GE THE KILLING?
British paper ‘tipped off about killing by Soviet spy’
A LOCAL newspaper in England may have been tipped off about President Kennedy’s assassination 25 minutes before it happened.
One of the documents released in the US named the then Cambridge News in a memo, describing how a reporter received an anonymous call shortly after 6pm.
The caller told the senior reporter to contact the American embassy in London because ‘big news’ was about to happen.
The caller, who hung up without leaving a name, is suspected to have been a British-born Soviet spy, calling from Grimsby.
The FBI’s deputy director at the time, James Angelton, wrote in the memo: ‘The British Security Service (MI5) has reported that at 1805 GMT on 22 November an anonymous telephone call was made in Cambridge, England, to the senior reporter of the Cambridge News.
‘The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up.
‘After the word of the President’s death was received, the reporter informed the Cambridge police of the anonymous call and the police informed MI5.
‘The important point is that the call was made, according to MI5 calculations, about 25 minutes before the President was shot.’
British and American spies suggested that the report carried extra weight because the journalist was ‘loyal’ – a possible hint that he was a regular informant.
Experts have suggested that the caller was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald’s friend Albert Osborne, a Baptist preacher and suspected Soviet spy from Grimsby in Lincolnshire.
Mr Osborne had spent time on a bus with Oswald in America in the weeks before President Kennedy was shot. The call was alluded to in 1981, when the Cambridge News ran a piece on the story, but the mystery of the senior reporter’s identity has never been solved.
Reporter Anna Savva, who works at the now-renamed Cambridge Evening News, said: ‘We have nothing in our archive – we have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call.’