JFK files: British newspaper got mystery call before killing

A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about “big news” in the US minutes before President John F Kennedy was shot, newly released files on the assassination say.

A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a memo from the CIA to the director of the FBI, dated November 26, 1963, about a call received by the Cambridge News on November 22, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.

The memo from deputy CIA director James Angleton says the caller said that “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.” The memo was released by the US National Archives in July but went unreported. It is also among a batch of files declassified in the US on Friday.