J. KEVEN HOFELING, ESQ.

JFK ASSASSINATION RESEARCH  •  DISTRIBUTION LIST WORK PRODUCT

Salt Lake City, Utah  ·  j.keven.jd@jkhofelinglaw.org  ·  https://jkhofelinglaw.org/

A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING THE JFKA RESEARCH COMMUNITY

— A RESPONSE IN THREE PARTS — PART I OF III

The Apparatus and Its Published Doctrine

Dispatch 1035-960, COINTELPRO, and the Continuum That Runs From Mail Covers to JTRIG

J. KEVEN HOFELING, ESQ.  •  AUGUST 2026

Foreword — The Question, and the Larger Question Behind It

Robert, thank you for asking. I have been meaning for years to set down in one place what I know from my own experience about the surveillance, co-optation, and harassment of researchers who look too closely at the criminal political events of the 1960s and their long shadow. Your inquiry on the Education Forum (Topic 32227), and Dr. Peter Dale Scott’s striking answer to it, gave me the push.

Because the answer runs long, and because Bill Simpich has fairly reminded me that my missives do, I am going to give it to you in three installments you can actually finish, a day apart. Part I, this one, sets out the apparatus and its published doctrine — what the government itself has admitted, in its own paper. Part II is my own account, from a pool hall in Murray, Utah in the early 1990s to a three-minute window in April 2025. Part III is the price — what it cost the journalist Gary Webb — and a field manual for the researcher who would rather not pay it.

But this is not only an answer to you. It is addressed, with respect and some urgency, to the far larger number of researchers who did not answer you — and to the one observation in the thread I cannot get out of my head. John Simkin, who has done more than any living person to preserve this field’s record, wrote on August 14:

I want to take that sentence seriously, because I think it is exactly backwards — and because the fact that a man of Mr. Simkin’s stature can arrive at it is itself the best evidence for the thesis of this series. The silence in that thread is not evidence that no one is being worked on. It is the product of the work. A counterintelligence program that leaves its targets convinced they are too unimportant to be targeted has not failed. It has succeeded completely.

So: a spectre is haunting the JFKA research community. Most of us have been trained — by the movies, by the sneer that attaches to the words “paranoid” and “conspiracy theorist,” and by a great deal of patient effort on the part of people who are paid to produce that sneer — to treat clandestine political operations as a genre of entertainment rather than a documented feature of American life with a fifty-year paper trail. Meanwhile every legitimate researcher in this field is a pawn on a chess board where the stakes include the public disclosure of government crimes, the possibility of prosecution, and the shutting down of a financial gravy train without precedent in human history. Those are not small stakes. People do not leave stakes like that unattended.

What follows is my account and my evidence. I have tried to make it useful rather than merely alarming: every substantiating document, video, and archive I rely on is linked where I rely on it, and gathered again in a source table at the foot of each installment, so that the bona fide researcher who wants to get to the bottom of these matters has the underlying material in hand rather than my summary of it.

I. What This Is Not, and What It Is

Let me say at the outset what I am not claiming. I have never found a bug in my telephone. I have never come home to a jimmied door and a missing hard drive. I cannot tell you that there is a file on me, because I have not seen it, and neither has anyone else who has not seen it.

What I can tell you is narrower and, I think, more useful — because it is documented, and because it happened to me. The counterintelligence apparatus this community talks about does not spend most of its effort kicking in doors. Kicking in doors is expensive, legally exposed, and it creates martyrs. The cheap and far more effective work is done upstream: identify the person early; evaluate whether he can be turned; turn him if he can be; and if he cannot, degrade his reach and his credibility until he is talking only to himself.

That is not my theory. That is published doctrine, and I will cite it below. I believe I have been on the receiving end of both halves of the sequence — the recruitment approach as a very young man, and the reach-degradation as an old one. That is Part II’s business. This installment establishes that the machinery I say was pointed at me exists, is admitted, and is still running.

II. Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark

I read David S. Lifton’s Best Evidence (Macmillan, 1980) when I was fourteen years old, in the early 1980s. It did to me what it did to a great many people: it moved the assassination out of the category of history and into the category of evidence. Once you understand that the medical evidence is where this case actually lives, and that the medical evidence does not say what the Warren Report says it says, you cannot go back.

From there I read everything I could locate — and what I found alongside the assassination literature was a second literature: the record of what the intelligence agencies had done to the people who investigated the first one. By my late teens I was subscribing to The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Progressive, which is an unusual reading list for a teenager in Murray, Utah, and which is precisely the point I will return to in Part II.

Two documents from that period matter for everything that follows, and both are now beyond dispute.

The first is CIA Dispatch 1035-960, “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” dated 1 April 1967 — the Agency’s own instruction to its stations, released under FOIA in 1976 and archived at History Matters as RIF 104-10406-10110. It directs officers “to discuss the publicity problem with … friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors),” and “to employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics,” noting that “[b]ook reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.” It further instructs that critics be answered with the suggestion that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.” That dispatch is the origin point of the reflex by which the phrase “conspiracy theorist” now does the work that evidence used to do.

The second is the Church Committee’s Final Report, Book III (1976) (Senate Select Committee, full PDF), which set out COINTELPRO’s stated purpose in the Bureau’s own vocabulary — to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” domestic political activity — and which concluded, in language every researcher in this field should have memorized, that “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.”

Neither of these is a theory. Both are government paper.

The dissent that wasn’t

I started college at about the time Oliver Stone’s JFK was released in December 1991. By then I knew enough of the actual record to watch the reaction with a certain grim clarity — because the most ferocious attacks on the film did not come from the right. They came from the respectable left. Alexander Cockburn devoted column after column in The Nation to demolishing Stone and the assassination critics generally, and Noam Chomsky published Rethinking Camelot (South End Press, 1993) in the same register: that it does not much matter who killed Kennedy, because Kennedy was no different from Johnson.

To a young man who had already read the autopsy evidence, this was the moment the picture came into focus. The magazines I had subscribed to precisely because they were supposed to be adversarial to the national security state were among those ones running interference for it on the single clearest case of its criminality. Something smelled rotten in Denmark.

I do not assert that Cockburn or Chomsky were assets, and I will not. I assert something I think is more interesting and better supported: the boundary-policing function described in CIA Dispatch 1035-960 does not require assets. It requires only that a respectable person’s professional standing be made to depend on his not going there. Once the Agency has spent two decades cultivating “friendly elite contacts” in the press — the practice Carl Bernstein documented at length in “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977, drawing on the Church Committee’s own files — the boundary maintains itself. That is the durable meaning of what is loosely called Operation Mockingbird: not a permanent payroll, but a permanent reflex.

Mr. Simkin’s own testimony in your thread is the cleanest confirmation of this I have seen from inside the profession. He worked for The Guardian, he wrote, “the UK’s most liberal newspaper,” and “they would not publish articles that questioned the Warren Commission report.” Denise Hazelwood reported in the same thread that she was banned from Daily Kos as a “conspiracy theorist” for submitting a piece on the evidentiary anomalies. Neither of those is a wiretap. Both are the dispatch, working as designed, sixty years on.

III. The Continuum: From COINTELPRO to JTRIG

The mistake most researchers make is to treat COINTELPRO as history. It is not history. It is the first generation of a program that was never dismantled — only professionalized, privatized, digitized, and made deniable. The table below is the shape of the thing.

TABLE 1 — THE CONTINUUM OF DOMESTIC COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AGAINST RESEARCHERS

The doctrine, in print, under authors’ names

In 2008, Professor Cass R. Sunstein — later Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and later still a member of President Obama’s NSA review panel — and Adrian Vermeule published “Conspiracy Theories”, proposing that government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-independent advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites. That is not a leak and not an allegation. It is a law review paper with a byline.

In 2011, DARPA announced its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, soliciting research into detecting and conducting persuasion campaigns on social platforms.

In 2014, Edward Snowden’s GCHQ material was published by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept as “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations”, exposing the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group and publishing its training deck, “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations” (mirrors: ACLU; DocumentCloud #1021430).

Read the deck in the original, because it is not coy. Greenwald summarizes JTRIG’s two self-identified core purposes as: “(1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.” The named tactics include false flag operations — posting material and falsely attributing it to someone else — fake victim blog posts, honey traps, destructive viruses, and posting “negative information” on forums. There is a “Human Science Operations Cell” devoted to “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption,” and slides on exploiting hindsight bias, confirmation bias, anchoring and priming.

And this is the passage I put in front of anyone who tells me I am being paranoid: GCHQ’s own title page acknowledges that it is “pushing the boundaries” by aiming these techniques at people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats.

TABLE 2 — THE JTRIG PLAYBOOK, AND WHAT EACH MOVE IS DESIGNED TO ACCOMPLISH

The scale — and a heresy about it

Dana Priest and William Arkin’s “Top Secret America” survey for The Washington Post found roughly 854,000 people holding Top Secret clearances across some 10,000 locations, with about a third of those clearances held by private contractors. Add to that the Five Eyes arrangement — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — under which allied services routinely do at home what a partner’s charter forbids it to do in its own country. The CIA is nominally barred from domestic operations. Its four English-speaking partners are not barred from operating here at all.

Now the heresy, and I offer it because I think it is important and because it cuts against the grandiosity that this subject invites. During my first research forays into the radical left in the early 1990s — the socialist organizations in Salt Lake City, their meetings, their audiences — my honest impression was that a startling share of the people in those rooms were undercover federal agents. If that impression was even half right, the implication is not that those tiny organizations were dangerous. The implication is that an apparatus with effectively unlimited resources will generate activity to fill the budget it has been given.

Which means that some — perhaps much — of the covert attention paid to people like us is not paid because we constitute a genuine threat to national security. It is paid because the line item exists and must be justified. I find this more disturbing than the alternative, not less. A machine that targets you because you matter can be reasoned with. A machine that targets you because it has payroll to spend cannot.

IV. What Comes Next in This Series

That is the machinery, and every element of it is on the public record under a government letterhead or an author’s byline. Nothing in this installment required me to tell you a single thing about myself. That was deliberate: I wanted the doctrine on the table before the anecdote, so that when the anecdote comes you can measure it against something other than my say-so.

Part II is that anecdote, and it is the part of this that I have never set down in full for anyone. It is about a student organization I founded, a stranger who walked into a billiards club in Murray, Utah and opened with the exact philosophy that organization was built on, a five-hour conversation, a business card reading “family therapist,” and what my father’s first cousins told me about that man years later. It is also about a keylogger in 2016, an account presenting as a beautiful woman that changed its story under questioning and volunteered that stranger’s name, and three copyright strikes filed 180 seconds apart in April 2025 that destroyed a decade of work. Part III takes up what all of this cost a journalist named Gary Webb, who made his evidence accessible to the masses and paid the ultimate price for it — and closes with a field manual for recognizing, in real time, what is being done to you.

More in a day or two.

Keven

J. Keven Hofeling, Esq. (Retired)  •  Sunday, August 23, 2026  •  Salt Lake City, Utah  •  http://www.jkhofelinglaw.org/

Sources for Part I (Hyperlinked)