JFK files: British newspaper got anonymous call 25 mins before his death

About 25 minutes before John F  Kennedy was assassinated, a British newspaper received an anonymous tip about "some big news" in the US, according to the trove of more than 2,800 documents released late on Thursday by the National Archives, a media report said.

The mystery call was made to a senior reporter at the Cambridge News, a paper that serves the East Anglia area of eastern England, on November 22, 1963, at 6:05 p.m. local time. Kennedy was shot shortly afterward, as he rode in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m. CST. Dallas is six hours behind Britain, USA Today reported.

"The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then hung up," the memo, from the FBI's deputy director James Angleton to J. Edgar Hoover, its director, said.

The revelation, one of many that emerged from the planned release of the Kennedy assassination documents -- so far, there's no smoking guns -- adds to the raft of conspiracy theories surrounding his death. In fact, the memo was first released in July, but went unreported until the cache of files was released on Thursday.

The memo, dated November 26, 1963, says: "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."
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