During the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the exile Cuban frogman going in before the landing craft arrived had their choice of absolutely any weapon available on the U.S. commercial market and most of what was in the U.S. military inventory at the time; after all, the CIA and US taxpayers were buying their equipment for them.
Their choice, for the most part, was the commercial Remingtron Nylon 66, which worked fine after long immersions in sdalt water. The barrel was often shortened to about 10 inches, along with a similar rediction of the front half of the forward portion [handgrip area] of the rifle's stock. This eliminated the front sight, easily replaced with a Bushnell Phantom pistol scoipe or a 2-7 Power Weaver rifle scope mounted with 1" rings on the rifle's factory grooved receiver. The shortening of the barrel brought the weight down to about 3 pounds, adding a scope brought it back up to about the original weight, certainl;y a better deal than the M1 Garands carried by most of the invasion force.
The job of the Cubano frogmen was beach recon and intelligence, not combat, but in the event of noisy dogs in the landing zone vicinity, they needed to be taken care of as quietly as possible. Any stray Fidelista militia sentry could be expected to suffer the same fate, probably from multiple shooters taking their shots simultaneously, as they had been trained and practiced.
I knew a few of the survivors who went in with Brigada 2506 on 17 April 1961, and many of the sons, cousins and brothers of those who died there. They all agreed about the neat and professional way the initial landing went off, the shortcomings of the grand strategy and aftermath notwithstanding. The five-man teams of frogmen and their equipment got their job done, and that is what it is all about.
I've seen one of the Nylon 66s that made that trip and returned to the US, in Georgia in the 1970s, in the hands of a former CIA *asset* who dealt with those guys and their equipment procural in those days. He was fond of the little one-time spookgun, though perhaps not as much as the guy who had carried in onto the darkness of that Cuban beach.
