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The Chris Hedges Report
Drug Trafficking and Murder In the Special Forces (w/ Seth Harp) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
A
The decades of warfare in the Middle east and global war on terror have spawned a vast secret army embodied in special operations units such as the Green Beret, Navy seals and the shadowy Delta Force. Seth Harp in his book the Fort Bragg Cartel was Cole's Delta Force. For example, quote, a high tech death squad dedicated to covertly liquidating the male population base of a recalcitrant ethnic and tribal group that resists US 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 and 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 return to the US not only with 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. HAARP 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. The led many in these units to engage in 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 jumpstart drug dealing. Katharine Lutz, in her book home front, her 2002 study on Fayetteville, where Fort Bragg is located, calls the town quoted 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 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.
- [03:29]
B
Thanks, Chris. Delta Force is what's called a Special Mission Unit, which are secretive and elite units specially 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, you know, what I describe as a death squad.
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A
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, Schwarzkopf did, as well as really counterproductive to the stated mission of those who were trying to domesticate Iraq and Afghanistan.
- [05:14]
B
Yeah, that's not a common. That's not an uncommon sentiment to hear from either Tier 2 Special Forces or guys in the conventional military, the regular army, that these units, because they're so secretive and siloed off, because they don't share any of 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, you know, 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.
- [06:40]
A
Well, as you point out in the book, the way they got targetless was often confiscating cell phones under interrogation or from. And then just adding the people on the cell phones to the list. Isn't that correct?
- [06:53]
B
That's correct. And honestly, even if you share, even if you subscribe to the, you know, 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 surround these units 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.
- [07:39]
A
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 of their two best friends, actually, Leshager and Levine. And Levine ends up killing Leshager. But I just want to read this paragraph. One night at his house, Levine 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. Levine 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.
- [08:52]
B
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 are certain forms 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, you know, tall tales that were told, you know, to, in this case, Nicole. Rick, you know, they're criticizing the fact that it's women who are telling me this. Nicole is a sister of a Green Beret, 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 takes 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 of clearly 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, you know, talking about, you know, brains and stuff, I mean, it's. 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 Levine himself wrote a memoir of his time in the service and he, he talks about executing at close range and a unarmed prisoner who was seized in a 2015 raid in Syria, the target of which was a guy named Abu Sayyaf, Tunisian oil trader, who was the top, who was believed to be a top ISIS figure. And Levine says that, you know, 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, like Levine tragically ended up being.
- [11:45]
A
Oh, there's a moment in the book where I think she's a woman, but she's in the military. And let's be clear, you're a veteran and you served in Afghanistan, Iraq, excuse me. And she talks about somebody coming back from a mission and there's brain on his boots. There's human brain on his boots.
- [12:05]
B
Right? And as distressing as it is to hear those kind of details, we should be aware of it because that's what we, you know, 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.
- [12:39]
A
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 Levine, you write, by 2008, he was smoking crack on a daily basis and regularly ingested mdma, smoked crystal methamphetamine, snorted powder, heroin, and had even taken to inserting speedballs, a dangerous mixture of heroin and cocaine, into his rectum in a dissolvable capsule to get a quicker and more powerful high. 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. But talk about how pervasive that was and the culpability of the military in kind of kickstarting these habits.
- [13:38]
B
The military prescribes 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 of, whether incidental or not, of increasing aggression and suppressing empathy. In Levine'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 abuse of hard, 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 and 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 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, you know, in readjusting or trying to readjust the civilian life. Because a lot of them are almost literally addicted to adrenaline and need 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. And 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.
- [15:59]
A
You quote, Tyrell, you said the unit guys kind of separate themselves into two groups. Terrell, who, like leshiker, aspired to join Delta Force but failed to meet the rigorous and often arbitrary selection criteria. Quote, 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, right?
- [16:33]
B
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.
- [17:02]
A
You raise a point. It's fairly early in the book, and it's about the Wacos. So this is the Branch Davidian, these splinter group of the Seventh Day Adventists. They've stockpiled weapons in anticipation of Judgment Day. There's a standoff after. 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 the with surprisingly aggressive tactics, making use of heavy machine guns, armored personnel carriers, and even tanks. Amid the resulting gun battles, 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 Pose 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, you know, My, and it's a question for you. The, 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, the Delta Force or SEALs are snapped up by. Well, the Gaza Humanitarian foundation is one, but paramilitary groups, Eric, which Erik Prince runs, they can be recruited into ice. But I found that a kind of important point in the book.
- [18:43]
B
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. And you know, Delta Force is supposed to play an advisory role to help, you know, let's say the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team deal with an active shooter situation or something of that nature. But you know, the Posse Comat act, which bars the military from acting in a domestic law enforcement role, I think should be a higher bar towards, you know, the participation of units like this in domestic law enforcement situations. And we're seeing today, I mean that was, that was many years ago, almost 30 years ago. And you know, today we're seeing once again a sort of militarization of law enforcement in the United States. You know, these ICE guys. And that's leads me to a broader point that's maybe worth touching on. The sort of trickle down cultural effects of this, of these units and units like them, where everyone wants to be a bearded special operator. Everyone whatever military unit in or whatever police, whether they're just, you know, regular cops working a beat, they all adopt these aesthetics and attitudes of these units, which is like, you know, the longer hair, the beards, the tattoos, just the Oakley sunglasses, just the whole, you know, image of the, 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, you know, 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 and operations overseas, which are just, you know, threats, you know, to be neutralized, people to be, to be surveilled and then killed as needed.
- [20:44]
A
Before we go into the drug dealing, I want you to talk about Ali Muhammad. This is a fascinating story. I'll let you tell it.
- [20:54]
B
Sure. You know, I think they. So I briefly recapitulate the History. The book is not a work of history. It's a. It's intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it. Kind of, kind of a police, kind of police beat reporting. But in order to tell this 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 911 and telling the story of 911 in a way that I hope to be fresh, I focused on a role of a Fort Bragg soldier whose name was Ali Muhammad. He was actually born in Egypt and was a Special Forces soldier in Egypt, but came over. Fort Bragg is home to the JFK Special Warfare center and School which often hosts or sponsors foreign military officers. They're 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 Muhammad 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 US 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 Muhammad, 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 trained them in all sorts of things, you know, 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 Muhammad used to train these guys. Now Ali Muhammad was, 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 911 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.
- [25:09]
A
He lived in Osama Bin Laden's house in Pakistan.
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B
Right. In Peshawar. Right.
- [25:17]
A
I'm going to just to move on, but you write a lot about the blowback in terms of domestic violence, the wife killings at Fort Bragg and there's a series of killings, I think, what is it, six spouses or something or murdered or. I can't remember the number. But then of course the 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 malefoquine, which is larium, which I took in the Southern Sudan, is to blame. I mean just. 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.
- [26:21]
B
Yeah, the Special Forces are expert 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, 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 Fort Bragg, 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, you know, 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 and other wire services and newspapers of record and told them that what had happened was that larium, 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 in how they're able to control the way that the media covers Delta Force operations and their blowback in the United States.
- [28:27]
A
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 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?
- [29:26]
B
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, 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 5. And I remember this change taking place. It suddenly became all now it became about this organization called Al Qaeda in Iraq, and specifically this figure, the Al Zarqawi. And I remember seeing his, 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 a foreign, 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, 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 resistance. The insurgency was primarily nationalist resistance to outside occupation, just like you would expect to see in any foreign country that's been, or 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, you know, 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 this is psychological warfare that they're waging in which they characterize the enemy in a way in which is conducive to the. To the continuation of the war and delegitimizing, you know, resistance to US Military occupation.
- [32:51]
A
I just want to mention how indiscriminate the killing was. So jsoc, 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 COVID 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.
- [34:03]
B
This is a point I really hammer upon, which is the low quality of intel and the sort of unknown factor there, 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 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.
- [34:40]
A
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 1,000 people a month, were the best recruiting weapon the FMLN rebels had. Now, you got to assume it was.
- [34:53]
B
The same in Iraq and 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 part of. 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, you know, all the males and oftentimes the women, too, which is what made the Taliban seem preferable to the. To the US Occupation in the eyes of ordinary Afghans.
- [35:27]
A
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.
- [36:08]
B
So Afghanistan under US Occupation produced more than 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 2000s were a time of a 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 have, you know, they're either first world or have a large market for drug users were inundated with high, highly potent and. And very, very cheap heroin from Afghanistan during this time. And it's just supply and demand when there's that much of it becomes a lot cheaper. In the United States, people whose opiate addiction had 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 U.S. payroll. They were narco warlords that were. 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. You know, I have their names in the book and the site, the sources that I cite to demonstrate for a fact that this government, this client government in Afghanistan was effectively, you know, 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.
- [38:55]
A
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, former state trooper, and then maybe Lozetas. I mean, 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, 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.
- [39:51]
B
Yeah, that airport, the Rafer drop zone or the PK Airpark it's sometimes called, that's a privately owned business. And if I told a lie about them being involved in 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 Braggs 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, you know, around Fort Bragg. And you know, 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 Levine, 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 him. 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, 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, by dropping. Dropping drug cargo with a parachute from a plane, either either without a person or accompanied by a parachute jumper. I mean, this is the tactic that has used at the airport and 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.
- [43:06]
A
So one of the things you write about in the book are a series of killings, including the killing of Levine 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 things they do overseas. But there are many incidents, especially around Fort Bragg, that seem to suggest they're doing this domestically.
- [43:42]
B
I. I think you may be referring to the case of Michael Hastings, or.
- [43:46]
A
I'm sorry, Hastings. I was Hastings, yes.
- [43:48]
B
Yeah. Gary Webb is the reporter who shot.
- [43:50]
A
Yeah, that was the contract. He.
- [43:53]
B
Yeah. And so. But I see obviously why those two men would be related in your mind. They're certainly related in mine. They are reporters who. Who died mysteriously, you know, after reporting on these type of issues. Michael Hastings was the guy, was the Rolling Stone reporter who got Stanley McChrystal fired. And he, you know, because he wrote the Runaway General, which, you know, depicted McChrystal and his aides getting drunk and making jokes about President Biden's staff. You know, McChrystal, of course, being the architect, being the sort of godfather of the Modern JSOC and the architect of the assassination programs in Iraq and Syria and in Afghanistan. So, you know, 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, why he was sober at the time of his death. Contrary to the article that. The shameful article that New York magazine published insinuating that Michael Hastings had a drug problem and was under the influence at the time of his death. That was a lie. He was sober when he died. And the car appears on the video. It seems like it's a grainy video, but it seems like it explodes before it crashes. And people who called 911 talked about it being 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 the CIA's 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. And have really never been dispelled as far as I'm concerned.
- [46:13]
A
Let's talk about some of these killings around Fort Bragg, including the killing of Levine. And he was with one of his drug partners. Was his name Dumas? Dumas, I can't remember. But there's just a series of killings around there that are inexplicable.
- [46:38]
B
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 Levine, Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas. Is the. Is a sort of central murder mystery that I explore in the book. Levine, as I've alluded to several times already, was a Delta Force operator at the top of his game and done 14 deployments. You know, 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. And, you know, both of them had previously killed people. Levine had killed a Green Beret at his house, rebranding Mark Leshiker. And a few years earlier, in 2018, he had killed this guy and the military and the. And the civilian.
- [48:07]
A
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. Won't go into the details, but they completely got him off.
- [48:22]
B
Correct. And that led directly to his own death because Levine 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 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. Levine, 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 on 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 story, because it's so on its face, is so implausible.
- [49:53]
A
I want to talk about Los Zetas. So these are the big Mexican drug cartel, you write. The advent of Lozetas, who really were narco terrorists, inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history. Trained in marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations, Lozetas 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. Lozetas wore paramilitary uniforms, drove around in homemade armored vehicles called monstros, and to so 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. And where did they come from?
- [51:22]
B
So Lozetas are a perfect example of how U.S. militarism and intervention in foreign countries, in this case Mexico, stimulates drug trafficking and spreads terrorism and murder to the countries that are, that are victimized by these forms of imperialism. The Lozetas 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, you know, the sort of underworld scene in Mexico and realized, hey, you know, we're the baddest dudes around and you know, we can, 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, in Mexican history, Los Zetas, which really precipitated the terrible homicide crisis that continues in Mexico to this day, in which hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this new model of paramilitary cartel where it's just, 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. Losetas today are fragmented and isolated. But, you know, the model that was created continues to the great, great detriment of Mexico. And again, it's an example just like in Afghanistan where you 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, you know, 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 opt them and use them to carry out our national security objectives.
- [53:49]
A
You close the book by talking about Hegseth, the new Trump administration restoring the name of Fort Bragg. It had been renamed Fort Liberty. Bragg was pretty mediocre Confederate general. And you know, 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 few very handful of people who have been prosecuted for war crimes. But talk about the, the, the culture, the return of that culture and its, and those within the Trump administration who will empower it.
- [54:45]
B
So my book is very critical of every US president since 2001 and I don't stint 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.
- [55:28]
A
And also just to interrupt, he killed, was it a boy? Right? He killed Gallagher.
- [55:36]
B
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, you know, 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, you know, claimed to be the most lethal sniper in American history. So Eddie Gallery just wanted to beat his kill count, which is, as his own teammates described him, freaking evil. And in order to do this, he was just shooting during the Battle of Mosul in 2017 in Iraq. He was just shooting anybody that came into his gun sites. This is, according to his teammates, this is what they allege 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 body cam 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 while 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, you'll often see, 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. In Gallagher's case, he was acquitted of the most serious charges. But so that's a great example of Trump's, you know, the cultural influence that Trump is having. And to bring it around to the question that you asked about, you know, what's going on now with Hegseth and so forth, I think that it's fair to expect that in this administration we're going to 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, you know, the grungy motorcycle gang types coming to positions more prominence, whereas, you know, the sort of, the sort of straight edged Tito tallers warriors for God, we were talking about him earlier. Those guys are going to be de emphasized and are going to get out of the military because things are tending in the opposite direction towards lawlessness and murder that Trump and Hegseth not only tolerate, but actually openly celebrate.
- [58:22]
A
You also write about Michael Waltz. You this is Trump's national security, national security advisors. 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.
- [59:04]
B
Yeah, Michael Waltz is a good example of the type of quote unquote 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.
- [59:24]
A
The Trump White House. 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 such someone who writes books and as a reporter. Yeah, it's just everyone should get it. The Fort Bragg Cartel. And I want to thank Max, Diego, Thomas, Sophia, and Victor who produced the show. You can find me@chrishedges substack.com thanks for having me, Chris.
- [59:59]
B
It was a pleasure.
- [60:05]
A
Sa.