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The final question put to Esterline concerned the rules and regulations for the utilization of US personnel. Esterline went through the drill, noting that the use of American pilot instructors had been approved early in the game; and finally on O+~ and 0+2, American pilots had been authorized to participate in combat air operations. With reference to the use of Americans in the maritime activities, Esterline re- ported that initially there had been an absolute prohibition against the use of American crewmen on infi1tration-exfi1tration exercises; but later that had been modified to permit their use aboard the ships--but not to go ashore. Esterline agreed that the prohibition against Americans who were serving aboard the vessels held at the time of the invasion, and he conceded that when Lynch and Robertson went ashore it was without authorization.* * The chances were that had Lynch and Robertson not been with the underwater demolition teams that were marking the beaches, the invasion -might have stopped off-shore of Playa Giron. Considering the failure of the Kennedy administration to support the Brigade's effort, this would have been far less embarrassing to the US than defeat. That a third US citizen was on Cuban soil during the invasion escaped notice of the. CSG and everyone else who has written on the Bay of Pigs except Eddy Ferrer, one of the Brigade's C-46 pilots. :rn his book, Operacion Puma Ferrer wrote "un navegante norte-americano que se hacia llamar 'Bob'" was on the C-46 that landed at Playa Giron on 0-2 (19 April 1961) with ammuni- tion and picked up Matias Farias, the B-26 pilot who had been shot down by Castro's planes on D-Day and survived a crash landing. The navigator in question was an Alabama National Guard volunteer Robert Hofbruck (pseudo). 154