The Editor in Chief of The Enquirer newspaper, Raymond Archer, Tuesday told of chilling assassination plots on his life during the J.A. Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party administration. According to Archer, so pervasive were the plots, as well as credible intelligence about them, that it took the intervention of business magnate, Alhaji Asuma Banda, to arrange a meeting with President Kufuor so he could explain his objectives for writing to expose corruption in government. His crime, Raymond told Radio Gold Tuesday, was that he persisted in exposing corrupt deals within the administration and it upset the president. Intelligence about the plots to kill him, he said, had come from two foreign missions, including the United States Embassy in Accra, and sympathetic persons within the National Security set-up. He was also alerted to the president’s anger by a cabinet minister in the administration. Diplomatic cables leaked by whistle blower website, wikileaks, speak of the assassination plots against Archer who said he had been ‘foolish’ not to take the intelligence warnings seriously, but with the published leaks now public, the scenario was now clear to him. “…When the US Embassy staff met me, they discussed in detail – I didn’t know that even before they had spoken to me, they were already talking to President Kufuor about the intelligence they had picked up on the supposed assassination reports. Around the same time, Suhuyini (host of Radio Gold’s newspaper review, Alhassan Suhuyini), there was this story that was also running; it was about the CAN 2008 contract. Now what happened was that the contract had gone on tender for one year. The tender committee and the procurement authority had awarded the contract after the international tender. Then I heard that President Kufuor had called the tender people and said that he had contacts in China whom he had made during one of his trips and that he wanted those contracts to be awarded to his contacts in China. Now eventually, it came to light that the president set the tender aside and sent Osafo-Maafo to go to China to bring in his contractors to come and do the job. So that was another major issue just around the time that the Kick-back story was running, that story also emerged. “Then I had another call from the US Embassy this time saying that the threat was becoming too much and that I should be very, very careful. So what I did was I went to see Alhaji Banda… I went to speak to him as somebody who was more like a godfather to me at the time – he still is – and discussed everything with him and I said ok, then I will run the story about the assassination first, but he advised me to cool down and he arranged for me to go and meet with President Kufuor. And his position was that I should explain my point to him – that I was just doing my work. But when I went to see the president, I told him that one, I thought that corruption in his government was becoming too much and that I was disappointed that he was the one leading the way in setting tender aside and going to bring his private company to come and do the work…” According to Raymond, during the meeting with President Kufuor (in the presence of Alhaji Banda), the president asked him to stop his publications and also indicated that he had information that he was NDC and that he should stop supporting them. Archer said he did not see the president’s point, besides he was not NDC. But later events proved he was marked for assassination. “…around that time, I closed from work one night around 2am. Now what happened was that in order to protect myself I went and parked my two cars and then I went to Mr. Eddie Annan and told him; I even lied to him that my two cars had all broken down and so I wanted him to help me with a car if he had one. Mr. Annan was generous enough to give me, I think a Fiat Toledo… One night I was going home in Dansoman, when I got in front of my house, there were these two boys standing in front of my house but they weren’t any macho men or things like that; then they asked me for money but I didn’t roll down so they were using their hands … (to gesticulate that they needed money for food) so I didn’t mind them so I stopped briefly but you see my road was a cul-de-sac – if you were going towards the house there was no way you could turn yourself unless you went into the house and turned yourself. So while I was moving, just when I passed the boys and they realized that they were behind me, then they removed cutlasses and began to slash the car into pieces so I managed to turn myself and quickly ran away and went to report myself at the Dansoman Police Station … My luck was that there was nobody sitting in the car because they cut the car from the right hand side (passenger side) and you know where when you sit, you rest your head, the cutlass actually cut through the glass and came to cut the metal that was at the left side which means that if somebody was sitting there, that person’s neck, throat would have been slashed…” Meanwhile former President Kufuor's office has denied any assassination plot against Raymond Archer.