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For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.
Harp joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to highlight the dark culture of violence inflicted by Special Forces operators both abroad and domestically. These operators exist in a world where battlefield impunity spirals into rampant drug use and trafficking, extrajudicial killings and domestic violence. Harp’s reporting insists that these are not isolated events but rather part of a system built on secrecy and unaccountable violence.
“The book,” according to Harp, “is not a work of history, it’s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators’ lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.”
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos and Victor Castellanos
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Chris Hedges
The decades of warfare in the Middle East and “Global War on Terror” has spawned a vast secret army embodied in special operations units such as the Green Berets, Navy Seals and the shadowy Delta Force. Seth Harp, in his book The Fort Bragg Cartel, calls Delta Force, for example, “a high-tech death squad dedicated to covertly liquidating the male population base of a recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist U.S. military occupation.”
These secret units, whose very existence is not officially acknowledged and whose vast budgets are hidden, number some 70,000. Harp in his book details how these units are beyond scrutiny or accountability, how they swiftly went rogue when deployed overseas, murdering and torturing with impunity as well as ingesting and trafficking prodigious quantities of drugs.
These elite soldiers returned to the U.S. with not only the skill sets of professional killers, but layers of trauma and rage that fuel acts of violence, including murder, sometimes of their wives and partners. Harp documents dozens of unsolved killings and suicides, some of which appear highly suspicious, in and around Fort Bragg where units such as Delta Force are based.
There were 105 deaths at the base between 2020 and 2021 alone. His book details how military alliances with the world’s leading drug dealers, especially in Afghanistan where the US-backed puppet state was the world’s preeminent heroin cartel, led many in these units to engage in the distribution and sale of vast quantities of narcotics up and down the eastern seaboard.
He chronicles the corruption that came with the deliveries of vast sums of money in shrink wrapped pallets to buy allegiances in Afghanistan, deliveries that saw some of these soldiers pilfer funds — billions of dollars’ worth — and come home with tens of thousands of dollars taped to their bodies, money often used to jump start drug dealing. Catherine Lutz in her book Homefront, her 2002 study on Fayetteville, where Fort Bragg is located, calls the town “a dumping ground for the problems of the American century of war and empire, where the wounds of war have pierced most deeply and are most visible.”
Along with narcotics, elite soldiers sell pilfered weapons from military bases on the black market, sales that may have amounted to billions in lost dollars. Joining me to discuss his book The Fort Bragg Cartel and the rise of these secret armies is Seth Harp.
First of all, it’s a great book. It does what all great — it’s very well written — what all great works of nonfiction should do, which is take a microcosm and extrapolate outwards to explain a cultural or social milieu. I can’t praise it enough. It’s also just a great read. So let’s begin, Seth, with defining for us Delta Force itself, how it was formed as a product, of course, of the Vietnam War and what it does.
Seth Harp
Thanks Chris. Delta Force is what’s called a special mission unit, which are secretive and elite units especially drawn from the Special Forces of the Army, Army Special Forces or Green Berets, also the Army Rangers. It’s open to service members from all branches, but primarily draws from those Army formations.
So it’s kind of a higher tier to the Special Forces, or the most elite tier of the Special Forces, and it’s entirely dedicated to covert actions or things that the government either will deny or will say nothing about their own role in. And as you alluded to earlier, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unit effectively functioned as what I describe as a death squad.
Chris Hedges
And, what are they? So I had a friend of mine who was a ranger in Afghanistan and they would be based in a certain area. They would build relationships with local leaders and then suddenly in the middle of the night, one of these black ops units would descend and shoot a bunch of people, and then disappear and they would bear the brunt of all the understandable rage and anger, including the attacks from the Taliban.
I mean, he saw these forces. And I think, as you mentioned in the book [Former US Army General Norman] Schwarzkopf [Jr.] did as well, as really counterproductive to the stated mission of those who were trying to domesticate Iraq and Afghanistan.
Seth Harp
Yeah, that’s not an uncommon sentiment to hear from either tier 2 special forces or guys in the conventional military, regular army, that these units, because they’re so secretive and siloed off because they don’t share any their operational plans with anybody and never talk about them afterwards they kind of come in and do their own thing which typically tends to be striking a target and leaving everyone there dead and the building on fire and then just leaving and nobody can really explain where the intel for that operation came from in many cases perhaps as high as 50% of the cases they’re hitting targets based on faulty intelligence by mistake.
So completely unaccountable and those assassinations were very counterproductive in Afghanistan in particular. The Afghan client state that we set up, as pliable as it was under Hamid Karzai and later under Ashraf Ghani, complained constantly about these night raids.
Drone strikes we have heard a lot more about; there have been more reporting and more books and research done on drone strikes but the other component of it was these night raids or these assassination missions which were designed or intended to decapitate and incapacitate the Taliban resistance but, of course, wholly failed to achieve that mission in the end.
Chris Hedges
Well, as you point out in the book, the way they got target lists was often confiscating cell phones under interrogation and then just adding the people on the cell phones to the list. Isn’t that correct?
Seth Harp
That’s correct, and honestly, even if you share, even if you subscribe to the policy assumptions and are supportive of US foreign policy and support these wars, you should still be very concerned about the quality of intelligence, which is wholly outside any kind of review.
No one really knows exactly how they generate targets, except we do know that it’s highly fallible. So even if you support waging war in Afghanistan for 20 years, things should be concerned about the curtain of secrecy that’s around these and the fact that oftentimes they themselves really don’t know who they’re targeting. They’re, I think, highly overconfident in their own assessments, which turn out to be very flawed.
Chris Hedges
So Seth, these people are handed all sorts of drugs, dextroamphetamines, which lead to addictions. But before I get into that, I just want to read a little passage from your book. You focus at the beginning, they’re two best friends, actually, [Green Beret Mark] Leshikar and [Delta Force operator William “Billy”] Lavigne. And Lavigne ends up killing Leshikar, but I just want to read this paragraph:
One night at his house, Lavigne confessed to Nicole — I think that was his sister — that he had once shot and killed a child. He was just a little boy, he told her, but he had a gun. He also introduced her to his dog, a tautly poised, hyper alert Belgian Malinois named Rocky, that had been one of the unit’s working animals. Nicole wanted to know why it had no teeth. Lavigne told her that its titanium dentures had been surgically removed upon retirement because the dog had been trained to attack and had grown accustomed to feeding on the flesh of people killed in special operations raids, including being allowed as a treat to eat human brains.
Seth Harp
Horrifying, I know. And actually, people seized upon, and there’s a lot of criticism, some criticism of my work, it’s very much mixed, there’s certain forums where current and former special operations soldiers talk about a number of things and my book sometimes comes up. Some of them are supportive of it and agree that I’ve accurately diagnosed certain systemic problems in the community.
Others attack it and say that it’s exaggerated. And this is one thing that the opponents of the work seized upon to say that this can’t be true. This is proof that I am just recycling tall tales that were told to, in this case, Nicole Rick. They’re criticizing the fact that it’s women who are telling me this. Nicole is a sister of a Green Beret. This is not coming directly from someone at the unit.
And they’re saying, you know, these are just crazy stories that they’re either telling to impress women or scare them or whatever. But in response to those comments, somebody on the Kiwi Farms Forum, which is where this conversation takes place, posted an actual video of almost the same thing that I was describing. It was a clearly marked special operations canine, a Belgian Malinois, that was attacking a dead body clearly of a South Asian person, Middle Eastern… it’s hard to say the person is covered in blood, but the dog is attacking him right around the head area just as I had described in the book.
So the fact that that video footage even existed to me was shocking. And then the fact that someone had posted it even more so. Not only that, talking about brains and stuff, I mean, these details are gruesome and horrifying. I include them advisedly not to shock people.
There’s a lot of stuff that I leave out because it’s excessive, gratuitous but Lavigne himself wrote a memoir of his time in the service and he talks about executing at close range an unarmed prisoner who was seized in a 2015 raid in Syria, the target of which was a guy named Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian oil trader, who was believed to be a top ISIS figure.
And Lavigne says that a piece of this person’s brain flew into his mouth because his mouth was open at the time he pulled the trigger and he talks about having to wash the taste of brains out of his mouth, so this type of intense close-range brutality and gore and violence is a normal part of what it was like to be a Delta Force operator during the 20 years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and I think goes a long way towards explaining how some of them came to seem like such brain damaged Frankenstein monsters like Lavigne tragically ended up being.
Chris Hedges
There’s a moment in the book where I think she’s a woman, but she’s in the military. Let’s be clear, you’re a veteran and you served in Afghanistan.
Seth Harp
Iraq.
Chris Hedges
Iraq, excuse me. She talks about somebody coming back from a mission and there’s brain on his boots. There’s human brain on his boots.
Seth Harp
Right. And as distressing as it is to hear those kind of details, we should be aware of it because that’s what we, our military, that we pay for, that’s what they go out and do. Their job is to go out and kill people in service of these increasingly obscure and abstract national security objectives that are shared by not a large swath of the population, but rather most of the people who live and work in Washington, D.C.
Chris Hedges
So I want to talk about drugs, which play an important part in the text of your work. They’re given drugs by the military. It leads to addictions. When you write about Lavigne, you write,
“By 2008, he was smoking crack on a daily basis and regularly ingested MDMA, smoked crystal, methamphetamine, snorted powder heroin and it even taken into inserting speedballs, a dangerous mixture of heroin and cocaine, into his rectum in a dissolvable capsule to get a quicker and more powerful high.”
The drugs and alcohol, I mean, the amount that these people ingest, of course, is kind of staggering and we’ll talk about the drug dealing later but talk about how pervasive that was and the culpability of the military in kind of kickstarting these habits.
Seth Harp
The military prescribed special operators dextroamphetamine as a matter of course. Commonly known as Adderall, it is an amphetamine that allows you to stay awake for long periods of time and to tolerate sleeplessness that some of these missions require. It also has the effect, whether incidental or not, of increasing aggression and suppressing empathy.
In Lavigne’s case, he specifically cited the prescription he had been given to Adderall as precipitating his drug issues, which is a common sort of gateway or path towards the abuse of harder substances. He started crushing and snorting his Adderall, taking double the dose that was given to him, and then pretty soon he graduated to just using cocaine and smoking crack cocaine.
And then his drug use and dependency deteriorated from there. More generally, in the community, there’s a ton of drinking. I mean, alcoholism is a major factor of life in the Special Forces. And it’s not to be puritanical or to be judgmental of these people. I mean, a lot of people in our country struggle with substance abuse. It’s actually one of the most salient aspects of American society.
But I think that there is a kind of, there’s a sense in which it becomes necessary in order to cope with the pressures of a job like being an operator on Delta Force, the need to numb the pain and grief that comes from participating in this type of violence, and also in readjusting or trying to readjust a civilian life because a lot of them are almost literally addicted to adrenaline and need a stimulation at all times.
I mean, a lot of these guys, their psychological makeup is such that they’re constantly in need of stimulation and they really don’t like to be bored. And so those are traits, all of which are traits that are conducive to drug use. I think those are some of the reasons why you’ve seen such widespread prevalence of drug use in the Green Berets and in the Airborne Corps, all at Fort Bragg, to a degree that you don’t see elsewhere in the US military.
Chris Hedges
You quote [former IT contractor for Delta Force Jordan] Terrell, you said the unit guys kind of separate themselves into two groups. Terrell, who like Leshikar, aspired to join Delta Force, but failed to meet the rigorous and often arbitrary selection criteria.
“You have the teetotalers, the guys who are super Christian warriors for God. No drugs, no alcohol, super goody goody by the book. Then you have the guys who are just complete fucking derelicts constantly doing nefarious shit.”
Those are the ones you write about in the book.
Seth Harp
Right, that’s right. I don’t focus on the sort of good apples, so to speak. They do exist. The guys that, by their own internal ethical lights, are doing the right thing. We may quibble with the inherent nature of their job or the foreign policy objectives to which they’re tasked to serve.
Nevertheless, they’re not just engaged in blatantly criminal activity, but a shocking number of people in these special mission units are. And I think that’s something that we should all be very concerned about.
Chris Hedges
You raise a point, it’s fairly early in the book, and it’s about the Waco [siege]. So this is the Branch Davidians, this splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventist [Church]. They’ve stockpiled weapons in anticipation of Judgment Day. There’s a standoff. This is you writing,
“After a lengthy standoff in which the members of the apocalyptic offshoot church refused to surrender their guns and ammo, the federal agents moved in with surprisingly aggressive tactics making use of heavy machine guns, armored personnel carriers and even tanks. Amid the resulting gun battle, scores of people burned to death including dozens of women and children.”
And then you write,
“A full six years later, it emerged that, notwithstanding the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from acting as a domestic law enforcement agency, Delta Force operators have played a key part in the assault on the compound.”
So this is always, and it’s a question for you, the extent to which these forces, we know they were, you document they were used in Waco, can be used domestically and then of course you have people when they leave the Delta Force or SEALs, are snapped up by, well the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is one but, paramilitary groups which Erik Prince runs, they can be recruited into ICE, but I found that a kind of important point in the book.
Seth Harp
Yes, certainly. I mean, I wasn’t aware that Delta Force had played a role in the Waco raid. I’m actually from Austin, so Waco is just an hour north of here. And I think the relationship between Delta Force and the FBI is a cause for some concern. They have a very close working relationship.
Delta Force is supposed to play an advisory role to help, let’s say, the FBI’s hostage rescue team deal with an active shooter situation or something of that nature. But the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from acting in a domestic law enforcement role, I think should be a higher bar towards the participation of units like this in domestic law enforcement situations.
And we’re seeing today, I mean that was many years ago, almost 30 years ago, today we’re seeing once again a sort of militarization of law enforcement in the United States. These ICE guys, and that leads me to a broader point that’s maybe worth touching on, the sort of trickle-down cultural effects of these units and units like them, where everyone wants to be a bearded special operator.
Everyone, whatever military unit people are in or whatever police, whether they’re just regular cops working a beat, they all adopt these aesthetics and attitudes of these units which is like longer hair, the beards, the tattoos, the Oakley sunglasses.
Just the whole image of the special operator is something that has come to have widespread cultural currency in our society and I think much for the worse because when they’re dressed like that and when they’re comporting themselves like that, they can’t help but look at all of us the same way as they looked at Iraqis and Afghans and Syrians in operations overseas, which are just threats to be neutralized, to be surveilled and then killed as needed.
Chris Hedges
Before we go into the drug dealing, I want you to talk about Ali Mohamed. This is a fascinating story, I’ll let you tell it.
Seth Harp
Sure, so I briefly recapitulate the history — the book is not a work of history, it’s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators’ lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.
So when it came to 9/11 and telling the story of 9/11 in a way that I hoped to be fresh, I focused on the role of a Fort Bragg soldier whose name was Ali Mohamed. He was actually born in Egypt and was a special forces soldier in Egypt but came over. Fort Bragg is a home to the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, which often hosts or sponsors foreign military officers there from countries that are allied with the United States, such as Egypt.
There they often become assets of either the CIA or just assets of the national security institutions in general. Ali Mohamed was one of those people. It’s a question of how deeply we want to get into it because this guy’s career was quite extensive. But in short, he was some kind of operative in the CIA’s war in Afghanistan against the Russian occupiers in the 1980s. He was deeply involved in that most likely as an asset of the CIA.
We know that he had been approached by the CIA. We know that he was monitored by them and that he was receiving money from obscure sources. He also became a U.S. citizen and actually joined the army and was stationed at Fort Bragg as a uniformed American soldier, which I think is important to point out because subsequently he became a close associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, of course, was the co-founder of al-Qaeda with Osama bin Laden.
Ali Mohamed, this American soldier, then went on to personally train Osama bin Laden and all of Osama bin Laden’s core security detail in special operations warfare tactics, specifically using manuals that he took from Fort Bragg and train them in all sorts of things — surveillance and ambushes, including in how to hijack airplanes. He specifically taught the core leaders of al-Qaeda how to hijack airplanes using box cutters. It was that specific because we have a copy of the training manual or the FBI has a copy of the training manual that Ali Mohamed used to train these guys.
Now Ali Mohamed was reeled in somehow to the United States after the Kenya and Tanzania bombings in 1998 so he was brought back to the United States and he was sort-of kind-of arrested, sort-of kind-of indicted and prosecuted more or less in these closed doors, anonymized federal court proceedings that no one witnessed.
And then after that, before he was actually sentenced, he was just disappeared into the bowels of the US government and nothing has ever been heard from him since, which is crazy because in the sort of canonical accounts that you hear about 9/11 and the deep causes behind 9/11, why this event befell our country, it’s often acknowledged the role of the CIA’s war in Afghanistan in creating the conditions that led to the rise of al-Qaeda.
But if you read mainstream Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters who have written the most extensive accounts of 9/11, what they will always say is that there was no direct contact between Osama bin Laden and anyone in the CIA and to date there has never been any evidence of direct contact between the agency and Osama bin Laden.
But what that omits is the fact that there was a direct, extensive and long-lasting relationship between Osama bin Laden and an active duty member of the US Army Special Forces. So I think that’s a really significant omission, especially because this guy is still in US custody somewhere.
Chris Hedges
He lived in Osama bin Laden’s house in Pakistan.
Seth Harp
Right, in Peshawar, right.
Chris Hedges
Just to move on, you write a lot about the blowback in terms of domestic violence, the wife killings at Fort Bragg. There’s a series of killings, I think it was six spouses or something are murdered, I can’t remember the number.
But then, of course, Fort Bragg and in particular, the Delta Commanders, just go into overdrive to exonerate everybody from these killings, most of them, and cover it up. And they actually begin to spin bizarre theories that the anti-malarial drug Mefloquine, which is Lariam, which I took in the southern Sudan, is to blame and the media buys it. I mean, one of the kind-of minor subtexts of your book is just how easily the media is just spun by these people repeatedly.
Seth Harp
Yeah, the special forces are experts in psychological operations and psyops are a big part of what they do. Now, by law, those psychological operations have to be directed at foreign populations. They can’t be directed at American citizens. But not only is there a lot of bleed back in the age of the internet, but also these guys, when they’re dealing with the media, they sort of naturally inhabit that role and that ability to spin and manipulate.
And they’re quite capable of controlling media coverage of their operations through selective leaks and selective disclosures. In the case that you’re talking about in 2002, when four Army wives stationed at Fort Bragg were murdered in short succession by their husbands, all of whom or nearly all of whom were special forces soldiers who had just returned from Afghanistan, that looks really bad.
That could cause a call into question the relationship between American militarism and certain forms of blowback, especially violence against women. But instead of that, some senior officials from Delta Force got on the phone with credulous reporters from UPI [United Press International] and other wire services and newspapers of record and told them that what had happened was that Lariam, this malaria drug that they had taken, caused these guys to lose their mind and become paranoid and aggressive and in fact, homicidal.
This is a ridiculous theory. There’s no basis at all for it in medical science. It’s completely untrue and unsupported. However, it was repeated by virtually all mainstream media institutions in the United States and in foreign countries, in France and Italy, all across Europe and in Israel.
Everyone reported that these guys had lost their minds from taking the malaria drug. And I use that in the book. I don’t dwell on it long, but I use it as just a case study into how they’re able to control the way that the media covers Delta Force operations and their blowback in the United States.
Chris Hedges
So you write about the huge expansion of these, and Obama was really the figure that turbocharged these special operations units. But of course, it depended on a false narrative. It was justified by a false narrative. And that was spun by McChrystal, Stanley McChrystal. You write,
“Although there were relatively few foreign fighters in Iraq and most came from neighboring Syria, McChrystal was the primary proponent of the view quick to spread among Washington policymakers that the enemy was not a nationalist rebellion against outside occupation, but one node of a global conspiracy of America-hating terrorists. To describe this nebulous and inherently malignant foe, McChrystal and his staff invented the term al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI.”
And of course, that just morphed into the Global War on Terror. Can you talk about that?
Seth Harp
When the Iraq war first began, of course, it was premised on the idea that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and might either directly attack the United States or might provide terrorists with these weapons that they could then carry out attacks in the United States. We know that this was false.
This was a conspiracy theory that was invented by the Bush administration and the CIA to justify the criminal invasion of Iraq. It quickly became apparent that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And so at that point the narrative pivoted. I actually happened to be deployed as a very junior soldier to Iraq at that time, 2004 and 2005. And I remember this change taking place, it suddenly became, now it became about this organization called al-Qaeda in Iraq and specifically this figure, the [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi.
And I remember seeing his face, his picture on big billboard wanted posters around Baghdad. But looking into this deeply and researching it, I found that the role of al-Zarqawi was highly exaggerated. And in fact, he may not have even been in Iraq at the time. The reason why they latched upon this person, this Jordanian of Palestinian descent, who was by all accounts more of a criminal and a thug than an actual terrorist, was in order to paste a sort of mask upon the insurgency and paint it as foreign fighters.
Foreign fighters were said to be coming into Iraq to fight the occupation and so the evolving theory of the war became that we need to be there so that we can fight them there so that we’re not fighting them here. I even remember guys in my own unit making that same argument when we would debate these things around the time of the 2004 election.
But in reality, as Stanley McChrystal frankly acknowledges in his book, they greatly exaggerated Zarqawi’s role and the role of foreign fighters in Iraq. There were hardly any foreign fighters in Iraq as a percentage of the insurgency. Most of them came from Syria which is very similar to Iraq in terms of its ethnography. And the insurgency was primarily nationalist resistance to outside occupation just like you would expect to see in any country that’s been invaded by foreign forces.
So it was a way for them to get around the fact that the insurgency was an essentially legitimate enterprise of resistance and not only that but also to expand the war and say well now there’s an al-Qaeda franchise in Syria and now there’s an al-Qaeda franchise here and there. And in reality, if you look deeply at these groups and at the evidence for what’s being described as them belonging to a so-called decentralized franchise or cell of al-Qaeda, it’s really absent any actual command and control nodes, any actual communication between them and the original al-Qaeda, which was broken into a million pieces and dispersed into the mountains of Pakistan and Yemen pretty early on in the war in Afghanistan.
So, again, this is a psychological warfare that they’re waging in which they characterize the enemy in a way in which is conducive to the continuation of the war and delegitimizing resistance to US military occupation.
Chris Hedges
I just want to mention how indiscriminate the killing was. So JSOC, that is Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq, you write, “was hindered by an almost complete lack of Arabic skills within our force.” You’re quoting McChrystal, suggesting that nearly all of those whom Delta killed were targeted based not on the content of telephone intercepts but on pseudo-scientific nodal analysis, tips from paid informants and arbitrary guesswork.
“‘We were not death squads,’ McChrystal writes,” and then you write, “but armed with NSA intercepts, backed by newly developed Reaper drones, and joined by fierce Kurdish mercenaries called Mohawks. That’s exactly what JSOC became during the covert surge in Iraq, which lasted into 2008. The body count from Delta Force’s killing spree and the proportion of Iraq’s hundreds of thousands of war dead who were gunned down in JSOC night raids will never be known because it wasn’t recorded in the first place.”
Seth Harp
This is a point I really hammer upon which is the low quality of intel and it’s sort of unknown factor or the X factor about the quality of JSOC’s intelligence because, again, even if you support these foreign wars, what is the reason to believe that they’re attacking and killing the right people because it certainly hasn’t been reflected in any kind of positive outcome in those countries. And every indication that I can ascertain suggests that in fact they’re very bad at identifying the people that they’re supposed to be fighting.
Chris Hedges
Well, I covered the war in El Salvador for five years and the death squads, which, when I got to El Salvador, were killing between 700 and a thousand people a month, were the best recruiting weapon the FMLN [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] rebels had. I got to assume it was the same in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Seth Harp
It’s certainly in Afghanistan. That was the main reason why the Taliban was resurgent. That’s supported by vast, vast amounts of reporting on the ground talking to people that were just part of the population or part of the Taliban. It was these night killings, these night raids, these invasions of people’s houses and the massacre of all the males and oftentimes the women too, which is what made the Taliban seem preferable to the US occupation in the eyes of ordinary Afghans.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about heroin. So you write, “Afghanistan after eight years of US occupation was now producing nine times more heroin than the rest of the world combined and of course that bled over into the Afghan population.” The Afghan National Army was filled with addicts as you write.
But then the alliance between, in essence, these narco traffickers in the Northern Alliance and everywhere else essentially drew in members of these special forces. Explain how that happened.
Seth Harp
So Afghanistan under US occupation produced more heroin than the entire world could absorb. And the truth around this phenomenon I think is one of the best kept secrets of the 21st century. And the lack of awareness in the general population among Americans is really astonishing. But it’s not a surprise, their ignorance has been procured by the mass media and the government, which is hiding this sort of crime of the century as I sometimes think about it.
The 2000s and the 2010s were a time of global heroin crisis around the world. In the United States, as its recent memory, people are well aware that we had a terrible heroin crisis in this country. It became nearly the leading cause of death among adults. And then, of course, morphed and transformed into the fentanyl epidemic, which is with us today and has never been worse than it is right now.
Well, the cause of that heroin crisis was down to the war in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan caused the heroin crisis globally in Europe, in Russia, in Australia, in Asia, and also in Canada and in the United States. All of these countries, all these countries that are either first world or have a large market for drug users, were inundated with highly potent and very, very cheap heroin from Afghanistan during this time.
And it’s just supply and demand when there’s that much of it, it becomes a lot cheaper. In the United States, people whose opiate addiction has been primed by loose prescribing practices around prescription pills, found that they could buy heroin for a lot cheaper than they could get, let’s say some Percocet pills that have been diverted from the illicit drug market.
And the dirty secret that no one in government or media bothered to tell us all these years was that the people in Afghanistan that were producing those drugs, they were people on the US payroll. They were narco warlords that were directly armed, sponsored and protected by the CIA and the special forces and that complicity went all the way up to the top of the corrupt Afghan client state.
Hamid Karzai and his family in particular, they were definitely implicated in it and many other named warlords. I have their names in the book and the sources that I cite to demonstrate for a fact that this government, this client government in Afghanistan, was effectively the biggest drug cartel in world history and the fact that the United States, the whole of the United States government, was complicit in this is really mind-boggling to contemplate and not enough people are aware of it in my opinion.
Chris Hedges
So let’s talk about how these special forces operators use the skills that they have learned and become drug dealers. You profile, I think his name is Huff, a former state trooper, and then maybe Los Zetas. So you train, these people are highly trained, and they take those skills into the drug market. Talk about that process.
I mean, the amount of heroin that was coming into the Fort Bragg area, there was a small airport near Fort Bragg that you write about, was kind of staggering. I mean, just massive amounts. And much of it was funneled through not just former members of Special Forces units, but active members of Special Forces units.
Seth Harp
Yeah that airport, the Raeford Dropzone, or the PK Airpark it’s sometimes called, that’s a privately owned business and if I told a lie about them being involved and that institution, that facility being involved in international drug trafficking, they could turn around and sue me for defamation really quickly. But the facts are clear. The facts are nailed down.
There are criminal prosecutions that have either taken place or that have been fully adjudicated show that that airport, which is where Delta Force does its parachute training, has been a hub of international drug trafficking since the 1980s and involving current or former Special Forces soldiers trafficking drugs into the United States by air and landing them and offloading them in this airport that’s within Fort Bragg’s airspace and is contiguous with the base and has been a center of Delta Force training for decades.
Most recently, the manager of the airport, a guy named Tim Thacker, whose father, Gene Thacker, was an OG Green Beret, who was sort of the pioneer of this illicit enterprise. Tim Thacker, the son, was convicted relatively recently of methamphetamine trafficking and was said by North Carolina prosecutors to have been the biggest meth trafficker in that state’s history.
That’s just one story I tell about systemic drug trafficking taking place in the Special Forces around Fort Bragg. And to answer your question or to elaborate a little bit more, I think it often has to do with that need for stimulation that I talked about. Sometimes these guys aren’t necessarily doing it for money. Like you said, they have a certain skill set.
This irregular warfare skill set, this attitude, this mindset of doing things secretly and getting away with it, that’s something that tends to port over relatively easily to the drug trade and Billy Lavigne, in his memoir that he wrote that I obtained after my book was published, he talks about specifically this about how, as he started to get into the drug game and started meeting higher level drug traffickers, they were very interested in his background and understood that his skill set was something very valuable to them and he became an advisor to the cartel, helping them do things like understand police surveillance, because of course, as a Delta Force operator, he understood these things very well — what the capabilities and limitations were of surveillance, how it works and how to evade it.
And also he was helping them traffic drugs by air from Central America into the United States, including through the use of cargo, like dropping drug cargo with parachute from a plane either without a person or accompanied by a parachute jumper. I mean this is the tactic that was used at the airport in this community since the 1980s.
They will fly drugs in from overseas and they will jump out with it and into some of the national forests around North Carolina or Tennessee or Georgia and maybe come back for it later or what have you but that’s the game that they’re playing at Fort Bragg. It’s been going on for a long time and whenever it comes to light, it tends to get passed over or actively covered up by the military command.
Chris Hedges
So one of the things you write about in the book are a series of killings, including the killing of Lavigne in murky circumstances. You bring up Webb and then you talk, which I didn’t know until I read your book, that they have the capacity to take over the steering mechanism of a car. So I mean, this is the kind of thing they do overseas, but there are many incidents, especially around Fort Bragg, that seem to suggest they’re doing this domestically.
Seth Harp
I think you may be referring to the case of Michael Hastings, the reporter.
Chris Hedges
I’m sorry, Hastings. It was Hastings, yes.
Seth Harp
Yeah, Gary Webb is the reporter who shot himself twice in the head but I see obviously why those two men would be related in your mind. They’re certainly related in mine. They are reporters who died mysteriously, after reporting on these types of issues. Michael Hastings was the Rolling Stone reporter who got Stanley McChrystal fired.
And because he wrote “The Runaway General,” which depicted McChrystal and his aides getting drunk and making jokes about President Biden’s staff, you know, McChrystal, of course, being the architect, the sort of godfather of the modern JSOC and the architect of the assassination programs in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
So what happened to Hastings after that is ambiguous. It’s not clear exactly how he died, but there’s a video of his car crashing and it’s hard to understand what happened there. He was sober at the time of his death, contrary to the article, the shameful article that New York Magazine published insinuating that Michael Hastings had a drug problem and was under the influence of the time of his death. That was a lie.
He was sober when he died and the car appears on the video, it’s a grainy video, but it seems like it explodes before it crashes and people who called 911 talked about hearing an explosion rather than a car crash.
Now again, it was ruled an accident and Michael Hastings’ own family supports the view that it was an accident so I don’t want to make irresponsible allegations, but it is the case that in 2017, several years later, there was a hack of CIA documents that was released by WikiLeaks. One of the documents there was something from their embedded device branch of the CIA, which showed that the agency was researching how to infect onboard car computers with malware that would allow them to conduct undetectable assassinations by steering a car into an immovable object at high speed.
So obviously when that came out, the conspiracy theories around Hastings’ death really resurged and have really never been dispelled as far as I’m concerned.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about some of these killings around Fort Bragg, including the killing of Lavigne. And he was with one of his drug partners, whose name Dumas, I can’t remember. But there’s just a series of killings around there that are inexplicable.
Seth Harp
It’s really shocking the number and the frequency of these sort of soldier on soldier homicides. Murders taking place on base that appear to be like settling of accounts or drug deals gone wrong involving some of the most elite soldiers in the army including Lavigne, Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas, is a sort of central murder mystery that I explore in the book.
Lavigne, as I’ve alluded to several times already, was a Delta Force operator at the top of his game and did 14 deployments, was 37 years old and had this terrible drug problem that we discussed, was working with drug cartels as we discussed. And his life came to an end in 2020. His body was found riddled with bullets and dumped in a remote training range on Fort Bragg alongside the other soldier that you mentioned, Timothy Dumas, who was a JSOC support soldier who had deployed to Afghanistan at least four times and was in charge of securing the supply lines for the Special Forces.
And the police say that this was a drug deal gone wrong. That in itself is shocking that that kind of thing can take place on Fort Bragg involving guys like that who are in such privileged positions in the military hierarchy. Both of them had previously killed people. Lavigne had killed
a Green Beret at his house, a Green Beret named Mark Leshikar, and a few years earlier in 2018, he had killed this guy and the military and the civilian police.
Chris Hedges
And let’s be clear, they covered it up. He was completely exonerated, even though as you document in the book, the scenario that they accepted was not supported by the evidence. I won’t go into the details, but they completely got him off.
Seth Harp
Correct. And that led directly to his own death because Lavigne was so out of control that he needed to be in prison. He was a danger to himself. He was a danger to other people. And he may have killed other people in the interim. His memoir certainly suggests that. He hints broadly at doing hit jobs for the cartel.
So that act of malfeasance and dereliction of duty committed by the district attorney of Cumberland County, as well as the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, that led to these other deaths and I think there should be reckoning around that and the responsibility for that. But the question remains who was responsible for killing these guys because it was a professional job, these are not easy people to kill.
Lavigne in particular was somebody who was a very competent military operator who would be hard to get the drop on to say the least. Dumas, same story, he’s a very hard man. All these guys always went around armed and they knew who they were dealing with, dangerous people. So who was responsible for killing them and dumping their bodies in Fort Bragg?
Well I don’t want to spoil the last chapter of my book but suffice it to say the person that the DOJ is attempting to pin those crimes on I have really struggled to find anybody who accepts the government’s story because on its face is so implausible.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about Los Zetas. So these are the big Mexican drug cartels. You write,
“The advent of Los Zetas, who really were narco terrorists, inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history. Trained in marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations, Los Zetas used overt military force to consolidate control over most of the Texas border and the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz, augmented by the state and local police forces that they co-opted, as well as an endless supply of short-lived hitmen recruited from the lumpen class of the northern borderlands. Los Zetas wore paramilitary uniforms, drove around in homemade armored vehicles called monstros, and to sow terror, filmed themselves committing sickening atrocities. Countless thousands died in their raids, assaults, and sprees of arson. Countless thousands more were abducted and disappeared. A sophisticated criminal militia that used encrypted communications and had the backing of deep-pocketed investors, powerful lawyers, and many Mexican politicos, Los Zetas leveraged their military control over large swaths of territory to diversify into nearly every illicit enterprise imaginable, reaping billions of dollars in profits.”
Where did they come from?
Seth Harp
So Los Zetas are a perfect example of how US militarism and intervention in foreign countries, in this case Mexico, stimulates drug trafficking and spreads terrorism and murder to the countries that are victimized by these forms of imperialism. The Los Zetas were trained by the special forces, it’s a Mexican special forces unit that was trained by the US Green Berets, including at Fort Bragg, also at Fort Benning, and they also were trained by Israeli instructors.
And they were meant to be in the mold of the Green Berets, they were meant to be the Mexican Green Berets. But this unit, quickly after being used to savagely suppress the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in the mid-90s, they went rogue and looked around the sort of underworld scene in Mexico and realized, hey, we’re the baddest dudes around, we can run this game if we want and that’s exactly what they did.
They defected from the Mexican state and became the most notorious cartel in Mexican history, Los Zetas, which really precipitated the terrible homicide crisis that continues in Mexico to this day, which hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this new model of paramilitary cartel, where it’s guys who have expert military training, who are using that military training directly to effectuate drug trafficking operations and control large swaths of territory.
That’s a model that was picked up by other cartels in Mexico. Los Zetas today are fragmented and isolated. But the model that was created continues to the great, great detriment of Mexico. And again it’s an example, just like in Afghanistan, where we have what’s described as a narco state and what are described as narco terrorists.
But if you look into the background, if you run the clock back you’ll see what originally started this was the US intervention and the incompetence or malice, misjudgment, just everything misguided about it, of the way that we deal with foreign countries and the way in which we try to co-op them and use them to carry out our national security objectives.
Chris Hedges
You close the book by talking about [Pete] Hegseth, the new Trump administration, restoring the name of Fort Bragg. It had been renamed Fort Liberty. [Braxton] Bragg was a pretty mediocre Confederate general. That last line of your book, “Fort Bragg is back is not just about the renaming of the fort, it’s about something else.”
Those people that are now within the Trump administration, and of course, Hegseth has exonerated the handful of people who have been prosecuted for war crimes, but talk about the culture, the return of that culture and those within the Trump administration who will empower it.
Seth Harp
So my book is very critical of every US president since 2001. And I don’t stand on critiquing President Obama or President Biden. However, I do see President Trump’s role in his first term as uniquely malignant on this culture.
And the trickle down effects of it have been just terrible because not only did Trump loosen the rules of engagement that are applicable to special operations, but he also made it a big part of his political persona to hold up these accused war criminals, people like Eddie Gallagher, who have been turned in by his own teammates and ostracized by his own organization, the Navy SEALs. But Trump elevated him and made him out to be an American hero and also…
Chris Hedges
Just to interrupt, he killed, was it a boy, right?
Seth Harp
Eddie Gallagher killed a lot of people. Eddie Gallagher was on drugs, incidentally. He was taking, as Dave Phillips of the New York Times reports in his excellent book, Alpha, on the Eddie Gallagher trial, Eddie Gallagher was taking a lot of drugs, just like the SEALs have a lot of the same issues as the Green Berets.
So he was popping Tramadol, which is an opiate painkiller, and he was on this deranged quest to beat Chris Kyle, another very toxic figure in this story, who was claimed to be the most lethal sniper in American history. So Eddie Gallagher just wanted to beat his kill count, which is, as his own teammates describe him, freaking evil.
And in order to do this, he was just shooting, and during the Battle of Mosul in 2017 in Iraq, he was just shooting anybody that came into his gun sights. This, according to his teammates, is what they’ve alleged publicly. He was shooting women, children, old men, people that were clearly unarmed. And then in the incident you described, he was caught on someone’s bodycam about to stab a teenage ISIS fighter in the neck who was completely unconscious, incapable of resisting, unarmed.
And so his trial was a three ring circus in which President Trump personally intervened to have him… well, he was exonerated by the jury. I talk about the little tricks and behind the scenes ways in which these trials tend to play out. You know, when a special operator is accused of a crime and it proceeds to a trial, you’ll often see that the prosecutor in those cases is someone who has never tried a case before.
That’s a pattern that recurs, which is extraordinary. And it shows a lack of intent to actually secure a conviction. In any case, in Gallagher’s case, he was acquitted of the most serious charges so that’s a great example of the cultural influence that Trump is having and to bring it around to the question that you asked about what’s going on now with Hegseth and so forth, I think that it’s fair to expect that in this administration, we’re gonna see a further loosening of the rules around special operations, a further increase in the impunity that these people enjoy and more of the sort-of like piratical guys, the grungy motorcycle gang types coming to positions more prominent, whereas the straight edged teetotaler, warriors for God we were talking about them earlier, those guys are going to be de-emphasized, they’re gonna get out of the military because things are tending in the opposite direction and towards towards lawlessness and murder that Trump and Hegseth not only tolerate but actually openly celebrate.
Chris Hedges
You also write about Michael Waltz. This is Trump’s national security advisor. You call him “a thuggish, warmongering dullard who holds the distinction of being the first Green Beret elected to Congress. Aside from being the first former Special Forces officer to hold a seat in the House of Representatives, Mike Waltz was a wealthy man. He made tens of millions of dollars running a private company that trains special operations units of the drug trafficking Afghan army. Waltz, a passionate advocate for war in China, has said that he expects the Global War on Terror to last 100 years.”
Seth Harp
Yeah, Michael Waltz is a good example of the type of “leaders” that are produced by this organization, the Army Special Forces. But I believe, if I’m not mistaken, he was relieved of his position for being too openly subservient to Israel, which is really extraordinary in the context of the Trump administration.
Chris Hedges
Well, that takes work in the Trump White House.
All right, Seth. It’s a really great book and it’s a great read. I just cannot commend you enough as someone who writes books and as a reporter. Yeah, everyone should get it. The Fort Bragg Cartel. And I want to thank Max [Jones], Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis], and Victor [Padilla], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
This post has been syndicated from The Chris Hedges Report, where it was published under this address.