President John F. Kennedy

Despite shell-shocking disclosures about false-flag operations in Cuba, Lee Harvey Oswald’s career as an intelligence agent, J. Edgar Hoover’s hair-trigger efforts to corrupt a professional criminal investigation, mob ties to the CIA and much more than that, the mainstream media has decreed that the newly released John F. Kennedy assassination files do not reveal anything controversial.

Instead of a honest historical and political appraisal of these documents, we get classic whitewashing and shameless disinformation.

But if the American intelligence community intended to suppress any file that would appear as a smoking gun to JFK assassination researchers, they made a huge blunder when they released a memo from the CIA to FBI that says a senior reporter at Cambridge Evening News was told to call the American embassy for some “big news” about 25 minutes before John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The memo, dated Nov. 26, 1963, reads: “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.”

A copy of the memo was actually released by the National Archives in the U.S. in July, but had gone essentially unreported. It may have never been exposed if not for the hoopla surrounding Donald Trump’s partial release of the JFK files back in October.

In fact, the memo was first discovered by a lawyer, Michael Eddowes, who devoted much of his life searching for the truth behind Kennedy’s murder. Eddowes, who died in 1992, believed that the anonymous caller was a British-born Soviet agent named Albert Osborne. According to Eddowes theory, the Soviet Union wanted the American leaders and populace to view the assassination as a conspiracy. Eddowes is said to have identified this spy by the alias of John Howard Bowen, a man who knew Oswald on a personal basis.

As intriguing as this speculation may be, what is indisputable is that whoever placed the call knew what they were doing. This brazen act seized the attention of very powerful individuals in Washington. The memo was from none other than the CIA’s legendary counterintelligence guru James Angleton, and it was written to FBI Director Hoover. Dated four days after the president’s death, the memo cryptically states that “similar anonymous phone calls of a strangely coincidental nature have been received by persons in the UK over the past year.”

Considering how seriously Angleton and Hoover took this call, is it naive to ask why this memo was kept under wraps for 54 years? If it was a routine analysis about an oddly timed phone call to a small and irrelevant newspaper in Britain, then just release this information to the public during the Warren Commission. What has changed after five decades of concealment to make this document less of a national security risk than it was in 1963? Could it be that this document is still dangerous today for the same reasons that it was then?

That poorly timed call to the Cambridge station on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, forced Angleton to write a memo to Hoover because he viewed it as a potential smoking gun that could have undermined the cover-up. How did the person who made the call know about this “big event” ahead of time? If Oswald was the only person who knew that he was going to kill the president that day, why do we have this call coming in 25 minutes before the event happened?

I am not surprised that this memo was kept hidden for so long. It is more surprising that the intelligence community would allow it to get out now.

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George Cassidy Payne is a SUNY adjunct professor of humanities, domestic violence counselor and freelance writer. He lives and works in Rochester.