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as a partner in crime was similarly wishful. The one voice of reason in Washington was that of Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs; and it was Mann who from the fall of 1960 until he was replaced in 1961 railed against the failure of the US to abandon plausible deniability and openly support an anti-Castro program with use of arms. Unfortunately Mann won no converts. In the end, he, too, played the game. The question that will always remain unanswered is whether the whole shooting match at the BOP might have been cancelled if the Department of State repre- sentatives in either Guatemala or Nicaragua had been better qualified and had been given better guidance from Washington about the fact that there could not be degrees of plausible deniability either the operation was deniable or it was not. If it was not -- and it obviously was not -- an alert and forceful Ambassador might have precipitated a decision either to stand down the operation or to openly support the Brigade.