroopers commit a more heinous crime than the one they are trying to cover up. Their arrests and trial shock and divide residents of the town between those who see the soldiers as heroes and those who view them as cold-blooded killers. Author Dan Melchior unearths the story of Rudolph Ziemer, known by some as the "Queer Undertaker."
By: Daniel Melchior
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Trespassers at the Golden Gate
- A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
- By: Gary Krist
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined me and my daughter.”
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Story of a City
- By Suzanna on 04-29-25
By: Gary Krist
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There Is No Place for Us
- Working and Homeless in America
- By: Brian Goldstone
- Narrated by: Dion Graham, Brian Goldstone
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
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Powerful and Informative!
- By Malika on 06-01-25
By: Brian Goldstone
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Justice Never Rests
- A U.S. Attorney's Battle against Murderers, Drug Lords, Mob Kingpins & Cults
- By: William Kolibash, Jon Land, Shariane Kolibash Taylor
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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As soon as I slid the contents from the envelope, I knew it was a bomb. So opens Justice Never Rests, the story of U.S. Attorney William Kolibash’s relentless fight against organized crime in the foothills of West Virginia and beyond. Not content with only the investigative and prosecutorial tools at his disposal, Kolibash sought new and different means to put away kingpins who’d successfully skirted the law.
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Ohio Valley hero
- By Michael minder on 04-11-25
By: William Kolibash, and others
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Yoko
- The Biography
- By: David Sheff
- Narrated by: Max Meyers
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Yoko’s life, independent of Lennon, was an amazing journey. Yoko spans from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-war Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her arrival in avant-garde art scene in London, Tokyo, and New York City. It delves into her groundbreaking art, music, feminism, and activism. We see how she coped under the most intense, relentless, and cynical microscope as she was falsely vilified for the most heinous cultural crime imaginable: breaking up the greatest rock-and-roll band in history.
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Great Book, Horrible Narrator
- By Mg on 03-28-25
By: David Sheff
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The Man Nobody Killed
- Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
- By: Elon Green
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with Billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma.
By: Elon Green
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The Painted Pink Dress
- A Daughter’s Story of Family, Betrayal, and Her Search for the Truth
- By: Minu Cash
- Narrated by: Kim Ramirez
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From her earliest memories, Minu felt like an outsider. It wasn't just her peculiar name, but also her light skin and cinnamon-swirl hair—so unlike the dark features of her Mexican family—that drew comments from neighbors and strangers. No one took her questions seriously, leaving her yearning for answers. Meanwhile, she had to endure her father's violence, her mother's negligence, and the poverty and drugs in Cashion, Arizona. Determined to carve out her own destiny, Minu embarked on a journey to uncover the mysteries of her past.
By: Minu Cash
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Guilt by Matrimony
- A Memoir of Love, Madness, and the Murder of Nancy Pfister
- By: Daleen Berry - contributor, Nancy Styler
- Narrated by: Courtney Patterson
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Fewer than twelve hours after her body was found and without any evidence, police decided a married couple from Denver had killed her. Within a few days, they arrested and charged Nancy Styler, a friend of Pfister's who'd had a falling out with her after a business deal went sour, and Dr. Trey Styler, Nancy's disabled husband, who recently lost the family home, his medical practice, and any hope of a peaceful retirement for himself and his wife. Eleven days later, police also arrested and charged Kathy Carpenter, Pfister's underpaid and overworked personal assistant and closest friend.
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How unlikable everyone is in this situation
- By gas girl on 04-16-25
By: Daleen Berry - contributor, and others
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The Scientist and the Serial Killer
- The Search for Houston's Lost Boys
- By: Lise Olsen
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they had gone, the Houston police department dismissed them as runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft or conservative parents, likely looking to get high and join the counterculture.
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Uncovering evidence with determination
- By RoxB on 05-22-25
By: Lise Olsen
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The Instability of Truth
- Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion
- By: Rebecca Lemov
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call brainwashing is more common than we think; it is not so much what happens to other people as what can happen to anyone.
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Great research. But too hard to listen to.
- By Claudia on 05-19-25
By: Rebecca Lemov
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The Church of Living Dangerously
- Tales of a Drug-Running Megachurch Pastor
- By: John Lee Bishop
- Narrated by: John Lee Bishop
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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For thirty years, John Bishop was a pastor. Along the way, he learned that everyone does stupid things. We lie to our families. We lie to ourselves. We take long lunch breaks and sneak cigarettes when we said we’d quit. Sometimes, we take a sabbatical from our nice, comfortable life as a pastor and start running drugs for the Sinaloa Cartel, then get caught and spend five years in federal prison.
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Tremendous story of God's Power and Grace.
- By Joseph Yosso on 04-13-25
By: John Lee Bishop
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