How an English local paper was first to hear of JFK’S murder
FOR decades conspiracy theorists have poured over every angle of John F Kennedy’s assassination hoping to expose what really happened.
But yesterday the trail unexpectedly led to Britain, with a surprising question being posed: did someone in this country know the killing was coming?
A newly-released FBI memo has revealed that a reporter at the Cambridge News got an anonymous call 25 minutes before Kennedy’s death.
The journalist was told to contact the US embassy for some “big news”, but thought nothing of it – until it broke that the US president had been shot dead. The call was deemed so significant that it was contained in intelligence notes sent by US officials in London.
The disclosure of the tip-off made headlines across the world yesterday and sent today’s staff at Cambridge’s local paper to the archives. However, no evidence for the call was found and a reporter with the paper working on the day of the assassination questioned whether it was even ever made.
The mysterious episode began when a tranche of JFK files were released in the US after Donald Trump approved their release, while keeping some back for checking against national security.
Among the documents were new details about who the Soviets suspected of being behind the plot. Some pointed the finger at Lyndon B Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president, while others blamed “ultra-right” Americans. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader at the time, was even said to suspect the Dallas police. However hidden among the files was a memo from James Angleton, of the CIA, to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, just after the killing on Nov 22 1963. “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,” it read.
“The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then hung up.” It went on: “The important point is that the call was made, according to MI5 calculations, about 25 minutes before the President was shot. The Cambridge reporter had never received a call of this kind before and MI5 state that he is known to them as a sound and loyal person with no security record.” Anna Savva, a journalist at the paper, said there was “nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call”. There was speculation a British-born Soviet agent called Albert Osborne, who lived in Grimsby and is believed to have befriended Lee Harvey Oswald, could have made the call. Eventually a reporter working at the paper on the day itself was located. “No one mentioned any tip-off call,” said Rodney Tibbs, now 83, “If there was such a call we would have had the best story going. We were a provincial newspaper but we would have grasped the fact it was the best story imaginable.” Perhaps, Mr Tibbs added, the call had been made to another Cambridge publication – the student paper Varsity. The mystery continues.
It’s perfectly rational to believe in conspiracies. When something happens that seems impossible, it’s natural to look for a human explanation – and if the CIA can try to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, or Richard Nixon’s boys can bug the Watergate Hotel, why wouldn’t the KGB shoot John F Kennedy and pin the blame on a chump called Lee Harvey Oswald?
Of all the conspiracies, the one against JFK is the most appealing because the subject was so attractive. President Trump knew what he was doing when he allowed 2,800 files to be released on the assassination, a crime that in popular memory brought down the strongest president in an era of the highest ambition.
Kennedy pledged to fight communism and go to the moon. The playwright Tennessee Williams said he was almost “too attractive” to be president. There was a conspiracy of sorts to hide images of him limping about on crutches, one symptom of many illnesses, which meant that when Oswald shot him dead from the window of the Texas School Book Depository, the public was left with an impression of a virile leader felled by a “magic bullet”. There had to be an element of magic in it because the Kennedys were cursed by bad luck: first Jack assassinated; then Bobby, shot in a hotel pantry; then Ted’s car span off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island and his female passenger died; then Jack’s son killed in an airplane crash.
Coincidence? Can fate really be that cruel? Yes. It can also be perversely kind. The assassination of JFK pickled his memory in aspic: black and white photos of a brilliant young man full of potential. Had he lived, however, Kennedy might be remembered as a byword for disappointment. Vietnam would still have happened. The riots would still have happened. Nixon would probably still have won the 1968 election.
And in retirement, Kennedy would’ve seen several birds come home to roost, such as his alleged affair with Judith Exner, the mistress of gangster Sam Giancana. Imagine JFK in the Seventies, frail, divorced, disgraced. If conspirators had wanted to destroy Kennedy’s myth, they’d have let him live. But they didn’t make that choice because, as Trump’s data dump pretty much confirms, there were no conspirators. Just a loser with a gun.
We accept that malice and random events can change our own lives – a thief with a knife or a car that skids out of control – yet we don’t do the same with politics. We ascribe to politicians competences that, God bless them, they just don’t have. The United States government can hardly make the trains run on time, let alone fake the moon landings or blow up the twin towers. Of course, by saying that I leave myself open to the charge of being a conspirator myself. And that’s one of the best things about believing in a conspiracy: even when someone tries to prove you wrong, it just proves you’re right.
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