Richard Billings and His Fascinating JFK Adventures
Description
JFK Facts recently published interviews with both Richard “Dick” Billings and Roy Rowan, LIFE reporter/editors who were deeply involved in the magazine’s reporting on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The previously published Billings interview focused exclusively about his participation in Operation Tilt, a joint CIA-LIFE magazine operation in the summer of 1963.
What follows is a much more expansive discussion about his wide-ranging travels in the JFK investigation — from Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife and mother appearing at his Dallas hotel room on the day of the assassination, to his interactions with Jim Garrison, his eventual role on the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and his Mob-did-it book with HSCA lead counsel G. Robert Blakey.
The interview was conducted at Billings’ home in Westerly, Rhode Island, in 2008. It has been edited for length and clarity. Billings died on March 4, 2022, in Kensington, Maryland, at age 92.
‘There Was a Team’
“While I can’t put a copyright on it, these are my thoughts, and I will be candid with you. If I got to a point that I could put a few more things together in the next couple years, I might decide to do another book. But it requires people doing things, making decisions where at the moment they have no motive to do so. I’m not very optimistic that all these things will come together. What I’m obviously saying is that to find out who actually put this thing together, who was on the ground at the time of the assassination, it would be worth another shot.
“The book [‘The Plot to Kill the President,’ later renamed ‘Fatal Hour’] that I had done on the assassination with [G. Robert] Blakey [lead counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations] was a step in the right direction. We were pretty careful. We were encumbered by the fact that we’d worked for a government committee, and we weren’t going to contradict what they had decided.
“We updated the paperback version, but an awful lot more has happened with the record and Review Board work in the ‘90s. I’ve learned more about what went on in Mexico, for example, in the last few months just reading Jefferson Morley’s book (‘Our Man in Mexico’) and David Kaiser’s book (‘The Road to Dallas’).
“Fabian Escalante was a chief of intelligence in Cuba. He’s written a book called the ‘Cuba Files.’ It comes to the conclusion that the perpetrators are anti-Castro Cubans, which was one of the likely suspects back in the day that we wrote ‘Plot to Kill the President.’
“He named 15 people. Ten of them are Cubans, roughly. Some of whom I had known about, some of whom I had not. He’s got Antonio Veciana in there. He’s got Eladio de Valle in there. He also named Richard Helms, a few Americans like Dave Morales and Howard Hunt. And then at the very end, having made a case for his theory, he says, ‘Gee, we found out something very interesting at the end of our investigation.’ The half-brother of Sam Giancana sat down in the early 1990s and wrote a book called ‘Double Cross.’ When Blakey and I did the introduction to our paperback, that book had just come out, and we took a look at it and we assessed it as useless. It names people, shooters. The key shooter, according to that book — and I don’t often take a chance on denying that somebody was involved — but according to Giancana’s brother, the key shooter in the window that Oswald was supposed to have occupied was a guy named Richard Cain.
“Richard Cain was a rather infamous Chicago gangster who was also informant in the sheriff’s office, Cook County, kind of a well-known person. The chances of his being a shooter are almost non-existent. The point is that Escalante kind of undercuts his whole investigation by quoting from a book that’s been discredited by most if not all of the assassination critics.
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