Phil Tinline is a freelance writer and documentarian. He is the author of The Death of Consensus, which was chosen as The Times (London)'s Politics Book of the Year. Over the course of twenty years working for the BBC, he has made and presented many acclaimed documentaries about how political history shapes our lives. He has also written for The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph (London), The New Statesman (UK), BBC History Magazine, and Prospect. A graduate of Oxford University where he obtained a degree in English language and literature, he lives in London.

Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Bird is Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "An excellent new book...Tinline's fast-paced account is often entertaining but never loses sight of where it is heading: toward a moment, our own, when conspiracists and crackpots have seized the levers of power....Both important and unsettling." -New York Times "Tinline is a brilliant researcher and writer [and] Ghosts of Iron Mountain is the best kind of modern history: deeply researched, entertainingly written, piercingly perceptive...[it's] essential reading for students of modern history and public perception, a rich survey of how we got to the point where practically every event or phenomenon is instantly decried as a 'false flag.'" -New York Post "Astonishing, important, and beautifully told...[shows] that distrust of the federal government and the belief that a shadowy cabal of evil elites is somehow in charge-ideas that powered the rise of U.S. President Donald Trump-have roots that reach back more than half a century." -Foreign Affairs "[How] a 1960s hoax by liberal luminaries including E. L. Doctorow fueled the conspiracy theories that Trump has relied on his entire political career....A New York Times obituary for [hoax participant] Lewin, who died in 1999, called Report from Iron Mountain 'the hoax that would not die.' But, as Tinline shows in Ghosts of Iron Mountain, they didn't know the half of it... 'the Iron Mountain affair' is a particularly fascinating case study." -Airmail "A thoughtful, engrossing, and highly readable history...Ghosts of Iron Mountain does not merely relate how the prank was hatched, executed, and received; it explores the hoax's afterlife, as the document was rediscovered by people who didn't watch that saga unfold in real-time....Tinline tells us, we have good cause to be wary of powerful people. But we also have good cause to be suspicious of documents that just happen to seem to confirm our worst suspicions." -Reason magazine "An astute study of a fiction warped under its own weight." -Harper's Magazine "Shines in its examination of how we treat the truth....Ghosts of Iron Mountain is an excellent book." -Bucks County Beacon "[How] a zany '60s leftist hoax became a progenitor of Trumpism....[This] account of a jest gone terribly wrong makes for fascinating-and eye-opening-reading." -Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Diligently traced...Tinline offers nothing less than an alternative history of the late twentieth century, in which an off-beat satire ends up perpetuating the 'paranoid style' of American politics." -Booklist (starred) "Eye popping...Tinline's account is both convincing and horrifying." -Daily Telegraph (UK) "Remarkable...Ghosts of Iron Mountain is a potent reminder that hard facts have rarely been enough when powerful satire feels more truthful." -Sydney Morning Herald (AUS) "Searing...Through dogged research, including interviews with Lewis's children, Tinline astutely examines how belief in the report's veracity persisted and draws a throughline to contemporary attitudes that 'if it feels real, it is real.' The results are equal parts fascinating and disturbing." -Publishers Weekly "Deeply reported and brilliantly told...What a fascinating tale Phil Tinline unspools here. He's unearthed a strange, little-known key from the 1960s with which he unlocks America's descent into conspiracy madness and the dangerous blurring of political fiction and reality. Ghosts of Iron Mountain is unique, illuminating, and important." -Kurt Andersen, cofounder of Spy magazine and New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses "Astonishing...an account of a brilliantly conceived spoof that has quite unintentionally changed the course of history." -from the Foreword by Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the film Oppenheimer "A tremendous journalistic achievement, a rollicking page turner, and, ultimately, a public service....Tinline provides the 'why' behind today's mos...

Publisher: Scribner Book Company

Pub date: 2026-03-24

Length: 352 pages