The JFK Files: Two Very Strange Phone Calls Occurred the Day of JFK’s Assassination
by Micah Hanks October 30, 2017 (mysteriousuniverse.org)
• Among the newly released J.F.Kennedy files at the National Archives website are two incidents of peculiar telephone calls made on the day of the assassination. Neither of these incidents were reported to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.
• CIA agent James Angleton wrote a memo to FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover relating how a senior reporter at the Cambridge News in England received an anonymous telephone call telling him to call the American Embassy in London “for some big news” – 25 minutes before the assassination took place in Dallas.
• A British provocateur by the name of Eddowes claimed that the caller was a Soviet agent who was told by Lee Harvey Oswald that he was going to kill the president, in an attempt to falsely cast the assassination as a conspiracy.
• Then there was the phone call that Oswald made to a former U.S. Army counterintelligence agent in Raleigh, NC named John Hurt on the day he was arrested. Oswald had the Dallas police make the call for him, but there was no answer.
• [Editor’s Note] In the first instance, the more likely explanation is that Angleton, who was the CIA’s Counterintelligence Chief, tried to cover up their mistake by blaming the all-purpose scapegoat, the Soviet Union, of collusion with the killer, Oswald, and branding any conspiracy theory as Soviet propaganda. In the second instance, how would Oswald even know an Army counterintelligence agent unless Oswald was also a government intelligence insider?
For the last few days, journalists and researchers around the world have been pouring over the files recently released at the website of the National Archives in Washington, which relate new details about the JFK assassination. Long kept from public view, these files–as many had hoped–do appear to offer some new details about one of the darkest days in American history.
Among these details, many had hoped that further information about a strange phone call made by Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, would emerge. Instead, new details about an entirely separate call halfway across the world, which seemingly tipped off one news service about some “big news” that was about to occur in the United States… 25 minutes before Kennedy’s assassination.
The call, according to one of the newly released documents at the National Archives, was received by a senior reporter at the East Anglia-based Cambridge News. It occurred at approximately 6:05 PM on November 22, 1963, London time, just 25 minutes before Kennedy was shot at the Dallas Motorcade in Texas.
According to the memorandum, penned by James Angleton of the CIA to then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then hung up.”
No further information was given which might indicate the identity of the caller in question, despite the chilling accuracy of the warning that was issued. Thus, it raises questions about who might have known about Oswald’s plans in advance of the assassination, and to what degree they might have been involved.
“The important point is that the call was made,” Angleton wrote, “according to the MI-5 calculations, about 25 minutes before the President was shot. The Cambridge reported never received a call of this kind before and MI-5 state that he is known to them as a sound and loyal person with no security record.”
The memo goes on to say that, “MI-5 noted that similar anonymous phone calls of a strangely coincidental nature have been reviewed by persons in the U.K. over the past year, particularly in connection with the case of Dr. Ward,” presumably in reference to osteopath Stephen Ward, one of the central figures in a British scandal occurring at the time known as the Profumo affair.
The late Michael Eddowes, a lawyer who investigated circumstances surrounding the assassination, became convinced that the secret informant that called Cambridge News had likely been Albert Osborne, a British-born Soviet agent. His reason for calling, Eddowes surmised, had been due to the fact that, “the Soviet Union was eager that the assassination should be seen as a conspiracy.” Eddowes also believed that Osborne may have befriended Lee Harvey Oswald, hence learning details of his plan to assassinate Kennedy.
This was not the only strange phone call that occurred on the day that Kennedy was assassinated. In fact, one of the strangest “loose threads” relating to the affair involves a phone call made by Lee Harvey Oswald that evening, while in custody and under supervision of law enforcement.
According to the Raleigh News and Observer, “In August 1977, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, created to do a new investigation, received information that Oswald allegedly tried to place a call from jail to a man named John Hurt in Raleigh, according to an internal report written by Surell Brady, a senior staff counsel to the committee.”
When Oswald was allowed to make the call, two police officers were present in the room with him. Additionally, a call slip was produced as a record of the call, a copy of which had been kept by Alveeta Treon, the switchboard operator who had been working that night at Dallas City Hall.
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CIA, counterintelligence, James Angleton, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald
