Alleged plot to kill Kennedy

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33037, 3 October 1972, Page 15

Alleged plot to kill Kennedy

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

PARIS, October 2.

A Spanish-born soldier of fortune said today that he was paid by a group of unidentified Americans to murder President John Kennedy on May 31, 1961, as the late American leader was touring Paris with President Charles de Gaulle.

Jose Luis Romero, who told the Paris daily newspaper, “L’Aurora,” of his engagement to kill both President Kennedy and General de Gaulle, said that he decided not to fulfil the contract because the act would have severely damaged the Organisation de I'Armee Secrete and it might also have cost him his life.

According to Romero, the highest-ranking members of the O.A.S. then involved in the brutal, but unsuccessful, effort to keep Algeria French, ordered him to drop the contract, which he had accepted without consulting the organisation, although he had doubts about the aims of the Americans who hired him. It was on the very eve of the day marked for President Kennedy’s death that he telephoned Algiers to inform O.A.S. officers of the plot, he said.

Telling the story in a copyright interview based on a book which he and his

Paris publishers will soon produce, Romero said that he then fled, first to the Congo and then to South America, keeping more than $NZ335,850 of his fee. “The American instigators of the would-be-assassination of the two Presidents hoped that President Kennedy's death would have passed for an accident accompanying the murder of de Gaulle," Romero said. "De Gaulle was constantly the target of assassins during the years of the Algerian crisis." Romero said that he had been contacted by the Americans at a restaurant in Algeria and was offered $NZ671,700 for the killings; his credentials were his reputation as a marksman earned in a career as a soldier and mercenary in various parts of the world. Apartments were secured for him overlooking the Rue de Rivoli and the Arc de Triomphe, through which the two Presidents were due to pass. He would have used a high-powered Remington rifle equipped with an infrared telescopic sight.