Cambridge News received an anonymous phone call 25 minutes before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22nd November 1963, telling them to contact the US embassy in London for “some big news”, according to an FBI memo which emerged on Thursday night.

The previously classified memo, which was released by the National Archives in July this year, was sent to the director of the FBI by the deputy director, James Angleton, on 26th November – four days after the President was assassinated in Dallas. It said:

“The British security service (MI-5) has reported that at 18:05 GMT on 22nd November an anonymous telephone call was made in Cambridge, England, to the senior reporter of the Cambridge News.

“The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then hung up.

“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.”

In a video, Chris Elliott, chief reporter at Cambridge News, says “no one has ever been able to establish whether that call was actually made”. The staff of Cambridge News have spent today attempting to contact the reporter who took the call.

The memo does not state that this phone call was referring to the assassination of JFK. It also notes that similar phone calls “of a strangely coincidental nature” had been received by people in the UK over the previous year, “particularly in connection with the case of Dr Ward”, which has been interpreted by some as a reference to the Profumo affair.

Yet this has not stopped the memo being reported as evidence that the local paper received a tip-off about the assassination. Cambridge News tweeted that a ‘mystery caller’ contacted the them ‘about JFK’s assassination’, while BBC News ran a story with the headline: “Cambridge News ‘received anonymous JFK assassination tip-off’”

The memo came to light when 2800 previously classified files relating to the investigation into Kennedy’s death were released on Thursday, in accordance with the law passed by the US Congress in 1992, demanding that all such materials be put in the public domain within 25 years.

There is no evidence, aside from the memo, the phone call took place