Murder, Drugs, and The Fort Bragg CartelA Look Into the Dark Underbelly of Special Operations
The Global War on Terror launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks is broadly and correctly perceived as a pointless saga of waste and failure. But in his just published book The Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, reporter Seth Harp, himself a veteran of the regular Army, delves deep into the essence of that war, or rather wars, by describing in chilling detail the wreckage inflicted on its principal practitioners, the U.S. Special Forces headquartered at Fort Bragg, adjacent to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and more specifically the elite, highly trained, and privileged unit known as Delta Force, which operates under the auspices of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). As he recounts, the terror war was essentially a program of widespread assassination and Delta, with the full blessing of higher command, was a primary instrument of that task. This led to the slaughter of countless men, women, and children around the globe, as “targeted killing” operations (further euphemised as “night raids”) swept up innocents in their wake. Through officially promoted books and movies, American society has been schooled to cherish the notion of an elite, fearless, warrior force, but as Harp details in the stories of particular individuals, the reality was all too often one of progressive dehumanization and moral corruption, devolving into a culture of addiction, drug trafficking, and murder, hidden from the outside world by assiduous official cover-ups. I caught up recently with Harp to discuss his book. (Lightly edited for clarity.) Cockburn We have this super elite force selected, rigorously, selected, highly trained, who by your account turned into a bunch of strung out, unstable, corrupt, in many cases, psychopaths. How did this happen? Harp Twenty years of continuous war, increasing autonomy, impunity, secrecy around these units and relying on them more and more just to keep these wars going without really involving large sections of the conventional military. I think all of those have had an effect in breeding the type of problems that I diagnose as well as trauma and moral injury and all kinds of social fallout from the wars itself and the demoralization that's felt in the ranks. I think all of that creates this kind of toxic stew that I describe at Fort Bragg. Cockburn Before we get into the details of your reporting, can you give me an overview of what makes Fort Bragg stand out in comparison to other large army bases? Harp. At Fort Hood, Texas, (home to two armored divisions of the regular army) thirty eight soldiers died in 2020, including a soldier named Vanessa Guillen, a photogenic young Latina soldier who was murdered. And this rightly became a target for a lot of media coverage about how poorly that base was run, the criminality that some of the troops were exhibiting. Two congressional committees got involved. The entire chain of command was relieved of duty, as it should have been. Whereas Fort Bragg, that same year, had fifty four deaths. And although Fort Bragg is bigger than Fort Hood, it's not that much bigger. So it was objectively a worse situation that continued into the next three years. A soldier died on average every week all through 2020, all through 2021. There were slightly fewer deaths in 2022. But then in 2023 there were another fifty-five deaths. So we've seen this really elevated level of mortality at Fort Bragg. The primary causes of death are suicide and drug overdoses, and there's also quite a few murders. I am tracking twenty four cases of Fort Bragg soldiers accused of murder since 2020. So the situation there is quite dire and there hasn't been nearly the same corrective action taken. In fact, there has been no corrective action taken at all. Cockburn. How did you first come to this story and decide to report on it? Harp I read about the murder of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas at Fort Bragg at the very end of 2020. (The bodies of the two men were discovered in an isolated, wooded, corner of the base by a deer hunter. Both had been shot.) A special forces blogger had revealed that Lavigne was an active duty Delta force operator. And in all my years of reporting on war and foreign policy, and also serving in the military myself earlier, I had never heard of a case of a Delta Force guy being in the news for any reason, positive or negative, certainly not being found murdered on base. And the police said it was a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong. That was all that they said. So at that point, I figured there was probably a lot more to the story and started researching, and it went from there. It came out that eighteen months before he was murdered, Lavigne had killed a guy in his house, Mark Leshikar, his best friend, who was another Green Beret, and that it had immediately been ruled a justified homicide. So that was another huge flashing indication that there was something really rotten going on here. Cockburn So who was Billy Lavigne? Harp He was just a kid from a lower middle class family on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who signed up for the Army when he was seventeen years old, before 9/11. He joined to get free laser eye surgery. But 9/11 happened while he was still in training and it really kicked off a very meteoric career for an enlisted man. He did an early tour in Iraq as a Cavalry Scout, and then got taken up the pipeline of Special Forces command. By 2009 he had made the cut for Delta Force. So that was right at the time when Delta was taking the lead in the assassination operations in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And Lavigne went on to do quite a few tours. I'm not sure exactly how many, but his father said more than a dozen tours, multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and Niger during the expansion of JSOC operations to North Africa. At a certain point, maybe in the mid 2010s, he seems to have really suffered a crisis of conscience, which was the precipitating event for his subsequent downfall, because he became convinced that what the United States was doing was wrong. He was afflicted with moral injury and felt guilt and remorse over some of the things that he had done, including killing a child. And his drug use began with them prescribing him dextroamphetamine. They give all operators these drugs, go-pills, and it spiraled from there. And by 2016, 2017, he's using coke every day. He's smoking crack and getting into even harder drugs, heroin and so on.
In many ways, it's kind of a sad story because he wasn't the stereotypical macho operator boasting about his kill count and how many women he slept with and so forth. That wasn't his personality at all. In fact, he was rather more of an introvert who, as I said, had real moral qualms about the global war on terrorism. So he was not a one dimensional character. Cockburn. How about the other man murdered with Lavigne, Timothy Dumas? Harp Timothy Dumas was not an operator. He was a logistics and supply guy who was attached to JSOC, which put him in a position where he was controlling these supply chains of weapons and cash and other things, including medications. According to the military documents that I reviewed, he was a very corrupt soldier who was repeatedly cited for losing items, for losing paperwork. He was involved in trafficking guns, stealing guns from the military and selling them on the black market. He was diverting and selling prescription pills. And he was also a big time cocaine trafficker who was dealing kilos and kilos of cocaine on Fort Bragg. After he got kicked out of the military for drug use - that’s the official reason on his separation packet- he was very upset and embittered because he was in his 19th year in service, so he was narrowly deprived of his 20 year pension. As a stratagem to get his pension reinstated he authored a Word document in which he described a group of special forces soldiers that were smuggling heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes. He put the letter on a thumb drive. He told that to several people who I interviewed, and then Freddie Huff told me that he had actually read it. And all of them corroborated the broad contours of its contents and his purpose in writing it. So it looks like Dumas was going to blackmail the special forces command and reveal a drug trafficking pipeline between Afghanistan and Fort Bragg. And then not long after, he turned up murdered on the base itself alongside Billy. So that feeds speculation among quite a few sources I interviewed that his murder was actually an inside job, and so was Lavigne’s, since Lavigne was also a major threat to the unit in the way that he was acting out. That's what made that murder such a propulsive narrative device because there were so many people who conceivably could have had a motive to kill these guys. Cockburn What happened to the thumb drive containing the letter? Harp. The thumb drive said to have contained Dumas’s letter remains in the possession of the Winston-Salem police department. Cockburn. Was the murder of Lavigne and Dumas ever officially solved? Harp. Kenneth Maurice Quick Jr was charged with the murders of Lavigne and Dumas. He has pleaded not guilty and goes on trial in January 2026. (Quick, a diminutive teenage low level drug trafficker with an extensive criminal record but no known military connections, purportedly managed to subdue and kill the two men, one a physically powerful and highly trained killer.) Cockburn Do we have any suggestion how high up the chain this cartel involvement might have gone? Are we just talking about the non-commissioned officers and the ordinary soldiers, or does it go higher in the ranks? Harp My sense is that this is something that's sort of done by lower enlisted guys. And to the extent there's complicity in the chain of command, that's in the nature of turning a blind eye. You have to remember, these guys, the commanders, have way better ways of making money than trafficking drugs. They have contracting gigs that they all step into as soon as they're out of their roles, and their commands themselves have unlimited operating cash. Cockburn But in other ways the world of special operations has had a significant effect on the military as a whole. In your book you list former commanders of Delta Force and how many of them have become two, three, four star, generals. I’m thinking particularly of Chris Donahue (currently commander of U.S. Army Europe-Africa and Allied Land Command, frequently cited as promoting a more aggressive posture toward Russia.) Harp They're all like that. They're all just wind up dolls who just try to advocate for more war, more operations, higher tempo. Another one is Michael Kurilla. who just stepped down as commander of Centcom, where he had a very aggressive role, especially with respect to Yemen. He didn’t come up through Delta Force, but the 75th Rangers (another component of special operations) and before Centcom he was in JSOC. So that's one of the double meanings of the title, Fort Bragg Cartel. I think guys like Kurilla and Donahue and their ilk are a cartel that comes up through Army Special Operations just as much as the infantry guys who are trafficking drugs are their own sort of cartel. Cockburn It’s striking that whereas everyone knows about Seal Team Six, years and years went by when there was no mention of Delta Force anywhere ever. How did they manage to stay below the radar so effectively? Harp I had never seen them mentioned in the news. I looked into it to check and found that there was one mention of Delta Force in the mainstream press in 2004 because they were implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal. And in fact, there were some reports that the sort of stuff that had gone on at Abu Ghraib were child's play compared to what was going on at the Delta Force interrogation center at the Baghdad International Airport. But that aside, it had been fifteen or sixteen years since they had last had any kind of negative press. How do they do that? Well, you have to keep in mind this is a unit that's dedicated specifically to covering things up and doing things in secret. So it's a natural extension of their capabilities to influence media coverage or their activities. There's a very strong psychological operations component to the Special forces, and that mostly gets exercised in the production of foreign propaganda. But inevitably, those same tools get wielded even if only implicitly towards the media here at home. Cockburn For example? Harp Prior to 2004 the last time Fort Bragg really came in for negative media attention was in the summer of 2002 because four Fort Bragg soldiers who had just come back from Afghanistan murdered their wives in the span of a few weeks. Two of them were Green Berets and one was a Delta Force operator who subsequently committed suicide. And that was really shocking to people. I mean, to see these four women get murdered in such quick succession and all the guys had just been in Afghanistan. It really didn't look good. And it was suggestive of, let's say, the connections between American militarism and violence against women, which I think a lot could be said about. But instead of that, the media coverage of it focused on this incredibly weird theory that this malaria drug, Lariam that they had all had taken, had caused them to go crazy and kill their wives. And just looking at the news archives, the United Press International and others, it says there explicitly that this theory was fed to them by anonymous Special Forces officials, and they were the ones that provided all of the sort of testimony padding out the idea that this malaria drug could cause someone to go crazy and have increased aggression and paranoia and so forth. So that's one example of how they pick up the phone and call reporters at wire services and the newspapers of record, and they put things out there, and the narrative gets manufactured out of that. Cockburn Could this system actually be reformed, or is it beyond redemption? Harp It depends upon the depth of the reform. I think that the two tier system that the military created after 9/11, or the three tier, however you define it, where you have a sharp division between conventional troops and special operations troops, that's inherently corrupt. Because the guys who have most of the responsibility and most of the privileges and who are kind of on the inside and doing all of the work as well are being shielded from scrutiny by secrecy and by impunity and the need to protect them from the consequences of their actions. That type of structure is inherently corrupt. And so I think the role of Special Forces should be de-emphasized in favor of the conventional army, which should be reformed through standard means. And that there also should be a winding down of the US military activities abroad, which is a huge cause of all of this. But is there any political will to do that? I don't see it at present. I think a lot of Americans would like to see that. I think you could find a broad buy-in for reforms like that to the military. But our political leaders aren't going to do it. Before you go: Please click that ♡ button. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Spoils of War, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. |