Phil Tinline

Producer and radio presenter Phil Tinline looks at the origins of modern US conspiracy theories in the true story of an astonishing hoax and explains why millions of Americans still see the government as an evil deep state today.

Report from Iron Mountain was a fake government report dreamed up as satire by a group of New York writers in 1967. They concocted what appeared to be a top-secret government report into what would happen to the USA if permanent global peace broke out. It claimed that winding down America’s war machinery would wreck the economy and tear society apart. Many refused to believe it wasn’t real even after the hoax was revealed. Tinline explains how the report was seized upon by figures in the far right and militia movement, who claimed it revealed government conspiracies, how it helped to shape Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, and how it spawned a second hoax that has helped it to sustain its relevance today.

Tinline has made acclaimed documentaries for BBC radio about how political history shapes our lives. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, Prospect and the New Statesman. His first book, The Death of Consensus: A Hundred Years of British Political Nightmares, was chosen as the Times Politics Book of the Year.