In December 2020, a deer hunter discovered two dead bodies that had been riddled with bullets and dumped in forested corner of Fort Bragg, one of the dead men, Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force. The other victim, Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas, was a quartermaster attached to the Special forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan.

Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, ,blatant military cover-ups, and he begins looking into the double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg, other murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units, and dozens of fatal overdoses.

John F Kennedy’s speech to the soldiers in October 1961, where he praised the men of the 82^ndAirbourne and special forces for their readiness to maintain freedom all around the globe. Special forces had been officially based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, since 1952, but had remained a marginal part of the army until Kennedy’s visit. Kennedy explicitly spoke of wars of liberation being waged in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and called for “a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training”.

After 1961, US Special forces adopted the green beret, the Navy Seals were formally launched and special operators fanned out across the Cold War’s hot zones to raise counter-guerrilla paramilitaries behind enemy lines. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia were immediately designated as countries of interest. In 1964, the CIA launched a programme of sabotage and assassination in Vietnam, Plan 34A. Studies and Observation Group (SOG) and was placed under the aegis of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam. SOG was engaged in sea raids on coastal installations, sabotaging bridges, kidnapping for intelligence purposes and carrying out propaganda warfare behind enemy lines across the peninsula. After the formal entry of the US into the war, regular soldiers fought guerrillas in jungle skirmishes, the air force carpet-bombed North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and dumped Agent Orange over South Vietnam, while US special forces led  “hunter-killer” teams in campaigns of kidnapping and assassination, which culminated in the Phoenix Progamme of 1968-72 which targeted what was called the “Viet Cong Infrastructure”. In 1961, special warfare training material was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and military officers from Central and South America started arriving at Fort Gulick in Panama for training in counterinsurgency. According to Michael McClintock’s Instruments of Statecraft (1992), over two decades 45, 000 Latin Americans including the future leadeers of various coups and juntas graduated from Fort Gulick. The US army also sent mobile training teams to Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela.

The US’s humiliating retreat from Saigon, and multiple congressional investigations into the military and intelligence services, counterinsurgency went out of fashion, replaced by new buzzword counterterrorism. In the Febrile 1970s, apartheid reigmes in Southern Africa and Israel funded and theorised counterterrorist action. Charlie Beckwith, who had given up a career in the NFL for a commission in the US army, who had been part of a covert mission to Laos in 1960s and travelled from the jungles of Indo-China to SAS training grounds in the British countryside before joining a mission to wipe out the last of Malaya’s guerrilla forces in 1963. Beckwith believed that special forces were either doers or teaches, and he was empathically a doer. Delta Force formed in 1977, by Beckwith, modelled itself on the European commando groups that had fought wars of pacification in Algeria and Northern Ireland. Three years later Beckwith led the ill-fated hostage rescue mission into Iran. The death of eight servicemen and the loss of eight aircraft in the Iranian desert should have led to a re-evaluation of the activities of Delta Force. Along with Delta Force and the Navy’s Seal Team Six, ISA came under a still larger military umbrella called the Joint Special Operations Command, which alongside CIA as a covert paramilitary force rescued hostages in Gambia, Sudan and Italy and invaded Grenada, Panama, Haiti and Somalia, flew into Suriname to defend the US aluminium firm Alcoa from nationalisation, hunted down Pablo Escobar in Colombia, and kidnapped and collected intelligence on Serbian military leaders during and after the wars in the Balkan. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other covert battlefields, JSOC hunted real and imagined enemies of the US. Its bases in Iraq including Camp Nama and Afghanistan including Bagram Air Force Base were notorious for the mass detention, torture and unexplained deaths of civilians. In a whistle blower report to Human Rights Watch, a US sergeant described a small room in Camp Nama painted entirely in black which was used for the hardest interrogations, Sleep deprivation, environmental controls, hot and cold water, loud music, strobe lights, hitting and kicking detainees during interrogations. The US soldiers invited their friends in the SAS to join in.

In the Fort Bragg Cartel, Seth Harp argues that after the capture of Saddam Hussein JSOC under General Stanley McChrystal heavily exaggerated the threat of al-Qaida in Iraq in order to ensure a steady flow of funding and support from Washington. The hidden surge of special operators and the campaign of mass assassinations in Iraq after 2007 and in Afghanistan two years later were in effect a rerun of the Phoenix Progamme. JSOC’s under McChrystal was summarised in the acronym F3EAD- Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyse and Disseminate, tarcking down  a target, killing him and every adult man and teenage boy in the vicinity, seizing every piece of paper and electronic device found in their persons, and using these materials to come up with more names to add to the hit list and then killing them too. Occasionally taking women and children hostage in order to force men to come out of hiding. There is undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas. The wars in Indo-China gave the US heroin epidemics; Latin America, a plague of powder and crack cocaine, the war on terror, heroin again and prescription opioids. The first CIA clients to see the benefits of the opium trade in South-East Asia were the Chinese Kuomintang expelled to the Golden Triangle between Burma, Thailand and Laos in the late 1940s. 

According to a New York Times Report 10 to 15 per cent of lower-ranking enlisted men were addicted during the Vietnam War, with some units reporting dependency rates above 50 per cent.

The War on Drugs intensifies under Reagan, under the terms of a secret 198s memo pledging logistical support and manpower to the CIA in its operations to support the Nicaraguan Contras and fight drug lords in Latin America. After the congressional ban that year on public funding for the Contras, Reagan’s national security staff decided to replace the cash by selling second-hand arms (some of them Israeli, In a process overseen by Shimon Peres) to Iran and by earning drug money from the US market. The scandal unravelled in  1986, after Sandinista troops in the Nicaraguan jungle shot down a twin-engine plane operated by Southern Air Transport- a company that had until 1973 been secretly owned by the CIA and capture the pilot. Gary Webb’s report in San Jose Mercury, revealed the part the drug trade plagued in the funding of the Contras, although denied by the CIA. Jeffrey Epstein helped move Southern Air Transport’s headquarters to Ohio, near the residence of the billionaire Les Wexner, ostensibly in order to carry out deliveries for his companies including Victoria’s Secret. The US blamed the Nixon-era epidemic of heroin on Turkish poppies, Mexico became the scapegoat for the opioid outbreak during the Bush and Obama years.

On 26 November 2025, Rahman Lakanwal, an Afghan refugee who has been assigned to Firebase Gecko ( a JSOC and CIA base extracted from Afghanistan after the Taliban regained power in 2021) and a member of a Zero Unit ( Zero-one for Kabul, Zero-Three in Kandahar), recruited by the CIA and trained by special operators, drove from the north-western corner of Washington State of Washington DC and shot two national guard soldiers, killing one. Harp writes  about Shahab al-Muhajir who had worked security for Rashid Dostum, JSOC’s favourite drug lord and was employed by Amrullah Saleh, who as the CIA’s right-hand man in Afghanistan had been responsible for the Zero Units.

In the run-up to the bombing of Caracas and Maduro’s kidnapping, the US military had been blowing up boats in the Caribbean and killing survivors clinging to the wreckage in double-trap hits. Over the past year Trump has accused Venezuela of exporting Fentanyl and cocaine to the US, and has used drug trafficking along with gang membership and immigration offences, as justification for the ICE concentration camp network. However, Trump has pardoned another former Latin American leader, the Honduran Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving time on drug-trafficking charges brought under the Biden administration.

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in The Special Forces by Seth Harp, Viking £22.50, 357 pages