◆ SpookStack

operations personnel and the guerrillas who were seek- ing support through the air drop of materiel. Consid- ering the success of the maritime infil and exfil operations, it does not appear that this would have been as difficult to accomplish as some of the project planners believed.* Jake Esterline, Chief of Project JMATE, put it in the following manner: I just felt the air crews weren't telling the truth about what they saw or didn't see, and I knew damn well where they were dropping their stuff because our intercepts -- within six hours -- would let us know exactly how many miles away the [Castro] Cubans * Stan Beerli made the following comments about the airdrops We had a heck of a time trying to determine if we were getting to those spots. There was really no way to know, and we were getting very little feed- back .•• We weren't really sure if ~e were really making it and how effective we were. It was always a great concern to us. Then, of course, there were\the crews that would come back and report that they had drifted off to the side of the drop point •.• I am sure there was a question mark in their [US] minds that maybe there was some collusion among the [Cuban] crews •.• But we had nothing to substantiate that except that we understood that the crews were all dedicated to sup- po~ting the operation, and so we hoped they were doing the job. 29/ - 118 -