Brigade 2506
CIA-trained Cuban exile force of the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing, whose veterans' association later joined CORU and whose members reappeared in Watergate, the Letelier inquiry and the Contra supply network.
Brigade 2506 was the force of Cuban exiles organized, trained and equipped by the CIA for the landing at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961. It took its name from the membership number of a trainee, Carlos Rafael Santana, who died in a training accident on September 8, 1960. At the invasion it numbered about 1,400 to 1,500 men in six infantry battalions, with five tanks, sixteen B-26 bombers and transport aircraft. Of its members 114 were killed and about 1,179 captured.12 On December 21, 1962, the New York lawyer James B. Donovan, recruited by Robert F. Kennedy, signed an agreement with Fidel Castro exchanging 1,113 surviving prisoners for 53 million dollars in food and medicine. At the Orange Bowl in Miami on December 29, the brigade gave President John F. Kennedy its flag, which he said he would return "to a free Havana."2
Veterans
Veterans of the brigade formed the core of later CIA operations against Cuba.3 Bernard Barker, Howard Hunt's contact in Miami for the break-ins at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist and at the Watergate, had served under Hunt in the Bay of Pigs operation; he and the burglars Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis were Bay of Pigs veterans.35 Felix Rodriguez, a veteran, took part in the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia and in the 1980s ran the Contra resupply operation at Ilopango Airbase in El Salvador as "Max Gomez."3 Felipe Rivero, a veteran, founded the Cuban Nationalist Movement with Guillermo Novo and Ignacio Novo.6 Luis D. Elizondo III, father of Luis Elizondo, fought with the brigade and was held in Cuba for two years.7
The Veterans' Association and the Letelier Case
The brigade's veterans' association was one of five groups that formed CORU, the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, under Orlando Bosch in the Dominican Republic on June 11, 1976, together with Bosch's Acción Cubana, the Cuban Nationalist Movement, the Cuban National Liberation Front and the 17th of April Movement. "We were conspiring there," Bosch later said. "Planning bombings and killings. Everything was planned there."4
In early September 1976, three weeks before the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, the brigade's president, Roberto Carballo, Manuel Camargo and Bernardo de Torres called on Admiral Ronald McIntyre of the Chilean naval mission there. They told him the leadership was committed to uniting anti-Castro Cubans and ending the bombings of small groups in Miami; the "only discordant note" was Carballo's feeling "over the detention in Chile and handover to US authorities of the Cuban Otero," meaning Rolando Otero.8 An undated memorandum to Colonel Manuel Contreras of Chile's DINA, written after October 1976, reported that "the FBI reached the conclusion that the perpetrators of the attack on Letelier were 4 members of Brigade 2506," naming Roberto Carvallo (Carballo), Carlos Pascual, Vicente Vásquez and Guillermo Novo, who "would have been deceived and paid by a Castro agent."9 By May 1977 the Letelier grand jury had summoned Armando López Estrada of the veterans' association among fifteen Cuban exiles.6
Relationships 5
Sources
- CIA Inspector General. "Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation," October 1961, declassified February 22, 1998, in Kornbluh, Peter, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba, New Press, 1998; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. X, as cited on the Bay of Pigs page. ↩
- Cuba Study Group (Taylor Commission), final report, June 13, 1961, FRUS 1961-1963, vol. X, doc. 169; Wyden, Peter, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, Simon & Schuster, 1979, as cited on the Bay of Pigs page. ↩
- Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998; Hougan, Jim. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA. Random House, 1984. ↩
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, file 2-471, "CORU," August 16, 1978, National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, doc. 13; Dinges, John, and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row, McGraw-Hill, 1980, p. 250, quoting Bosch to Blake Fleetwood, New Times, May 13, 1977. ↩
- U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. Final Report, 1974, section on the Watergate break-in (Barker's background). https://archive.org/details/senatewatergater01unit ↩
- Marina, Gloria. "Citan a Felipe Rivero en el caso Letelier," El Miami Herald, May 3, 1977, scan at latinamericanstudies.org/belligerence/Rivero-Letelier.pdf ↩
- Elizondo, Luis. Imminent. William Morrow, 2024. ↩
- Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78, as reproduced in Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo, tomo 2, sworn declaration of Admiral Ronald McIntyre, 1978, translated from the Spanish. https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991-2.pdf ↩
- Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78, as reproduced in Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo, tomo 1, memorandum "Caso Letelier" to Colonel Manuel Contreras, undated, translated from the Spanish. https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991.pdf ↩
Named without a link 6
Local network
Search or select an entry to see how it connects to Brigade 2506.
An interactive diagram of Brigade 2506's connections, drawn on a canvas and explored with a pointer. The same connections are listed as links in the Connected and Mentioned-in sections below.
How to read the graph
- People
- Organizations
- Programs
- Events
- Concepts
- Places
Larger = more mentions across the vault.
A link from one entry to another.
A name mentioned in an entry without a direct link. Toggle these with “Inferred”.
Gold rings mark entries mentioned across several clusters.
Orange rings mark your selection.