Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-316) and index.

What happened? -- The power elite -- The unthinkable -- The conspirators -- Iron Mountain -- The lobby -- Mister X and the high cabal -- Blueprint for tyranny -- The ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald -- They want to kill everybody -- As if.

"Delve into the labyrinth of America's conspiracy culture with this investigative [work] 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 ... 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 ... 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. ... 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. ... What fascinates about Phil Tinline's revelation-filled recreation of that ... 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"--