| The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp. [excerpt] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n03/laleh-khalili/guns-money-and-opium?utm_campaign=4262523_20260221ICYMI&utm_medium=email&utm_source=LRB%20email&dm_i=7NIQ,2JCZF,3EIXEU,5IOHA,1,0,0,0 Under Kennedy a cabinet-level Special Group was set up to counter 'subversive insurgency'. The deputy secretaries of defence and state, the heads of the CIA and the US Information Agency (USIA), the chair of the joint chiefs, the attorney general and Rostow were all members. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Colombia were immediately designated as countries of interest. The committee was tasked with developing US capability to train and support indigenous paramilitary forces, directing the CIA and USIA in deploying counterinsurgency personnel to 'impending crisis areas', and pushing the CIA and special forces in Asia to find 'an exploitable minority' with paramilitary capability to fight communist insurgents. In 1964 the CIA launched a programme of sabotage and assassination in Vietnam, Plan 34A. Three years later it morphed into the innocuously named Studies and Observation Group (SOG) and was placed under the aegis of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam. According to a report in the Washington Post, SOG was composed of a thousand US special forces and two thousand proxies; it engaged in 'sea raids on coastal installations, sabotaging bridges, kidnapping for intelligence purposes and carrying out propaganda warfare' behind enemy lines across the peninsula. The Green Berets recruited and trained Cambodians and Vietnamese religious minorities to capture or kill North Vietnamese forces and the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front (NLF). For each communist fighter kidnapped along the Ho Chi Minh trail, proxy paramilitaries were given 'cash on delivery', a 2009 memoir by the CIA agent Thomas Leo Briggs claimed. SOG officers were also involved in provoking clashes in the Gulf of Tonkin between US and North Vietnamese forces, leading to the eponymous resolution that resulted in Indochina being flooded with ground troops. 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. The latter culminated in the Phoenix Programme of 1968-72 which targeted what was called the 'Viet Cong Infrastructure' – a euphemism for civilians who sympathised with the NLF – and resulted in the summary execution of tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians and guerrillas. Nearly a hundred thousand more were confined in what Douglas Valentine, in an article from 2013, called 'an archipelago of secret torture centres'. South-East Asia wasn't the only target of Kennedy's Green Berets. In 1961, special warfare training material was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and the next year, military officers from Central and South America started arriving at Fort Gulick in Panama for training in counterinsurgency. According to Michael McClintock's scrupulously documented Instruments of Statecraft (1992), over the next two decades 45,000 Latin Americans, including the future leaders 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 units in Colombia coached the country's military in counter-guerrilla operations in the fertile Magdalena and Cauca valleys. The tactics included 'cordon, search and destroy' missions and the formation of local paramilitary groups to defend Colombian oligarchs' coffee plantations, as well as propaganda efforts. Iran and Turkey also hosted US counterinsurgency trainers. After the US's humiliating retreat from Saigon, and multiple congressional investigations into the military and intelligence services, counterinsurgency went out of fashion. The new buzzword was counterterrorism. In the febrile 1970s, apartheid regimes in southern Africa and Israel lavishly funded and theorised counterterrorist action, and European governments fought domestic militants under the counterterrorism banner. A significant figure here was Charlie Beckwith, a square-jawed college athlete who had given up a career in the NFL for a commission in the US army. He had been part of a covert mission to Laos in 1960, and travelled from the jungles of Indochina to SAS training grounds in the British countryside before joining a mission to wipe out the last of Malaya's guerrilla forces in 1963. Later he led hunter-killer teams in Vietnam in conjunction with the CIA. Less interested than most in training indigenous guerrillas, Beckwith believed that special forces were either doers or teachers, and he was emphatically a doer. Delta Force, formed in 1977 by Beckwith and some of his spooky colleagues, 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. Instead, the Pentagon began planning for a second – never executed – rescue mission, out of which emerged the highly secretive Intelligence Support Activity group. Along with the army's Delta Force and the navy's Seal Team Six, ISA (which is still in existence) came under a still larger military umbrella eventually named the Joint Special Operations Command. In its first twenty years, JSOC functioned alongside the CIA as a covert paramilitary force. It rescued hostages in Gambia, Sudan and Italy, 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 Balkans. JSOC was even involved in the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, which led to the deaths of eighty people (including four US officials). According to Relentless Strike (2015), Sean Naylor's history of JSOC, the organisation was 'a fringe presence on the US military scene' until 2001. The war on terror changed all that. 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 infamous for the mass detention, torture and unexplained deaths of civilians. In a whistleblower report to Human Rights Watch, a US sergeant described a small room in Camp Nama painted entirely in black which was used for the harshest 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: This British guy actually wasn't supposed to be interrogating anybody – a British soldier. SAS ... But we went back there and he gave the [Iraqi] guy a pretty good pounding. Nothing really in the face. A lot of stomach shots, and I would say two or three groin shots, very harsh. A knee to the abdomen. Thrown against the wall and so forth. Some detainees were hosed down with cold water and then thrown into air-conditioned rooms. Some were waterboarded. One was forced to drink urine. According to military medics, others had burns on their bodies. 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 Programme. JSOC's modus operandi under McChrystal was summarised in the acronym F3EAD – Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyse and Disseminate – and 'typically meant tracking down a target, killing him and every adult man and teenage boy in the vicinity, seizing every piece of paper and electronic device found on their persons, and using these materials to come up with more names to add to the hit list, and then killing them too, sometimes just a few hours later'. It also meant occasionally taking women and children hostage in order to force men to come out of hiding. To 'keep up their morale, ward off passivity and suppress empathy' – in other words, to encourage aggressive behaviour – JSOC operatives depended on prescribed amphetamines such as Dexedrine and Adderall. Then, to be able to sleep, they were given Ambien. 'Such habits, once formed, are hard to break,' Harp adds phlegmatically. While the percentage of veterans in the US who report substance abuse is lower than in the general population, Harp shows that soldiers at Fort Bragg and another special forces base, Fort Campbell, are more likely to die of drug overdoses than the average US citizen. Dependency on narcotics isn't the only after-effect of war. A study at the University of Maryland in 2024 concluded that military service is one of the strongest predictors for becoming a mass shooter in the US. Another study, from 2018, showed that 15.7 per cent of US military personnel and veterans (3.9 per cent of men, 38.4 per cent of women) had suffered sexual assault and harassment, and that men exposed to combat were 3.4 times more likely to have experienced sexual assault. There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country's covert operations overseas. The wars in Indochina 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. Decades later a KMT general explained: 'We have to continue to fight the evil of communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium.' By 1973, the KMT was exporting 90 per cent of Burma's opium, and controlled nearly a third of the world's supply. According to the historian Alfred McCoy, the opium was shipped to Thailand and sold to a CIA client, a general in the Thai police. Another CIA client, the Hmong general Vang Pao of Laos, also used opium to raise funds. McCoy notes that the Laotians refined the heroin in a laboratory in Long Tieng, which, embarrassingly, was also the headquarters of CIA operations in northern Laos. Vang used the CIA's Air America planes to export the drugs from his jungle outposts. These Air America flights were central to the logistics of the opium trade: a decade after the US withdrawal from Indochina in 1975 and the end of CIA support for Vang's army, opium production in Laos had slumped from two hundred tons to thirty tons a year. During the Vietnam War, heroin was so readily available in Indochina that a New York Times report claimed that between 10 and 15 per cent of lower-ranking enlisted men were addicted, with some units reporting dependency rates above 50 per cent. Many soldiers brought their heroin habit back home. The US government refused to acknowledge the connection with the opium trade in the Golden Triangle and blamed the epidemic in the US on Turkish poppy fields. A drug epidemic expedited by war gave the Nixon administration a useful alibi for its War on Drugs in Latin America, and for the creation of a vast prison infrastructure in the US. In a 1994 interview with the writer Dan Baum, Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people ... We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. The War on Drugs intensified under Reagan. In 1984 the New York Times reported on the formation of JSOC and mentioned that the Pentagon had 'under the terms of a secret 1983 memo' pledged 'logistical support and manpower' to the CIA in its operations to support the Nicaraguan Contras and (supposedly) fight drug lords in Latin America. The report added that the Pentagon had been 'less co-operative' with congressional oversight committees than the CIA. 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 began to unravel 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 captured the pilot. Only years later did investigative reports by Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury reveal the part the drug trade played in the funding of the Contras. Webb's reports were strenuously denied by the CIA and derided by the mainstream press. He died in an apparent suicide in 2004 after his career collapsed, a few years before his reporting was vindicated by the release of archival national security material. (In a bizarre twist, while the role of Southern Air Transport and its connection to the CIA was coming to light, Jeffrey Epstein helped move the airline'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.) At the heart of the Contra arms supply was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who had a knack for covert operations in the hazy interstices between the CIA and the Pentagon. Many years later, the National Security Archive (an independent organisation that liberates classified documents through freedom of information requests) reported that North's diaries from those years contain many mentions of Contra drug smuggling, conversations with Panama's General Noriega, who aided the US with its covert war, and discussion of attempts to spring a Honduran general accused of 'narcoterrorism' from prison in the US. North's partner in the Iran-Contra affair, Richard Secord, was an air force special operator who had dispatched regular flights to Laos for General Vang and advised the Imperial Iranian Air Force (establishing the contacts that were later utilised in arms sales to Iran). Secord was also involved in planning Contra supply flights. In July 1985, he told North that arms for the Contras had arrived at a Honduran army warehouse and that, according to North's handwritten notes, '14 M to finance [them] came from drugs.' Then came the war on terror, and the heroin labs of Afghanistan. In the opening section of his book, Harp describes the murder of Special Forces Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar, killed in Fort Bragg by his best friend, Delta Force Master Sergeant William Lavigne II. The men had just returned from a weekend at Disney World with their daughters, where days of rides with the children were followed by benders on cocaine, MDMA, 'bath salts' and prescription drugs. Leshikar's six-year-old daughter witnessed the murder: 'She looked up and saw Billy pointing the gun at her daddy. And she looked at her daddy and it was like he was dancing.' The Fayetteville Police Department deferred to the military, as it often did, and accepted Lavigne's claim that he had fired in self-defence. What unfurls is an astonishing narrative about the wages of the US's covert wars abroad in the last quarter-century. Leshikar and Lavigne are not the only special forces operators whose stories of drug use and narcotic-related deaths are told. There are decapitated soldiers, victims murdered in murky circumstances, bodies set on fire and drug networks involving sex workers, tavern owners and corrupt cops. In June 2005, George Bush gave a speech to special forces at Fort Bragg amid an escalation of bloodshed in Iraq. In it he claimed that the US was in Iraq to stop the war coming to the US. What Harp documents is the way the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended up there. In Homefront, her book about the effects of the first US war on Iraq, the anthropologist Catherine Lutz describes Fayetteville, the nearest city to Fort Bragg, as having one of North Carolina's smallest tax bases, voter registration rates and number of sidewalk miles, and its county appears near the top or the bottom, whichever is worse, in many lists of North Carolina's 100 counties' features, including those for poverty, child abuse and other crime, female unemployment and auto accidents per capita. It has a striking number of pawnshops and strip joints, and of prostitutes and prostitute murders. And while many of its veterans are successful small businesspeople or civic activists, some live with horrific physical and psychological injuries, and they make up a quarter of the city's substantial number of homeless people. Harp's Fayetteville is, if possible, an even more squalid version of the town Lutz described more than twenty years ago. Harp interviewed special operators, their families and friends, drug dealers and drug clients; he reviewed reams of court cases and other official documents. He looks back at the war in Afghanistan and the stubborn upsurge in the opium trade after the fall of the Taliban, some of it inadvertently facilitated by the US. In 2007, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a bridge over a gorge between the Kunduz province and Tajikistan. The bridge – a standard dual-use infrastructure – stimulated the economies of both countries by providing an international outlet for Afghan heroin. Kunduz city was home to one of the main Delta Force base camps, and 'a choke point controlling access to the alpine supply route'. 'No wonder', Harp writes, it 'was the site of such fierce fighting'. The drugs didn't stay in Central Asia, of course, just as heroin didn't stay in Laos during the Indochinese wars. And just as 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, drove from the northwestern corner of Washington State to Washington DC and shot two national guard soldiers, killing one. It was soon revealed that he had been a member of a Zero Unit – these were paramilitary units (Zero-One for Kabul, Zero-Three in Kandahar and so on) whose members were recruited by the CIA and trained by special operators. Lakanwal had joined the unit in 2013 at the age of sixteen 0r seventeen, had been assigned to Firebase Gecko (a JSOC and CIA base) and extracted from Afghanistan after the Taliban regained power in 2021. Towards the end of his book, Harp writes about a shadowy figure called 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. Al-Muhajir, however, appears in the story not as a Zero Unit operative, but as the leader of the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISIS-K), which was responsible for a suicide bombing at Kabul airport during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The crepuscular world of covert operations frustrates any effort to distinguish CIA operatives from uniformed military, drug lords from drug police, clients from enemies, and Zero Units from ISIS. In January, Delta Force, the special operators who feature centrally as conduits of drugs from Afghanistan to the US, abducted Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela to be tried in the US. Commenting on the operation on social media, Harp noted: 'Delta Force is based at Fort Bragg. The other main unit involved, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, is based at Fort Campbell' – the other base where soldiers are more likely to die of an overdose than the average American. 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-tap hits, ostensibly in order to curtail the drug trade. 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. But without a hint of irony, he 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. You are only a drug lord, or a terrorist, if you are an enemy of the United States. |
