The British press and intelligence services were warned about the assassination of John F. Kennedy 25 minutes before the president was shot, according to a memo released to the public on Thursday that raises suspicions the JFK assassination was a plot involving multiple conspirators and international intelligence agencies.
In news reminiscent of the advance warning the British press had about World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse, it appears that a suspected Soviet spy from Grimsby, U.K. tipped off the British press that JFK would be assassinated 25 minutes before the ‘shot heard round the world’ in 1963.
The extraordinary call to the Cambridge News, home of the British intelligence community at the time, on the day JFK was shot, was revealed in a memo made public in a release of files ordered by Donald Trump about the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy.
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The memo states that a senior reporter told MI5 he was contacted at 6.05pm UK time – 25 minutes before JFK was shot in Dallas, Texas – and the voice said ‘call the American Embassy in London for some big news’ before they ‘hung up’.
Daily Mail reports: Experts on the assassination said Albert Osborne, a suspected Soviet agent and Baptist preacher from Grimsby, was on a bus with Lee Harvey Oswald from Texas to Mexico City in the weeks before JFK was shot dead in Dallas.
Osborne was said to have been in Lincolnshire with his sister when JFK died and researcher Dick Russell said in his book The Man Who Knew Too Much that the Cambridge News call was made ‘a short distance from Grimsby’.
British and American spies gave the tip extra credibility because the reporter was ‘loyal’ – a hint he may have been an existing informant – and MI5 had said that they had a ‘strangely coincidental’ call when the Profumo affair rocked Britain months earlier.
The previously unseen memo was sent by CIA Deputy Director James Angleton in London to the director of the FBI in Washington DC on the morning after the assassination in Dallas.
At the time of JFK’s death Albert Osborne is said to have been with his sister Lillie Featherstone near Grimsby for ‘four or five days’.
Around ten days after the assassination he is said to have flown to New York via various European countries.
London lawyer Michael Eddowes, who died in 1992 and dedicated much of his later life to researching JFK’s death said in 1981 that he was convinced there was a call to the Cambridge News and that caller was British-born Soviet agent, Albert Osborne.
He said he was helping the Soviets give the impression there was a conspiracy, adding: ‘They left every single lead and this call was their final effort.’
Mr Eddowes also argued in his book The Oswald File a Soviet agent imposter took the place of Lee Harvey Oswald after the murder and allowed Jack Ruby to kill him while the true Oswald was hidden in Russia.
Historians have long been fascinated by Albert Osborne’s links to Oswald and whether he was part of a conspiracy to kill the US president.
FBI agent Bob Gemberling was charged with looking at whether the Briton was with Oswald before the murder after the links between the two men emerged.
At the time they were also investigating claims Oswald had been visiting the KGB Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov in Mexico City on the same trip.
Mr Gemberling said: ‘He [Osborne] denied he was sitting next to Oswald. We had enough people on the bus with him. We thought that was strange, so that resulted in us doing a rather extensive investigation just about him’.
However Osborne did admit travelling regularly to Mexico – but he said that this was because of his work in the Baptist church – and there were claims his pseudonym John Howard Bowen was found on the passenger list of Oswald’s bus.
Fellow preacher Reverend Lyman Erikkson said that shortly before Osborne died he had stayed with him in San Antonio, Texas, and confided in him: ‘I traveled to Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald, and I was called in and questioned about it’.
He added: ‘I think he was an agent. My problem is I don’t know if he was an agent for the United States or a foreign government’.
Kennedy expert Mary Farrell has also spent long periods investigating if Osborne was involved in the assassination.
She told the BBC in 2003: ‘I think this man [Osborne] was capable of just about anything… I think he was very smart, of course I think Lee Oswald was a smart man’.
