Watergate is the ultimate American conspiracy – but what if we’ve been misunderstanding it all along?

The conclusions were chilling. War, the report claimed, wasn’t just inevitable – it was essential. Without it, economies would falter, governments would lose their grip on power, and society would unravel. To preserve stability, the report proposed alternatives: mass enslavement, faked alien invasions, even environmental catastrophes staged to keep the population afraid and obedient.

It's because of this report, says journalist and author Phil Tinline speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, that we’ve been getting Watergate wrong for decades. It wasn't the work of “Satanic cabals” lurking in the shadows like a demonic Illuminati. It was simply a political farce amplified by a short-lived zeitgeist.

Which was made all the more galling by the fact that The Report from Iron Mountain was actually a work of fiction.

How a ‘peace scare’ startled Wall Street

The Report from Iron Mountain was not the work of shadowy government operatives. It was satire, authored by Leonard Lewin – a political provocation designed to question America’s military priorities and its dependence on conflict.

“In early 1966, it looks for a moment like the Vietnam War is going to come to an early close, that there's going to be a peace settlement,” says Tinline, author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America.

“On Wall Street, the response to this prospect of peace is that the price of shares dips. It doesn't go up; it dips. That’s what's called a peace scare.”

This bizarre market reaction – the fear that peace could harm the economy – inspired a group of journalists and writers to explore the idea further. Led by Lewin, they created a fictional government document that took the logic of Cold War strategy to its most absurd conclusion.

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Tinline explains how they, “concocted this story of a top-secret government report scoping out what would have to happen if permanent global peace broke out, and how it would be a disaster”.

The result was a deadpan satire dressed as a classified white paper – complete with footnotes, official-sounding language and the cold, analytical tone of real government reports.

A satire that seemed all too real

“The aim of the satire was very clear, I think,” says Tinline. “It was to make people think.”

But The Report from Iron Mountain didn’t just make people think. For many, it confirmed their deepest fears. It didn’t look like parody. It looked like proof. Even the White House, for a brief time, feared it might be genuine.

Instead of being merely a thought-provoking, authority-challenging piece of fiction disguised as a mock-report, it snowballed into a greater conspiracy: one that would then go on to pour rocket fuel onto other conspiracies that emerged throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.

But why was it so convincing?

“The key thing is that it is based on some truth,” says Tinline. The report echoed real attitudes held by some figures in the upper echelons of power. But, he explains, the satire “exaggerates them to the point of absurdity”.

In the aftermath of the satirical report, following the turbulence of the 1960s (which had seen a string of shocking assassinations, the Moon landing, botched invasions and moments of nuclear crisis) the line between fiction and reality was becoming harder to draw.

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And then, in the early 1970s, came Watergate – a real conspiracy that seemed to vindicate the public’s worst suspicions.

From Iron Mountain to Watergate

The satirical report was published during Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, at the height of the Vietnam War. But its influence lingered – and arguably laid the groundwork for the public’s response to the presidential scandal that would bring down Johnson’s successor, the Republican president Richard Nixon.

“Unlike The Report from Iron Mountain, the thing about Watergate is that it's a real conspiracy.”

In 1972, operatives linked to Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. The burglary itself was clumsy – but the subsequent cover-up, and Nixon’s direct involvement, created a political firestorm that led to resignations, impeachment proceedings and his eventual resignation.

But while Watergate is often remembered as proof of how sprawling and dark government conspiracies can be, Tinline believes this interpretation misses the point.

“Watergate is a specific conspiracy which was largely plotted in one building by a very small bunch of people who are highly connected with each other and have connections to the president,” he says. “That is not showing us a generalised nefarious web of dark, sinister power stretching across Washington and through all the agencies, explaining the Kennedy assassination and anything else.”

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Instead, he argues, Watergate shows something else entirely: a strange mixture of fragility and incompetence.

“It’s a bunch of men who are making a shabby decision and eventually getting caught out for it. It seems to suggest enormous power, but actually it suggests weakness. The only reason it happens, you could argue, is that [those involved in Watergate] don't have enough confidence in themselves to think they're going win the 1972 election fairly.”

That, he concludes, “is not the work of Satanic cabals”.

While The Report from Iron Mountain positioned the state as a calculating machine – coolly staging wars and disasters to maintain control – Watergate revealed something far more relatable: the idea that right at the top of the US government was a small group of anxious, paranoid men making reckless decisions rooted in personal ambition.

But by the time of Watergate, the public had spent years being primed to see hidden hands and dark networks everywhere.

In that climate, even a very localised and specific conspiracy took on epic proportions. Taking root in the fertile ground sown by The Report from Iron Mountain, Watergate became an archetypal conspiracy that has overshadowed everything subsequent to it.

This article is based on an interview with Phil Tinline, speaking to James Osborne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

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