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impression on the principals who were responsible for planning the air operations -- Beerli, Gaines, and Thorsrud clearly were concerned about FAR. In fact, George Gaines is on the record as having said: We did not have to be told that one air- craft in the air would do us a great deal of damage; and for that reason, our under- standing of the operations plan was that there ~ould be no landing on the island until we had destroyed all air-to-ground and air-to-air capability of the Government of Cuba aircraft. 111/* and Stan Beerli noted: We had U-2 coverage ... and Art Lundahl and his people were giving us detailed readout of where everything was ••. espe- cially in terms of what had to be done to knock out the Cuban Air Force. 112/** It might be well at this point to mention that subsequent to the close out of JMATE, there was specu- lation that the Air Operations people failed to con- sider the Castro T-33'~ as the serious threat that they proved to be. These aircraft had been identified in the Castro inventory in the August 1960 memorandum * Emphasis by writer. ** Thorsrud also noted that they had U-2 photographs of every serviceable aircraft on the island. 113/ - 87 -