The Cambridge News ‘got call about JFK shooting 25 minutes before it happened’
● Latest secret files reveal links to UK local paper
A British local newspaper received an anonymous call about “some big news” in America shortly before President John F Kennedy was assassinated, documents have suggested.
The revelation was made in documents relating to the killing, which happened on 22 November 1963.
A memo to the director of the FBI said the anonymous phone call was made to the senior reporter at the Cambridge News on the day Mr Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. The journalist reported receiving the call at 6:05pm and MI5 calculated it was 25 minutes before the assassination.
Current staff at the newspaper said they did not know who took the call, but they were speaking to people who worked there in the 1960s to find out.
The document, from deputy director James Angleton, said: “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.”
Anna Savva, a reporter who works at the Cambridge News, said hearing about the call was “completely jaw-dropping”.
“Itwouldhavebeencommon knowledge in the office who took the call, but we have nothing in our archive,” she said.
“We have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call.”
Ms Savva added there was just speculation as to why the anonymous caller chose the Cambridge News and said they had been inundated with media requests.
President Kennedy was shot as he rode in a presidential motorcade in Dealey Plaza at 12:30pm Central Standard Time, which is six hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.thememoadded:“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. 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.”
The memo added that similar anonymous phone calls “of a strangely coincidental nature” had been received by people in the UK over the past year “particularly in connection with the case of Dr Ward” – potentially a reference to Dr Stephen Ward, one of the central figures in the Profumo affair.
A copy of the memo, dated 26 November 1963, was released by the US National Archives in July this year, but had gone unreported until the latest batch of documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination were released on Thursday evening.
Yesterday, one report claimed the call was made by a British-born Soviet called Albert Osborne, who was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The report suggested that Mr Osborne had travelled to Mexico City with Mr Oswald a couple of months before the assassination.
He then returned to his home town, Grimsby, from where he allgedly made the call to the Cambridge News.
The phone call was first reported decades ago by Kennedy conspiracy theorist Michael Eddowes. In the 1980s, Mr Eddowes claimed to have a CIA document mentioning the call.
In a video on the Cambridge News website, chief reporter Chris Elliott said Mr Eddowes “was convinced that there was some kind of conspiracy” and believed the call was one of several made to newspapers at the time of Kennedy’s death.
Mr Eddowes, who died in 1992, wrote a book alleging that Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald, but a Soviet impostor who took his identity. The killer’s body was subsequently exhumed in 1981. An autopsy confirmed that it was Mr Oswald.
COMMENT “The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then hung up.” JAMES ANGLETON