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A tip off warning about the impending assassination of US President John F Kennedy is thought to have come from GRIMSBY, it was revealed today.

A telephone call 25-minutes before the fatal shooting was made to a newspaper in Britain, according to secret papers released today by the American Government.

The documents reveal the Cambridge News received a call shortly after 6pm on November 22, 1963, warning "Call the American Embassy in London for some big news".

And it is thought the call was made by Albert Osborne, a Grimsby-born former soldier turned spy working for the Soviet Union.

Less than half an hour later JFK was shot dead in Dallas, Texas with Lee Harvey Oswald later arrested for the murder. He was shot dead by Jack Ruby soon after.

It is claimed Oswald had been befriended by Osborne and the pair had travelled to Mexico City to meet KGB agents in the weeks before the assassination.

The tip-off to the Cambridge News emerged in a document written by the CIA released by the US government, which has been heavily promoted by US President Donald Trump.

But the memo first emerged in the late 1970s when a London solicitor Michael Eddowes, who devoted much of his life to researching the Kennedy killing, said his research pointed to the call being made by Osborne when he was staying at his sister's house in Grimsby.

The memo does not mention Osborne directly, although his name surfaces in dozens of reports by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, including from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

It is claimed Osborne didn’t call the Grimsby Telegraph as he was worried the call would be too easily traced.

And it is suggested he called a regional newspaper to ensure the information was passed on rather than risk being lost in one of the national newspaper offices where hundreds of reporters were employed in the 1960s.

(Image: PA)

The CIA document states: “An anonymous call was made to Cambridge, England, to the senior reporter of the Cambridge News. The caller said only that the reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then rang off.

"After word of the President’s death was received, the reporter informed the Cambridge police of the call. Important thing is that the call was made, according to British calculations, about 25 minutes before the President was shot.”

The memo goes on to say that MI5 "noted that similar anonymous phone calls of a strangely coincidental nature have been received by persons in the UK over the past year, particularly on connection with the case of Dr. Ward."

Dr Stephen Ward was a prominent figure in the 1963 Profumo affair, a spy scandal which rocked Britain.

(Image: Cambridge News/BPM MEDIA) (Image: Cambridge News/BPM MEDIA)

Mr Osborne was born in 1888 in Grimsby and was one of 12 children. He went on to become a soldier in the British Army in 1906 but left shortly before World War One to travel to America, where he was recruited as a KGB agent working for the Soviet Union.

He is believed to have died in hospital in San Antonio, Texas, in 1963.