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;r~p ~ECtt ET one could have found a better man. People have said ... "Well, the son of a bitch just worked out in the Philippines as a stay behind what did he know?" He knew a lot. He had written a book on guerrillas. He was sharp, he was smart, and honest, and not overly ambitious. I am sure that he saw this as a way to further his career, of course. Military men, I think, tend to maximize that more than Agency people. But that was not his motivation -- or his primary motivation. He had around him some really first rate help ... not very high ranking •.. but we didn't need an awful lot of high ranking ..• we needed some hard workers. Frank Egan, who went down to do the training, was the man that I would have picked. He was probably the most disputable of the bunch because he was pretty volatile. He has been condemned for leading the Cuban manpower to believe that they were going to get more support than he had any right to let them know about. Well, I wasn't there, but I know damned well that if I had been, I would have been priming up the Brigade to do this tough job, not by counseling them as to the difficulty of it ••• at least, exclusively •.. or, giving them lectures about now you will really have to do this on your own, because you are not going to get one iota of assistance from the armed forces. You don't normally train a group to conduct an operation of this sort by playing on ~heir fears. If, down there at the end of the line -- first in Guatemala and then in Nicaragua -- Egan led them to believe that they were going to get them more help than he had any right to let them know, well, I can understand why that would have happened.* 122/ * With reference to Colonel Hawkins, Jake Esterline has noted: (footnote continued on following page) - 134 -