Operation 40 necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents...We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time." The group sought to incite civil war in Cuba against the government of prime minister Fidel Castro. "In October 1960, they realize that this project has failed, and that is when Brigade 2506" was created, a CIA-sponsored group made up of 1,511 Cuban exiles who fought in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. On 17 April 1961, Vicente Leon Leon, with other members of Operation 40, landed at the Bay of Pigs via the CIA-chartered freighter "Atlantico".
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)