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 Castro as well as his trips throughout the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and China. In 1991, former high-ranking U.S. diplomat Hermann Eilts told journalist Elaine Sciolino that Mahdawi had been the target. By 1961, the CIA had cultivated at least one high-level informant within the Iraqi wing of the Ba'ath Party, enabling it to monitor the Party's activities. A CIA cable reveals that the Ba'ath Party "first approached Arif about a coup in April 1962." In mid-1962, alarmed by Qasim's threats to invade Kuwait and his government's expropriation of 99.5% of the British- and American-owned Iraq Petroleum Company's (IPC)