Mystery UK call before Kennedy assassination

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This image provided by the Warren Commission is an overhead view of president John F. Kennedy’s car in Dallas motorcade on Nov 22, 1963, and was the commission’s Exhibit No. 698. Special agent Clinton J. Hill is shown riding atop the rear of the limousine. (Inset): In this Nov 23, 1963, file photo, surrounded by detectives, Lee Harvey Oswald talks to the media as he is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station for another round of questioning in connection with the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy. (AP)

LONDON, Oct 28, (AP): A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about “big news” in the United States minutes before president John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963, newly released files on the assassination say. A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a Nov 26, 1963 memo from the CIA to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about a call received by the Cambridge News on Nov 22, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.

The memo from deputy CIA director James Angleton says the caller said “the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up.” The memo says Britain’s MI5 intelligence service calculated that the call came 25 minutes before Kennedy was shot. It said the reporter who took the call “is known to them as a sound and loyal person with no security record.” Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, said Friday the paper does not know whether the call ever happened. “We have nothing in our archive — we have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call,” she said. It’s unclear whether the call was merely a prank and the timing coincidental.

The CIA memo says several people in Britain had received similar anonymous phone calls “of a strangely coincidental nature” over the preceding year, “particularly in connection with the case of Dr Ward.” That is an apparent reference to osteopath Stephen Ward, a key figure in the “Profumo affair,” a sex-and-espionage scandal that almost toppled the British government in 1963. The memo was released by the US National Archives in July but went unreported until a bigger batch of material was declassified in the US on Thursday.

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