Jeff Morley’s Substack blog JFK Facts has posted an interesting coda to the story of Operation TILT. (I discussed TILT in a note available here). The post features an interview with Dick Billings, the LIFE editor who accompanied William Pawley and the Cuban team to their drop off near the coast of Cuba. The article is definitely worth reading for those interested in TILT.
Unfortunately, the post is marred by an odd claim that two Cubans who were later arrested for the Watergate burglary were also participants in TILT. There is no documentary basis for this claim, but I have a guess as to where it came from.
Billings and TILT
The transcript of Billings’ interview is available here. We owe the interview to Peter Voskamp, a frequent contributor to the JFK Facts substack. According to Voskamp, the interview took place in 2008, and the transcript is an excerpt from a longer interview.
Billings contributed numerous articles on the JFK assassination to LIFE immediately following the assassination, and he was also responsible for most of LIFE’s coverage of Jim Garrison’s JFK investigation in 1967 and 1968.
Billings later wound up doing significant editorial work on the report of the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA), and is credited as co-author of a book on the JFK assassination, written with the Committee’s chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey.
Billings was thus one of the journalists who developed a long term interest in the JFK assassination, and reported on it over most of his career. It is quite interesting to read Billings’ retrospective view of TILT. Did TILT influence his thinking? According to Billings:
“There was a lot of anti-Kennedy talk on that boat — a lot. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I would. There’s suspicion that these were the CIA guys in the place that they would’ve known. If that’s the way it worked, then they would at least have known that there was something going on in Dallas.”
Not very clear, and not very convincing perhaps, but Billings’ participation in TILT may have been one reason he was more willing than others to consider conspiratorial takes on the JFK assassination.
Billings on the genesis of TILT
There are some details of TILT that Billings provides which are not in the CIA file, or that may be somewhat at variance. It would take a detailed write up of TILT to describe most of these, something I do not have space or time for here. It is clear, however, that contrary to what CIA Miami station chief Ted Shackley thought, Billings was first approached by John Martino, rather than Nathaniel Weyl.
Billings also mentions a meeting in Boca Rotan between Martino and “money people”. This meeting did not involve William Pawley, so it appears than Martino approached others for financial backing in addition to Pawley. (Such a meeting has been mentioned by people like Loran Hall and Gerry Hemming, but I don’t have references for these right now.)
Billings, perhaps influenced by his later work with Blakey, has been a strong advocate of “the Mafia did it” view of the JFK assassination. This shows up in the interview almost immediately, as he tells Voskamp, “I was approached by the Mafia to begin with, a source named John Martino.” I do not find the case for Martino as a Mafioso particularly convincing, but Billings apparently did.
No Watergate burglars participated in TILT
In his JFK Facts article, Voskamp also claims that “Two of the crew members, Eugenio Rolando Martinez Careaga and Virgilio R. Gonzalez, would be arrested as Watergate burglars in June 1972.” But the names of Martinez and Gonzalez appear nowhere in the TILT file.
It seems that this claim comes from a page on the Dealy Plaza UK website which features links to some of the TILT file. (The page is available here.) Voskamp clearly did not bother to read the file himself. Unfortunately, this is also true for most of the discussions of Operation TILT now online.