JFK assassination files: British newspaper got tip before assassination

[deminks]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jfk-assassination-files-cambridge-news-got-tip-before-assassination/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId=44018124

Newly released files say a British newspaper received an anonymous call about "big news" in the United States minutes before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a memo to the director of the FBI, dated November 26, 1963, about a call received by the Cambridge News on November 22.

It 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 in Dallas.

Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, says the paper has no record of who took the call. She said Friday that learning of the call was "completely jaw-dropping."

(end snip)

[rzemanfl]

1. That would have been about 6 p.m. in Cambridge. n/t

[jberryhill]

2. The only two problems being....

1. "Big news" is hardly specific. Newspapers receive crank calls all of the time, and

2. "The memo says Britain's MI5 intelligence service calculated that the call came 25 minutes before Kennedy was shot in Dallas." One has to remember that this is long before there were things like GPS satellites and other mechanisms for establishing a reliable time base for things happening at different places on the planet.

[DavidDvorkin]

4. Your second point makes no sense

Precise knowlege of the time in other places existed long before 1963.

[jberryhill]

5. What was the method used here?

Yes, it could be done, provided that everyone was working from the same time base. But absent knowing what sort of "calculation" was involved here, then the conclusion is not supported by anything.

[DavidDvorkin]

15. No calculation required

The difference between local time and Greenwich Mean Time was well-known all over the world.

[jberryhill]

16. Perhaps I was not being specific

What mechanism recorded a time of 6:05 in this third hand memo based on an oral recollection?

[DavidDvorkin]

20. Reported orally, not necessarily a recollection

He could have been reading from a British document, or he might have just read it. The Brits recorded the time using GMT. What more is needed?

[jberryhill]

21. I'm obviously still being unclear

From what instrument was the time of 6:05 recorded?

The reporter's recollection of the time on his watch?

[DavidDvorkin]

23. We can't be sure

But my impression is that that was the time given in whatever British report he read.

[jberryhill]

24. Now I'm not sure if there is a cognitive issue

"that was the time given in whatever British report he read"

Yes. A report of something which is said therein to have happened at a particular time. A report made 24 hours after the event, which was not a significant event (i.e. a newspaper getting a crank call) at the time it happened.

The report says that a reporter at a minor newspaper received a call, didn't think anything of it at the time, and the next day realized it may have been of significance. The reporter notified police of the call the next day, upon hearing the news.

There is nothing in the memo to indicate the 6:05 figure is based on anything other than the recall of the reporter the next day, the recollection of whom has, by the time this memo comes into being, been orally transmitted twice.

[karynnj]

9. Curious - why would you need GPS etc to calculate the time difference accurately?

The time zones were very well defined then - even if you could not google "London time" and get the time immediately.

A year later, some friends and I kept our watches on Liverpool time. Very silly and fortunately we were good at converting back to Northern Indiana time!

[jberryhill]

10. You wouldn't need GPS

That was an example.

Yes, time zones were very well defined and, yes, one could tell the time accurately in two places.

However, in relation to this third-hand account, we do not know what was the timebase used in order to "calculate" the alleged 25 minute difference.

Can you tell me, specifically, how the time of the call was recorded?

[karynnj]

11. One would imagine that if it was something noted by the FBI, the teleco

billing records would have been the source of the time. At least in the US, all that information would have been on the billing records retained by the phone company.

What I think is that this was a coincidental prediction - maybe because JFK was in Texas.

[jberryhill]

12. "billing records retained by the phone company"

Which phone company?

That's the point. The FBI would not have access to a UK phone company's billing records, so it's not clear you read the document in question.

I am not as familiar as you may be with UK telephone billing practices in 1963. So perhaps you might brief me on whether they produced bills with itemization of timestamps of incoming calls (local and/or long distance) for some reason?

In the US, in the 1960's, I can say from direct knowledge that a bill from AT&T would not include that sort of information for incoming calls.

But if it was based on billing records, then whose billing records are we talking about? The person who made the call? That might be a more interesting piece of information.

[karynnj]

13. I am not familiar with the UK phone system, but I do know the Bell System of the 1970s

I assume the FBI was told of the call by the British company and they may have provided whatever backup that exists. I do know that the Bell System had AMA tapes that included the origin, the terminus, the beginning time and the end time of calls routinely captured. As I said I know this was the case in the 1970s (I worked for AT&T and Bell Labs and in addition to being the basis of billing, it was the data used for engineering the telephone network.) I don't know if that information existed in the UK at any time or if it existed in the 1960s in the US.

Given how we used it, I can not imagine how they would engineer the network without point to point telephone data.

[jberryhill]

14. Why not actually read the report in question?

"I assume the FBI was told of the call by the British company and they may have provided whatever backup that exists"

That's not even what the memo says.

"The memo says Britain's MI5 intelligence service calculated that the call came 25 minutes before Kennedy was shot in Dallas."

The FBI wasn't told anything by any primary source to that report. So, first off, we are dealing with third-hand information presenting a bare conclusion based on a "calculation" which is not explained.

Here is the memo:



It's just a notation of a time recalled by the person who was called. And, no, they probably didn't go digging through records of calls in less than 24 hours in the UK. Note that the call was made after business hours, and reported to the station at 0933.

The only "calculation" involved here is just subtracting the time zone difference from when the reporter said he/she got the call.

[hlthe2b]

3. It said "coincidental" phone calls of this nature had been received over the past year especially

with regard to the case of "Dr. Ward". What does the "case of Dr. Ward" refer to?????

[Chiyo-chichi]

18. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Ward

[hlthe2b]

19. ahh, yes... Christine Keeler

Now that comes back... Thanks!

I always loved the Dusty Springfield song about that whole affair:

and I still miss Dusty's great voice....

[stopbush]

6. Heres a tip that happened the day of the assassination that never gets covered.

On the morning JFK was killed, a person in Fort Worth, Texas was overheard saying the following only hours before the assassination:

“It would not be a very difficult job to shoot the President of the United States. All you'd have to do is get up in a high buliding with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, and there’s nothing anybody could do.”

Believe it or not, this was overheard by White House employees, yet nothing happened to the person uttering this unbelievable idea. They weren’t held for questioning, they weren’t arrested, the police weren’t notified. Nothing.

Why was that? Why?

Well, the so-called “reason” given is that the person uttering those words was none other than...John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States of America. And those words were heard by none other than JFK’s Cheif of Staff, Ken O’Donnell. (Source: Bugliosi, “Reclaiming History,”pg 21.

Looks like JFK had prior knowledge of - and was deeply involved in the plot -to kill himself.

[ProfessorGAC]

7. The Oswald Didn't Act Alone

You've done it! Solved the crime of the century!

[BootinUp]

17. Dayum! LOL

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

8. Tweety has the answer...

He was just on msnbc and he said something like "one of those guys was a drunk."

Thanks for clearing it up, Tweety.

[Orangepeel]

22. So what?

I’m not well versed on all the theories, but this doesn’t seem like anything to me. Why would this call have anything to do with the assassination? An unidentified person called a newspaper somewhere in England and told them to call the American Embassy in London. The only thing remotely related to Dallas or Kennedy were the words “American” and “news”

The FBI, Cuba, CIA, Russians, GHW Bush or whomever— why would any of the call a random newspaper and tell them to call people who probably heard about the assassination on television?