The New Statesman

Hello, I'm Rachel Cunleff, and this is Politics from The New Statesman, the show where usually we bring you the latest from Westminster and beyond.

However, Parliament is in recess, so we're going to do something a little bit different today.

Instead of the usual ups and downs of Whitehall,

we're going to be speaking about America's greatest hoax,

how a joke gone awry in 1967 forever changed the nation's relationship with the truth.

I'm delighted to be joined in the studio by Phil Tinline,

a regular writer for the new statesman,

an author of The New Book, Ghosts of Iron Mountain,

The Hoax That Jooped America and Its Sinister Legacy.

Phil Tinline, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Let's start with the title.

You can't call something the Ghost of Iron Mountain

and then not explained.

So what is Iron Mountain and what is this hoax that occurred in

1967? Okay, so Iron Mountain at the time was a nuclear bunker for executives to flee to

when the bombs started falling. They thought get in helicopters and fly off to these luxury

bunkers with chandeliers and cinema suites and all sorts of things

100 miles north of New York City. Of course, there were a couple of flaws in that plan, but, you know,

big companies invested in this. It was also a document store and so on. And it had been like an iron,

an iron ore mine and then a mushroom farm, but it was created as this in the early Cold War because

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