Brigade 2506 Brigade 2506 Brigade 2506 (Brigada Asalto 2506) was the name given to a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed in 1960 to attempt the military overthrow of the Cuban government headed by Fidel Castro. It carried out the abortive Bay of Pigs Invasion landings in Cuba on 17 April 1961. In May 1960, the CIA began to recruit anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the Miami area. For most recruits, infantry training was carried out at a CIA-run base code-named "JMTrax" near Retalhuleu in the Sierra Madre on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. In November 1960, with Gregorio Aguilar Matteo spearheading training
CIA activities in Iraq recipient of the handkerchief, as CIA officials would likely have remembered an attack on the Iraqi head of state. While Qasim was not a colonel but a brigadier general and did not openly promote Soviet interests in Iraq, the pro-Soviet head of Iraq's "People's Court," Colonel Fahdil Abbas al-Mahdawi, fits the above description perfectly. Qasim effectively banned the ICP in January 1960, but Mahdawi remained a crucial conduit between Qasim's government and several communist-front groups—including the "Peace Partisans," which was allowed to operate in public despite being formally outlawed in May 1961—and was known for his outspoken praise for Fidel