Chapo Trap House - 961 - The Dogs of War feat. Seth Harp (8/18/25)

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Journalist and author Seth Harp returns to the pod to talk about his horrifying and expansive new book The Fort Bragg Cartel. We talk with Seth about America’s forever-war machine and the global drug empire it empowers, with a special focus on the case of Delta Force officer William Lavigne, who killed his best friend before turning up dead near Fort Bragg in a still-unsolved murder. We also discuss the rise of JSOC, the third Iraq War and its ongoing ramifications, the US military’s ties with the brutal Los Zetas cartel, and the eternal shadow war waged in the name of empire. Buy Seth’s book here (and give it 5 stars on Amazon!): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bragg-cartel-by-seth-harp/ And follow him on X at @sethharpesq

All right All I want to be is a joke All I want to be is a joke We need problems and places Hello, everybody. It's Monday, August 18th, and this is your chopo. Just going to jump right into it today. We're very excited to have back on the show author Seth Harp to talk about his newly released book, The Fort Bragg Cartel. Seth, I mean, this is no shape to any of the other authors or books we've discussed on the show. But this is an astounding piece of work, Seth. And like, I guess like the highest compliment I can

pay it is that this is nonfiction that reads like a novel to me. And just like to contextualize this book for our listeners, I was just thinking of two fiction authors throughout this book that I think will like sort of situate the material. And the first of course was James Elroy. I was thinking of Elroy reading this book just because of the sheer scope of just squalor and psychopathic depravity carried out under the guise of law enforcement or I guess in this case national security and like the personalities and people that populate this book are truly terrifying. And the other one was Stephen King because like a lot of this book sort of read like a horror story to me. It's like you sort of invoke a demon into your life and society that

then steals your soul and turns you into a monster. But there's no supernatural explanation required because like the mechanism here is like just drug addiction and war and killing people. But like I think about a book like It, where, like, there's a physical location that is like the locus of evil. Is there, like, at the heart of this book, like, what is the thing, the it to you that, like, from, from which spins out this, like, you know, kaleidoscope of murder, torture, corruption, and death? I mean, if you wanted to reify it, you could say that Delta Force's base, you know, hidden in the woods on Fort Bragg is kind of that, you know, that monster lurking in the forest. but I think, you know, more generally, it's the entire U.S. Special Operations Complex and the dark heart of the war machine that's been waging arm conflict all over the planet for the last 25 years. It's what's generating all this darkness and evil.

I want to begin with a person who is sort of a tour guide or the main character, at least, for a lot of the book. Can you tell us what made you choose Master Sergeant William Levine as sort of a representative of the special forces and like his life and career as kind of a stand-in for this like history that you're discussing. So Billy Levine was found murdered on Fort Bragg at the very end of 2020

and I chose him simply because the book is at its heart an investigation into who killed him as well as the guy who, the soldier who was found dead next to him, Timothy Dumas. But as it turns out, William Levine was great sort of his life and career, the arc of his life and career and his death turned out

to be an ideal guide into this underworld because he was such a complex character. There's many things I can highlight about Billy Levine, but one of the things that's not often picked up on or immediately picked up on is that, you know, Levine, although he was a Delta Force operator who had done lots of tours. He had turned against the sort of post-9-11 Forever War paradigm and had actually come to hold foreign policy beliefs, not unlike my own or perhaps that you guys would share. He was very demoralized and disillusioned with his mission. There's a lot more to the story as well, but I want to point out just that Levine was not a one-dimensional character. Actually, I'm glad, or I like the fact that he was not the sort of like yokes, door kicking, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, you know, meathead operator of stereotypes.

In fact, he was a rather introverted, rather soft-spoken, rather nice guy before all of this. And for that reason, he made him more of an interesting character from my perspective as an author. he had a very a sort of like fall staff like quality in all of this that I really liked. Yes I think that's a good way to put it. Could you give our listeners just like

how did Billy Levine start his career in the special forces? And what were like some of the campaigns that he took part in and like what began his kind of descent into this world of criminality that eventually led to his murder? Levine was a regular guy from the upper peninsula of Michigan. You know

a middle class or working class Midwesterner, who joined the Army actually just before 9-11 in order to get free laser eye surgery. You know, a lot of people join the military for economic reasons, and Levine was one of them. He had been cross-eyed as a kid and picked on as a result of his, that slight physical deformity, which is actually pretty easily corrected, but, you know, your parents have to be able to afford an ophthalmologist and his couldn't. So that's one of the things that you can get when you join the Army is free Lasic, and so that's

why he joined. He did an early tour in Iraq as a cavalry scout with the Stryker Brigade out of Fort Lewis and then quickly got taken up the pipeline of the first special forces command, of the first special forces group at a time when the whole special operations complex was rapidly expanding. He made the cut for Delta Force in 2009 at a time when the unit was rapidly expanding and, you know, the fact that he was only, I believe, 26 at that time is indicative of that rapid growth in the unit because normally the guys are a bit older than that. He then went on to do, I'm not exactly sure how many tours because of the idiosyncratic way in which his enlisted record was printed, the copy I obtained.

It doesn't show what he was doing for a couple of key years. But by 2012, he was doing back-to-back rotations in Afghanistan in service of the U.S. assassination program there under the Obama administration when the war became all about drone strikes and night raids. He went on to do tours in Niger and then in Iraq and Syria in the war against ISIS there. And in the middle of all that, he spent some time in Israel undergoing training with the IDF. As to what precipitated his sort of decline to this life of crime that he was leading at the time of his death, I already mentioned before his disillusionment with the wars and all. Also, a big component of the story is something that happened to Billy in 2018.

And his drug addiction, by the way, I skipped right over that. But at some point along the way, you know, he had been prescribed dextraumphetamine, like a lot of operators are to help him cope with sleep deprivation, which quickly spiraled out of control to where he became addicted to cocaine and was using a lot of coke and a lot of other drugs. And then, I don't know if you want to get into this right now, but in 2018, he actually shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret. at his house in Fayetteville, and that more than anything else, I think, really sent him off the deep, deep end, the guilt and remorse that he felt as a result of having murdered his best friend. Yeah, no, that was my next question. His friend, Sergeant First Class Mark Leshachar, could you describe who Mark Leshachar was his relationship to Billy and the circumstances of his murder? So Mark was a regular Green Beret in the 19th Special Forces Group. In fact, he was a National Guardsman. who was working at Fort Bragg, I believe, in an administrative desk job. He had done tours in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the Philippines.

So he was a green beret, but he was significantly less elite than Billy. The two of them were best friends. You know, one thing that they shared in common was a voracious appetite for drugs. Both of them were really into using lots of drugs. And they went to Disney World with their two young daughters. You know, they each had a daughter, ages five and six, respectively. They took the girls to Disney World and were there for several days, just drinking and doing drugs the whole time. And on the way back to Fayetteville, Mark, who had ingested baths,

I don't know if it was on purpose or inadvertently because he got, you know, MDMA or something that was cut with bas salts. But he started really tripping and hallucinating and he became convinced that the car was being followed. And his paranoia started to irritate Billy and they got into an argument and they were arguing in the car on the whole way home. And then when they got home, it escalated from there. And Billy ended up shooting and killing Mark right in the foyer of his house. And then after that, you know, the really important thing that I've focused on the first two chapters of the book is how the military command dealt with that murder and how they made that case against Billy Levine just go away. Could you talk a little bit about the drug culture?

you talk about it a bit with Delta Force, but also just J-Soc in general. I thought it was very interesting because it does kind of remind me of, I mean, I guess they do use steroids too, but they use of steroids in professional sports, specifically combat sports, where it's a, you know,

guys in that context aren't necessarily taking steroids because they want to have like cum gutters. It's because the human body is not supposed to be able to fight for 25 minutes and that's the only way you can train to that capacity and similarly like it seems like the only way you could do the job of being in delta force which as you describe as just being a global assassination squad is by you know just basically doing an eight ball every day yeah that's exactly right i mean i don't think the human body you're not meant to be do the things the Delta operators do either. I mean, it is incredibly hard on your body and mind. Steroid abuse is a big

thing in that community because, you know, steroids are actually pretty effective in the short term. It's speeding up recovery and helping with injuries. So it's easy to see. You know, these hierarchies are very competitive. All the guys in the Green Beret groups, they all want to go Delta and make selection and only a small number of them are able to make the cut. So they use a lot of steroids for that. you know, the harder drug use comes in, I think, as well in the same context, because you're dealing not only with, you know, physical pain, you know, which makes people take things like, you know, opiates, starting off with opiate prescription painkillers and then progressing from there to heroin. But also there's a lot of like, you know, moral injury that's inherent in this

job that the guys don't really like to talk about. But, you know, if you have personally killed a hundred or more people like in close quarters combat, that's going to do bad things to your psychology, unless you're an absolute psychopath, which is actually pretty rare in the human population. And I've heard that the unit intentionally tries to weed out actual true psychopaths through its battery of like psychological exam. So, you know, if you're just a relatively normal person, then, you know, going through these experiences is guaranteed to fuck you about mentally and spiritually and people that have had that happen to them and that are in a bad place in that way, you know, they almost automatically turn to drugs. I mean, damage people

self-medicate. It's what they do. It's something that a person who's an army epidemiologist told me who has studied this cohort. So I think drug use is endemic in the green berets primarily for those reasons. Yeah, I mean, you talk about the physical toll, but yeah, you bring up the moral and spiritual one as well. And like reading this book, like, I was just struck by like how fundamentally unnatural and abominable it is to like a human being to consciously take the life of another person. And I thought about that in the context of how the special forces, as you describe in this book, how they like go from being what we think of in popular culture as like our most elite soldiers who fight our toughest battles to, as you said, a global nighttime

assassination squad where they're not like doing pitched battles with people. They are selecting names off a list to target them and just assassinate them, like, come kicking their door in the middle of the night and shoot to, like, just murder them. How does, like, that switch in war, how were the special forces at the forefront of that into just, like, going from, like, what we think of as war, like battles between two sides of people with guns to this, like, global hit squad? Well, it was a very specific policy choice that was made during the surge in Iraq, 2007 and eight, in which the emphasis became on night raids. rather than the sort of more conventional, more traditional method of waging war that you're talking about,

where you have infantry soldiers who are going out on patrol and drawing fire and then fighting back. Instead, they're using intelligence signals intercepts, tips from paid informants, surveillance feeds to generate targets and then go and hit those targets at night. And typically everyone on point dies. You know, one thing that I follow some of the sort of message boards where, you know, guys in this community kind of dissect my work and in many cases are very critical. One thing that they were pushing back on pretty hard in the initial week after publication was the idea that, you know, when Delta hits a target, that they just slaughter everybody who's there. And it's true that they also do abduction missions where the target is deliberately captured and interrogated for their intelligence value. but you know i have a lot of things i guess to say about that uh critique uh two things would be that

um you know one the capture missions well that's not like it's not like a good thing to come and be abducted by delta force because god knows what happens to them after that like where do they put these people and what do they do with them after that so even if they do do capture them you know are they being put in secret prisons or they being held on ships like that's not like an out to say oh we're actually we're not killing every single person that we talk The other thing is that if you look at the comments that are made by former Delta officers and operators in public forums, including on podcasts and stuff, they themselves will talk about, you know, I just posted one this morning by a former Delta commander named Jeff Teigs, who told Dalton Fisher, one of these operator podcasts, he said, you know, when we hit a target, we will kill you, your family, your village, your pets, your bullfish. when the black helicopters come everyone dies and that's like you know that's more exaggerated than anything that's that's you know that's putting it more vehemently than anything i wrote in my book and that's

coming directly from a former delta force commander well as long as we're talking about pets one of the most blood-curdling things that i've seen got a lot of traction in the coverage of your book is the details about uh sergeant levin's dog could you describe the the the details about the titanium dentures and some of the videos that he took sort of in-country. Yeah. So Levine was a dog handler, and dogs are a big part of what Delta does. They use dogs for a lot of things, including as attack animals. They send them in in advance of a raid, and they attack people.

They're trained to do that. And so Billy had a dog that he had adopted that had been one of the units, former working animals, a dog named Rocky, that had titanium dentures because they put titanium dentures in some of these dogs' teeth. But all of this dog's, this retired dog's teeth had all been removed. And Levine told a source of mine, a woman named Nicole Rick, who is Mark Leshiker's sister, she asked him why the dog had no teeth. And he explained to her that the dog had been trained to attack and that they had removed them to prevent him from posing a danger to people. And then he related this anecdote in which, you know, he had allowed the dog to.

to eat the brains of someone who had been killed in one of these raids. She was obviously incredibly grossed out by this. By the way, she wasn't the only person who told me about gruesome stories relating to Billy's dog. Another of his former buddies from the army told me that he had, that Levine had shown him videos of his dog attacking people, including a video of him ripping someone's fingers off. So it was in the process of writing this book was difficult because these are very secretive.

unit and these guys don't talk to the media. So I had to make judgment calls about what type of, you know, allegations to include or what type to credit. And in some cases, there's things that can't be corroborated or there can't, things that can be proven directly, but can be corroborated when you have multiple people telling you the same thing. So that's why we chose to publish this detail, even though it's not crucial to the book at all. It's kind of a, you know, just something that's thrown in for a bit of illustration or for color. In any event, that was something else that many people on the SF Vet Bro forums picked up on to say, this can't be true, that this shows that I'm inventing stuff and then I'm publishing hearsay from unreliable women.

However, no sooner did those guys pile on with all those type of comments than somebody who was on the same board actually posted a video shot from a drone that clearly shows an animal, a Delta Force, or another special operations working dog. just savagely attacking a dead body, doing basically what had been described in the book. So it was just amazing to see that video come out and prove for a fact that the kind of stuff that I'm alleging is real.

I think like a broader view. Like these are the individuals involved in the special forces. But can you talk to us about the founding of the Delta forces and then J-Soc? And like the shift, like what compelled the government and the military to go from, like, Delta Force to founding of the J-Soc. And then why you write that this is the most significant event in U.S. military history since the emergence of a permanent standing army following World War II.

Could you expand on that? Sure. So Delta Force was created in the late 1970s, and its first operation, Operation Eagle Claw in Iran, was famously a disaster. They were there to rescue the hostages that had been taken prisoner by Iranian revolutionary. in the American embassy. And there was a helicopter crash at the staging ground that killed like a crewman. And the whole thing was adepical and led to Carter's failure to be reelected. J.Soc is a sort of larger superstructure that was built up around Delta Force in order to give Delta Force assets like aircraft, naval capacities, basically everything that it needed to be a

freestanding unit because the problem in Operation Eagle Claw was that, Delta was using borrowed assets and the task force that they used was kind of ad hoc and patched together at the last minute. So going forward, they created JSOC to build it out and create like a full spectrum counterterrorism force is what it was originally, specifically for things like hostage rescue and other very difficult, tactically complex military missions. Now, pretty soon became more involved in things like covert actions. And as far back as the 1980s in places like Nicaragua elsewhere in Latin America, but it remained for the first 20 years of its existence, a pretty niche organization. And it wasn't really until the post-9-11 wars that it grew massively

in its size, its number of personnel, its funding, its mission set. Everything just grew and grew until it became, you know, the single most important component of the military, the, you know, the most prestigious, the most selective, the most elite, hardest to get into. with the most direct line to the president and other top, top U.S. officials. And the primary method of waging war these days is through JASOC-led task forces in various countries where the U.S. is waging, you know, these off-the-books, shadow wars and proxy wars.

And that's why I say it's the most important event since the creation of a permanent standing army because the creation of J-Soc inaugurated this entirely new paradigm for raising war. And I think like that sort of grows out of the experience of the American military and government in the Iraq War. Because like the creation of J-SACC, like it fills this need that was created by the fact that the Iraq War was a disaster and everyone hated it and they knew too much about it. And like even in the sanitized version that they saw on the news was too much for them.

So J-Sach like provided first Bush and then Obama like a great way to, continue all of these operations, but have them carried out literally under cover of the night and just like less American soldiers dying that we're aware of. But like it created like you said, like this whole new way of fighting a war like as based on these assassination campaigns directed at the Iraqi insurgency. Could you talk about that? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you said it, you nailed it. I can add to that that it was from the perspective of like that, from the lens of like the U.S. domestic politics, it was a successful move because of the American populace by and large doesn't really care that much about foreign policy and will be pretty checked out

unless American soldiers are coming back in body bags, unless there are like these large scale, you know, wars, invasions like we saw in Iraq, which proved to be incredibly unpopular. By doing it through J-Soc, they're able to continue the same missions, but without that domestic political cost. And like, does this lead to the rise of like American soldiers who are killed conducting training missions in Tajikistan or something like that? Killed in an accident or a car accident? Like this way of covering up actual combat deaths in these off the books like wetwork missions? That's an interesting question. You know, I think that I don't think casualty reports are faked.

I get a lot of them through FOIA and I believe that when a JSOC operator is killed, in action overseas, that you will have a publicly available document that reflects that death. Now, there have been so many accidents, suicides and drug overdoses at Fort Bragg that some people, including in a lot of situations where they've redacted the circumstances of death, when I post that kind of thing, it leads a lot of people to speculate, hey, these are casualties that are actually taking place in off the books wars. I don't know that we can say that, I don't think that we can say that. I don't believe that that's the case.

You know, J-Soc operators don't typically get themselves killed. They're very good at what they do. They have a lot of ways to mitigate the risks when they're doing things like assassination operations in Iraq and Syria, which they're doing right now in 2025 on a near daily basis in Iraq and Syria. And yet, you know, they don't take casualties by and large. That's part of the, you know, what we're talking about, the paradigm for continued,

continuation of the wars without the casualties. A big part of that is that these guys that are tactically able to go in, you know, kill people and get out without themselves suffering casualties. I thought another very interesting point you made and it's something we've talked about on the show is this idea of, you know,

you talk about Delta Force at its inception. It was originally, at least the goals of Beckwith and some of his, you know, sponsors within the army was to create an army unit that specifically was modeled after the SAS.

Like they, you know, they already had multiple special forces units, but a, to have a unit that specifically could do counterterrorism ops and could do something like retake an embassy that, you know, fifth special forces or something

like that couldn't necessarily do. You identified sort of around the warrant terror that eventually Jaysock, it kind of replaced the CIA in their traditional role as like the tip of the

spear of the American Empire and sort of the main factor in all covert operations. This is kind of a general question, but do you think that you can attribute like the this sort of culture of lawlessness and like murders

and drug abuse and everything? Do you think that that can be attributed broadly to just their covert role expanding like that since the war and terror? I mean, certainly the fact that their operations are so protected by secrecy and the unit itself is so shielded by government secrecy that it creates an environment in which all kinds of bad behavior flourishes. And also the sort of cultural adulation that's heaped upon these guys where they're treated as almost like real-life superheroes. I think that contributes to the sort of like rock star partying, you know, atmosphere.

And I should say, look, I'm not like a drug warrior. I'm not here to judge anybody who makes the choice to use drugs. I'm more of a civil libertarian in that respect. I don't think drugs should even be illegal. I completely oppose the entire drug war. But, of course, we're dealing with a separate subset of the population here, which is, you know, elite government agents who are, you know, military operatives who, among their many other tasks that are deeply involved in prosecuting the sort of militarized drug war

in Latin America. So they're fair game, I think, for this type of criticism because, you know, they're supposed to be the, you know, warriors on the side of law and order. But in their own communities, it doesn't, they don't look like that at all. Right. I don't think that makes you a prohibitionist to say that I don't think you should, you know, shove 30 Percocet up your asshole before jumping out of an airplane and killing someone's family. Yeah, I'm pretty civil veterinarian too,

but I'm, you know, count me in with that. Well, I mean, Seth, like so much of this book is the story of the special forces in the 21st century or in before that as well is really the story of drugs and two in particular, heroin and cocaine. And let's beginning with heroin, because you talk about how the opium market in 1990s Afghanistan led to the rise of the Taliban as sort of a tough-on-crime reaction to the Mujahideen?

Yeah, the CIA war that was waged in Afghanistan in the 1980s is very famous as the sort of Charlie Wilson's war, kind of like this, it's regarded, I think, as a very successful example of co-reaction in which the Russians were driven out. But then the story, ends, you know, in the 1990s or that the story is not told to us that the continuation of it we don't see, which was that those very same Mujahideen that had been formerly backed by the CIA took over Afghanistan and they were the ones who originally turned the country into a narco state. The Taliban emerged in the mid-90s specifically in reaction to these warlords and their abuses and among the things that they did. Like, you know, I'm not here to defend the Taliban or

promote or praise them because we hear so much about, you know, their treatment of women, their oppression of women, which is very real and other abuses. But that often, what we don't understand about the Taliban and the source of their popularity is that they suppressed crime in Afghanistan, not just drug trafficking. I mean, crime most often done by like the law enforcement, like, you know, cops and military in Afghanistan. Yes. And it wasn't just drug trafficking is also kidnapping and child sex trafficking. But they eliminated all of the drug. drug production that was taking place in Afghanistan. In fact, in the summer of 2001, is when they complete that eradication campaign.

A few months later, November, October, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and teamed up with those exact same narco warlords. And they created the Afghan client state that the U.S. backed for 20 years in Afghanistan. And this gets to, I think, one of the most galling, and one of the most really, like, just jaw-dropping parts of the book is, like, At 9-11 happens, the U.S. military invades Afghanistan and occupies it for 20 years. And over that exact same period of time, domestically in the United States, you see an explosion of opiate addiction. I mean, like, this is, you know, obviously prescription drugs are and part of that, but like as prescription drugs got too expensive to buy illegally,

suddenly the U.S. market was flooded with tons of cheap heroin from Asia. Because you talk about how the DEA reacted to like this explosion of heroin in the United States and who they tried to. And the way they kept the sourcing of this heroin sort of vague. Initially, the DEA was accurately tracking the influx of Afghan heroin to the United States. The DEA National Drug Threat Assessment for 2002 specifically says that as a result of the Taliban's fall, that heroin production ramped up again in Afghanistan. And then for the next few years, it was reporting on the high level of heroin availability from South. Asia or from Asia, especially in the northeast of the United States, in Appalachia, and in the

Midwest, which are the markets that, that African heroin reaches first because it comes by air, whereas Mexican heroin comes over the border and supplies California, Southwest. However, around 2008, the DEA completely changed its story and began publishing every year an assertion that only 1% of the heroin in the United States comes from Afghanistan. And that is a very counterintuitive proposition because at the time, by 2008, Afghanistan is the world's largest supplier of drugs. The U.S. is the world's largest consumer of drugs and the U.S. controls Afghanistan. So to say that there's no drugs flowing from one to the other defies credulity. And in looking deeply into this and how the DEA came to that determination, I found that

they used these two tracing programs and got into, in the book, I get into the weeds. I won't now. But suffice it to say that when you look carefully at how they make that determination, it's riddled with untenable assumptions. And in fact, the DEA in fine print admits that they don't know where fully 60% of the heroin in the United States comes from, they just speculate that it comes from Mexico. It's actually called alleged Mexican white is the made-up nomenclature for this category of heroin. But in 2012, some researchers

they were working for the Office of National Drug Control Policy were analyzing the DEA's work in this regard and published a paper that used mathematical methods to show that the estimates of heroin availability by geographic origin were irreconcilable with other known metrics of heroin availability, basically saying these numbers are bogus, these numbers don't add up. And ever since then, the DEA has said nothing in its annual drug threat assessments about Afghanistan, despite it being the world's largest narco state, they focus on Mexico,

on Colombia, and other countries. And any mention of Afghanistan was simply scrubbed from their publication altogether. I guess this brings us to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Fort Bragg is located. Given the picture of the availability of high-grade heroin in America in the years following 9-11 and the ensuing war on terror, to what extent can it be said that this was just coming into America on military cargo plans, landing at military bases, and then being directly. distributed by U.S. soldiers? It seems clear that some of that was taking place.

And there are other cases, incidentally, of that same thing happening between Colombia and the United States. There was a case in 2005 of five soldiers in Colombia who were trafficking multimillion dollar quantities of Coke into the United States from Colombia on military planes. and then as recently as 2018, there was a case of a couple of Green Berets who were also trafficking million dollar quantities of Coke from Columbia to Duke Airfield in Florida, which is Special Operations Airfield in Florida. Now, there's no comparable cases that have been adjudicated in the criminal justice system

of the same thing happening between the United States and Afghanistan. But people who read my book, I think, will, they will see in careful deep. detail how in case after case, the authorities, both military and civilian, are quite capable of covering up cases that promised to be, look to be politically embarrassing and just making those disappear. So it's not outside the realm of possibility that this happened and was simply covered up or dealt with unofficially. And, you know, a crucial narrative sort of vehicle in the book is that one of the guys who was found, or the guy who was found murdered next to Billy Levine, Timothy Dumas, had actually written after being kicked out of the army

for drug use in 2016. He sat down and wrote a blackmail letter in which he reported to name the members of a drug ring in the special forces who were doing just this. You know, Dumas had served four tours attached to J-Soc in Afghanistan. And he knew about what was going on to Kandahar Airfield and wrote a letter describing, you know, just what we're saying in drug trafficking ring. However, he was murdered before that letter ever came to light. And just thinking about like Fayetteville, North Carolina and Fort Bragg, how would you describe the community, like the military community in Fayetteville and like Fort Bragg specifically? It's a very unusual community because, you know, Fort Bragg is 50,000 soldiers, mostly young men,

all infantry or special forces. And so imagine, you know, who are mostly white. And Fayetteville is a majority black city that surrounds Fayetteville. There's a complex dynamic. It's been a military town since its inception. There was actually a great book written in 2001 called Homefront by an anthropology professor named Catherine Lutz, who delves into just this topic from an anthropological perspective and chronicles, you know, the high rates of poverty, inequality, homelessness, gender violence, and among many other things, drug trafficking, you know, which she and the sources that she interviewed blamed on soldiers who bring narco-trafficking knowledge and contacts back with them from tours in Asia and Latin America. Now, she wrote that in 2001, and in the course of my research and reporting,

I found that those type of activities have dramatically expanded as a result of. result of the so-called global war on terrorism. I mean, you also write about after 9-11, like a spate of murders of basically wives and girlfriends being killed. And a lot of the sources in this book are, you know, the former wives and girlfriends of a lot of these guys. Like, how would you describe, like, their role in, like, the situation of, like, the women in these people's lives who are often, like, the most exposed to, I don't know, like,

the psychological toll and violence that these guys' lives have taken on them? They're fully immersed in this world, and they experience it indirectly. You know, their husbands or their boyfriends are at their off on deployment off a lot of the year. They're back at home. They're dealing with a lot of the sort of heartbreak, infidelity, substance abuse, all these things that characterize life in the special forces, you know, impact them domestically. now when I came around to writing my book in a lot of cases I found you know this I said before this is a difficult target journalistically delta force is a very secretive institution and the guys are

trained not to ever talk to the media now there were quite a few operators that spoke to me some on the record mostly not on the record mostly completely off the record however the most valuable sources the most knowledgeable and the most willing to talk tended to be moms sisters ex-girlfriends, ex-wives, who had seen their husband, you know, brother, son, what have you, come to a bad end on Fort Bragg, and for that reason, didn't care at all about respecting this culture of silence. And in fact, were, you know, rearing to talk about it because they were, in a lot of cases, really pissed off. And because of their knowledge of this inside world, and because their motive to talk, in many cases, they were my best sources.

you talk a little bit about like the training for special forces what can you tell us about like how the military selects people through this process and what make like what in the training differs from like standard or even other elite units in the u.s. military or Marines well selection for delta force is very difficult to get into and I think the primary selection tool they use to weed people out is by just incredibly brutal ruck marches you know marching 40 miles with a pack that weighs, I don't know, maybe 50 pounds over a rough terrain. Like 100 degree heat, like, yeah. Yeah, sometimes in the heat or in cold or an adverse inclement weather.

And that's just something that not a lot of people are capable of doing. You have to be very, very tough. Not only do you have to be in really good shape, but you just have to be really tough and be able to suck up a lot of pain to be able to withstand that. So that's a big part of their selection. Their training is very specialized. They go through lots of specialized courses. You know, they're already special forces soldiers.

So they're already, they're already highly trained. But on top of what they've already done, you know, high altitude, low opening parachute jumps are a big part of Delta training, halo operations. They drill constantly on marksmanship. You know, I've read that the Delta Force uses more ammo per year than the entire Marine Corps on their, on their shooting ranges. Guys like Billy Levine looking at their enlistment record. they often have training, often have been to esoteric courses like, you know, evasive driving or counter surveillance. These guys are not just soldiers. They're just as much, in many cases, they're just as much spies as they are soldiers. And their training reflects that.

Well, yeah. I mean, like another fascinating part of the book is when you talk about how J-Soc soldiers are allowed to operate in basically virtually the entire globe and are given fake covers, including like basically real passports and fake, like assigned with essentially fake passports and social security numbers that are essentially real by the DMV and the State Department. And they basically are allowed to go to any country in the world and pose as tourists, aid workers, just like the kind of thing you're really not supposed to do in the military, like, you know, be out of uniform. Because you talk about like that level of reach and like the practice of posing as civilians in foreign countries. I literally didn't know that.

was the thing before I started writing this book. I didn't know that active duty U.S. troops can be in a foreign country, either in a small group, in pairs, or solo, posing as civilians, while in fact carrying out abduction, mission, assassination, or maybe espionage, you know, bugging embassies and that kind of thing. But as it turns out, that's a big part of what Delta Force does. Now, guys like Billy Levine probably didn't do that type of work. You know, he probably didn't wear, I know he didn't wear a uniform. I've seen pictures of him downrange. but at the same time he's not disguised as you know like an NGO worker they're just wearing whatever because they're not on film there's they never have any journalists come around they're going out doing night rates so they're allowed to just wear whatever they want but there are compartmented elements of delta force in particular an element called g squadron which is very much dedicated to exactly those type of operations and in fact i had a tip come in this morning about how they deploy to somalia according to this tipster I haven't verified it, but it's consistent with what I've learned.

You know, they were deploying to Somalia or first to Ethiopia, disguised as humanitarian workers were there to do flood relief. I mean, this would seem to imperil actual U.S. civilians who are aid workers or tourists in foreign countries if people posing as them are abducting and killing people in those countries. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, it's outrageous that they're doing this, that the government is letting them do this. I mean, that's just the beginning of the criticisms that I would have of this practice, you know, the fact that real humanitarian workers are now going to be under the shadow of

suspicion as a result of these activities. Well, and then the other, I thought, very telling detail in this part of the book is there was one country that was exempted from this sort of penetration by special forces posing as civilians. And it was Israel. Could you talk about that? Yeah, that was a detail that, you know, I made no attempt to elicit it was just a unit employee talking to me about her training and all the countries in which the unit operates. And she just spontaneously volunteered. And this is, by the way, it was before October 7th, before Israel and Palestine were so much in the news. You know, she just told me, yeah, you know, they just mentioned that we could never do spying operations in Israel. And that when Delta operators go to Israel because they're there routinely,

the fact that Levine was there is instructive because, you know, he was very much a mid-level or a low-level guy enlisted, not an officer. And yet the fact that he was spending, you know, on his enlistant record shows four months in Israel, that shows me that pretty much all unit guys rotate through Israel. And apparently when they're staying there, the IDF puts them up in bugged hotel rooms. They're aware that they're bugged. They're not allowed to choose their accommodations and they submit to this indignity, which they wouldn't, I don't think, except from any other allied country.

And yeah, that's just pathetic. I mean, well, at least like, you know, at least with Israel we could say that they never spy on us. At least there's like a reciprocal thing there. Well, I mean, I was just struck by it by like, because like, these guys go to Israel to receive training. And so like, you know, our best friend in client state

would seem to know the most about these guys. and I think it's telling that they don't let them in the country, except unless under heavy surveillance. Yeah, yeah. I've heard that, you know, I don't know what they're doing, whether it's training or what. I'm not sure exactly why Delta Force operators go to Israel as like a day of rigor part, you know, of their advancement through the ranks.

It could be training, it could be intelligence sharing. I believe that Israel probably generates a lot of the targets the Delta Force is hitting every week or every day. possibly right now in Iraq and in Syria, because Israel has so many enemies there. And the U.S. intelligence, particularly our language capabilities are so poor that I imagine it's Israel generating most of the targets for them. And, you know, Trump earlier this year, a few months into his administration, made a comment where he said, since my inauguration, U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria,

and Somalia have eliminated 68 terrorists. And to me, that was a clear reference to what's called the Expeditionary Targeting Force, which is a Delta Force troop that has been stationed in Iraq and Syria for 10 years now. And the fact that Trump gave a number was very, you know, Biden never talked about these operations and neither did his people. But this Trump's comment provided a crucial window because that was an approximation of the tempo of operations that they're doing 68 he said and I guess that have been two or three months at 68 kills I mean so you can do the math very easily and again to bring it back to the point I'm making like it's 2025 who are those people that they're attacking and killing in Iraq and Syria they'll all the sent com when they put

out statements they'll just say that they're ISIS but I think that's probably really reductive a lot of them are most likely um Iranian or allied with the Iranians or who knows but I think it's probably Israel mostly was directing those operations. Well, we talked earlier about like the assassination campaign that was in, that went on during the Iraq war that was sort of part of the surge and this sort of a smaller footprint, you know, less high profile, you know, more highly targeted, shall we say, military operations. But like you make the point that like every Sunni militant in Iraq was just like put under

the umbrella term of al-Qaeda in Iraq, right? Like they're a part of an international global terrorism network. that would be otherwise attacking America. But throughout the book, you also make reference to what you refer to as the third Iraq war or the Iraq War part three. Because you tell us what you're describing, referring to when you make that reference. So President Obama drew down troops from Iraq and had completed an almost complete withdrawal by 2011. However, after ISIS emerged, you know, in 2014, Obama redeployed troops to Iraq. Iraq and Syria. Or he redeployed troops to Iraq and also to Syria for the first time putting

uniform soldiers on the ground in Syria. And throughout the rest of his presidency, J-Soc led task force over there was waging, you know, a major ground campaign against ISIS. It was a war that was easily on the scale of the Iraq war itself, what I call Iraq War II. And last to the present day, just the operations I was just talking about are a continuation of this campaign, which I think culminated in 2017, or culminated in 2017 with the destruction of the city of Raqa. But that was sort of J-Sox's biggest war to date. And yeah, as I keep saying, it continues to this day. Another small but sort of telling detail in this book for me that I found very surprising

is you talk about how the U.S. military, as far as institutions go in American life, is very diverse. However, you state that infantry soldiers are mostly white and that special forces soldiers are almost all white. What are we to make of that detail? I was very surprised by that. You know, that's obviously not the focus of my book. I mean, the race of the guys that are carrying out these war crimes is really not the most important aspect of it. Nevertheless, this is this is something that many of my sources told me about that is a very salient feature of the green berets and in particular delta force is that you know we were talking about selection earlier but selection is very idiosyncratic and it's very much an old boys club and they choose guys

who look like them and it's mostly guys who look the same looked apart they tend to be not only just white guys but but tall white guys they really tend to select for guys who are quite tall. You see that in all the photos of them. People have men under six feet being discriminated against once again. I hate it. I think you could find some of that, you know, that discrimination against the vertically challenged in Delta Force for sure.

I mean, Billy Levine was six foot one and Mark Leshiker, if I'm not mistaken, was six foot six. So these tend to be hulking dudes. But yeah, I interviewed soldiers, you know, African-American soldiers in the 82nd who tried out for the third group or for special forces or for Delta, who talked about just this and how it's almost impossible as a black guy to get in Delta Force. Now, the SFFBRO message boards will jump on this and even post pictures of the one black operator who was photographed in Syria a few years ago and say you, but again,

okay, you're talking about 99% white, but Delta is 300, 400 operators. So yes, there are are one, two, three. And of course, there's a high degree of turnover. So I'm not saying it never happens. There's also probably, or there definitely have been Asian operators, Latino operators, but it is, it is the kind of, the degree of whiteness would not be tolerated in the other institution of such importance to the U.S. government because everyone would see just by looking at it that it's so homogenous. I mentioned before that your book is, is larger the story of drugs in the 21st century. And we talked a little bit about the Afghanistan and its heroin production. But I'd like to turn now to cocaine. Because, and like, could you talk about the

character in your book who was the former Special Forces guy who became a state trooper and then became a major cocaine trafficker? Yeah. So Freddie Wayne Huff, he actually was never in the military. But I still felt that his trajectory closely paralleled some of these other guys. guys. And then, of course, he was working with them. So Freddie Huff was a North Carolina state trooper who was very good at asset forfeiture. So good, in fact, that people whispered that he must have an inside line with the cartels because he was so good at picking out which motorists going by were carrying six-figure sums of cash, you know, destined for Mexico. So he became a DEA task force agent and he was going around the country lecturing other

police departments explaining how to do asset forfeiture and stuff. He was a really dedicated hard charging young canine officer, but he got fired from the, from the highway patrol after he gave a DWI ticket to a donor to the governor of North Carolina. So this left him extremely embittered and unemployed. And at that point, he decided that he was going to use his detailed knowledge of how drug traffickers move narcotics to become a drug trafficker in his own right. And he was able to leverage the connections and knowledge that he had to create or to forge an alliance with the Los Zetas cartel in Mexico. And he began trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine up from Mexico to North Carolina using these specialized techniques for smuggling

and for defeating drug-sniffing dogs. I love that detail of the book, Seth. Basically telling me, telling you, oh, readers, if you're looking to import cocaine into the country, there's a very detailed description of how you can bypass drug-sniffing dogs and some very sophisticated smuggling techniques employed by these guys. But, Seth, you mentioned Los Zetas. Because you talk about they're both the U.S. and Israeli training,

like where these guys came from. And just like how they became one of the most brutal cartels in the world and their relationship to this whole story that you're telling here. Yeah, the fact that Huff was working with Los Zetas proved to be ironic or brought things full circle because Los Zetas started off as an elite Mexican military unit that had been trained. You know, the Green Berets, their whole thing is liaisons with foreign allies where they train foreign troops. and stand up foreign military formations, often in their own mold. And so the Grupo Eromovil de Fuerces Specialis, for its gaffe for its initials in Spanish, was an elite unit of the Mexican Army trained at Fort Bragg

and also at Fort Benning. And also, as you say, they had Israeli trainers. And in the year 2000 or so, they defected from the Mexican state, eventually struck out on their own and became, by far the most feared cartel in Mexico. And that was one of the most disastrous events in Mexican history. One of several important factors that precipitated the drug war in Mexico, the homicide crisis in Mexico that's been the darkest epoch in Mexican history started with the emergence

of Los Zetas, which was shocking to most Mexicans because they were so violent. They just outdid all of their predecessors in hyperviolence and terrorism. And Los Zetas today exists in a very fragmented form has been contained to one small part of Mexico for years now. Other cartels and other paramilitary cartels in the same mold have emerged to supplant them. But they do still exist on the Mexico border where Freddie Huff was working. He told me the name of the guy that he was working with.

He was a brother of Miguel Unheld. Trevino Morales, who was an important Mexican drug lord. So that's where the supply of cocaine was coming into North Carolina. And then Huff was distributing it to Timothy Dumas and Billy Levine. Others of their Confederates in the same Fort Bragg cartel. This is where the name for the book comes from. Freddie Huff was one of many sources who told me there's a cartel in Fort Bragg. But Huff was the only one who actually knew the guys personally and had worked with them trafficking drugs. another maddening thread that emerges in this book is concerns FBI informants and the extensive legal protections and immunity they get. And then just like broadly speaking, the FBI's role

in shutting down investigations into the Fort Bragg cartel. And like, could you talk about like the sort of legal immunity that is enjoyed and like the coverups that are going on here? I mean, you talk, there's like a really a harrowing of. rape case that you talk about that is also covered up. Because you just talk about how the FBI's role in this. And like, there's also speculation that, uh, Billy Levine was himself an FBI informant among his compatriots. Because you talk about how like the FBI has factored into this and their role in, I don't know, covering up a lot of this really, uh, just jaw dropping crime. So I was never able to get any documents about Billy Levine from the FBI. They denied all my FOIA requests. So I can't say

whether or not he was an informant. They didn't even answer. that question when I posed to them in an email. But the very fact that Levine was believed to be an FBI informant by his associates in the drug trafficking industry was independently a fact that I deemed to be worth reporting. Huff was one of the people who told me that he believed that Levine was an FBI agent and he said that so did Dumas and that Dumas planned to kill Levine because he believed he was an FBI informant. Now, one other detail that lends credulity to the possibility that Levine may have been an FBI informant is the fact that he was arrested six times on felony charges, and in none

of those cases, was he prosecuted or convicted? As we know, that can be a benefit of being an FBI informant, is prosecutors will drop charges against you for crimes. So that's an open question about Levine, but it seems to have definitely influenced the behavior of the people that he was in the drug trade with. Now, as far as cover-ups more broadly, you know, that's a topic that spans the entire book from the first page to the last page. You know, I show again and again how there's cases of special operators who turn up in handcuffs, accused of serious crimes, and then the district attorney just does nothing. Or like, you know, you mentioned, like, judges will just basically, if they show up in

their, you know, dressed uniform, they just say, thank you for your service and send them on their web. Yeah, that was a quote from, you know, a police officer who had arrested some guy for something and saw that take place, you know, soldiers who show up to court appearances in their class A uniforms and get special treatment. One of the most gut-wrenching and harrowing stories that you relate in the book. It concerns the story of a guy named Keith Lewis. And basically his, like, his use of steroids, but then, like, really, I don't even know where to go with this, but, like, just his murder of his pregnant wife while holding his infant daughter was just so, just so horrifying to me. Yeah, one of the most just gutting passages of the book is the, you know,

Keith Lewis murder, suicide. You know, two years before that happened, Keith Lewis had gotten in a fight with his, his wife, you know, Keith Lewis served in the same unit as Bo Bergdahl. And he was one of these guys who like, you know, just hated Bo Bergdahl. And so someone said, for folks who don't know, Bergdahl was the soldier who walked off of an base in Afghanistan was captured by the Taliban held prisoner for like five years. anyway, some stranger made a comment about Bo Bergdahl that was basically positive. Keith Lewis got into a fight with him, got into a fight with his wife. The police were called. He got an arm standoff with the police in which he pointed a gun at the police. And he was completely let off the hook for that. He was not prosecuted in any way for that. Life just just went on. And that's a great example of what we're talking about, you know, in regards to impunity because he was a special. a medic in the special forces. And then, you know, just a short time later went on to kill his wife and her unboard child. She was nine months pregnant and then kill her himself. And yeah, he was

holding his child and his arms the entire time he was shooting his wife. Just one of those shocking things. And, you know, he was dealing steroids on Fort Bragg, according to, you know, multiple credible allocations, including large amounts of steroids that were found in his apartment after his death. And, you know, the last thing he told, his own steroid use, which his mom talked to me about at length, really precipitated severe anger issues that he had. And that can be a consequence of taking synthetic testosterone and other steroids is that it lowers the threshold of aggressive behavior in men. It increases propensity to anger, especially when mixed with alcohol. And so I think that that is part of the sort of toxic stew that's sort of brewing in

Fort Bragg, it's the rampant steroid abuse contributing, you know, to this sort of violence and criminality. Yeah, steroids, their effect on people's personality and behavior, a lot of it is kind of murky. The just the anecdotal evidence or the thing that bodybuilders and and MMA fighters say the most often is they will just make you more like yourself. So if you're already an aggressive guy you know, you may

show symptoms of roid rage. It goes without saying that if you if you are part of an international hit squad, you may start killing people in your off time. Especially if you're not going to an endocrinologist

and you're just you know injecting yourself with like 10 times what you should be taking. That sounds right. The photographs of the drugs, the steroids that were found in Lewis's apartment included you probably, sounds like you know more about

this Felix than I do, but Trembalone, acetate, I think was one of them. I can't remember the names of the other one's off the top of my head. Trembalone is a, it's a classic bodybuilding one. I mean, I honestly don't know. I mean, I guess I, you know,

I guess even members of Delta, and just you know want their triceps to pop but i if i was taking if i was doing gear for like purely utilitarian reasons i would just take test and like maybe depending on my age like some type of like uh estrogen blocker i don't i don't take gear um not because i'm i'm against it it's just i'm the type i i'm the type of person who would like forget i would and i would i would like reuse a needle and give myself a terrible disease? Well, the Socom's Directorate of Science and Technology occasionally floats the possibility of introducing steroids as a legal regimen for increasing the efficiency of units like Delta Force and Delta operators. I don't know if those

will ever actually get off the ground, but it's something that they do seriously consider. They give operators other drugs. They give them dextroanphetamine, Ambien, Tramidol, benzodiazepines. These are routinely prescribed special operators to deal with the stresses of their jobs. And so it's not that far-fetched to imagine that they might give them steroids as well. In the meantime, I would say, sort of implicit, an atmosphere of implicit tolerance prevails, you know, it's big boy rules, which means go ahead and do it just don't get caught yeah i just i don't know what reason there would be to not give them uh steroids i mean they like anabolic steroids are in some ways kind of a miracle drug and how uh quickly they can help people recover from very serious injuries i mean it just it's as you said these guys

are loaded to the gills with dexies i mean is there like a commissioner of assassination that would that would prescribe them if they like pissed hot they're not going to the Operator Hall of Fame Yeah it just doesn't make sense to me That they wouldn't outright prescribe it I mean if you have like a halfway decent Endocrinologist giving them testosterone

And like whatever else they need That's way better than these guys just You know I always think about the Blackwater steroid parties Where these guys were just you know jamming trembleone needles into their each other's asses. I will try not to think about that. The closest thing to a commissioner of assassinations that exists is a position in the Pentagon that hardly gets any attention, even though it's more important than the secretary,

the Army, Secretary, the Navy, what have you, which is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for low intensity, for special operations and low intensity. city conflict. It's really a mouthful. The acronym is even uglier. But that person is effectively the civilian who sits at the apex of Socom. And, you know, Michael Vickers is someone I talk about in the book who held this position during some of the key years that I discuss. But that position is somebody who has a great deal of power in the U.S. government and almost never, almost nobody ever pays attention to who that person is. Speaking of the commissioner and like the people at the sort of the apex of this pyramid, I mean, the book mostly spends time with like, you look, the actual operators themselves. But I did want to ask you about Stanley McChrystal, the guy who was sort of the J-Soc guru. He's a guy who sort of started this and, you know, sort of captained this whole era. What do you make of General Stanley McChrystal like as a character and not just him, but.

But then his successor, William McRaven. McChrystal is so much more interesting than McRaven. McRaven's kind of an enigma. You know, the books that he's written, the memoirs, and how he writes like children's book and stuff. He's doing a book reading at My Local Bookstore in Austin, you know, where he's exhorting young men to make their bed or whatever. What is his children's book?

I'm saying everyone has a fucking children's book now. Like Cash Patel wrote that. It's such a scam. Like, I'm so sick of this. I'm pretty sure McRaven's book is called Make Your Bed. Oh, my God. There's already a guy who did that. It didn't end very well for him.

Someone fact check me on that, please. I might have that wrong. But it's that sort of book that McRaven is profiting from the sale of. Sorry, it is, in fact, make your bed with Skipper the Seal. Oh, my God. where a cartoon seal tells you how to become a good seal, I presumably like the Navy SEAL. I don't like that they're enlisting seals in the,

I mean, the Pinniped variety, not the Navy. A seal would have nothing to do with that. This is a guy who has presided over just assassination programs in countless countries for a year, who's got who's um whose operators have been criticized for shooting people in their beds among other things for shooting people in their sleep is one thing that um you know a specific criticism that's been levied at jaysock is for the rules of engagement is that they'll come into a target in the dead of the night you know wearing soft shoes with silenced weapons catch people asleep and then just kill them right there in their beds which is you know that may not be a violation

of J-Soc's classified rules of engagement, but most people, I think, find that to be a repugnant violation of the sort of inherent laws of war. But, yeah, so McChrystal talking about make-your-bed, that just gives me horrible visions of, like, blood-stained mattresses from incredibly dark and evil stuff that the troops under his command carried out for so many years. Like, if King Vaughn wrote a children's book about, like, how to be a good friend, you'd be like, okay, come on. Yeah.

But McChrystal is a much more interesting guy whose book, I think, is worth reading. He wrote a book called My Share of the Task, which I never would have put myself through the experience of reading had I not been researching the book. And I was very surprised, you know, what a relatively articulate and thoughtful person he is because he more than any other figure was responsible for the rise of Delta and J-Sach in the Iraq War. But, you know, one of the things that he also expresses contrition about a lot of how things went down, something that McRaven never does. And one of those things, you know, to bring it back to what you're saying, Will, was how they classified, you know, pretty much anyone, without understanding the real nature of the Iraq insurgency, they just put everyone in this, on this box of saying that if they were Sunni, they called them al-Qaeda. and they you know we were told that al-Qaeda was metastasizing it was forming cells in Iraq and Syria and all over North Africa and all these other countries but to a large degree that's all fictitious or conjectural and McChrystal basically admits that in this

book we're turning again to the beginning of the beginning of the story with Billy Levine and the other gentleman named Dumas, who he ended up dead with in the woods of North Carolina. Dumas, you talked to his son who was very explicit in that he believes that his father was murdered for his attempt to blackmail the special forces. Did you talk about like that blackmail dossier that he compiled and this thumb drive that you reference in the book that is sort of like a McGuffin throughout the throughout this story? Yeah, Dumas. as I mentioned before, I've been kicked out of the army for his, you know, for his whole career.

I read his separation packet, which is a hundred and something pages, and which makes clear that his entire career he was stealing from the military, stealing weapons, stealing prescription drugs, possibly stealing cash. And he was kicked out in 2016. And in order to exert leverage on the special forces to get his pension reinstated, because he was kicked out after like 19 years and some months. months in service. So just shy of his 20-year mark. And if you serve 20 years, you can retire with a lifelong pension. So that was important to him. And he was denied it. And in order to get it

back, he wrote this letter in which, as I said before, you know, he literally named a bunch of green berets who were trafficking heroin from Afghanistan into the U.S. and military planes. I had three different sources, no four, excuse me, tell me about this blackmail letter. None of these sources were in contact with one another. One of them was a Army CID police agent. The other was Dumas's son. One was Dumas's like girlfriend or mistress. And then the fourth one was Freddie Wayne Huff, who said that he read the letter in its entirety and was able to describe it in some detail. Now, I tried to get my hands on a copy of that letter. It was ultimately unsuccessful. The only copy that I managed to track down was on a thumb drive that had been seized from Freddie

Huff's house after he was finally arrested and taken down. And after, you know, more than a year of trying to get that thumb drive release, the Winston-Salem Police Department didn't release it, but they told me that they would open it up and look at it for me, basically, and tell me what was on there. And, but then they just said, oh, it's, it's empty. There's nothing on there. Everything's been erased. So that's interesting. But another thing is that Billy Levine had also written, you know, an incriminating text or something that could have gotten him in trouble in the same way. He had been going around telling people that he was writing a book about his time and service and his ex-wife told me this and that someone was

trying to make it into a movie. And this, of course, goes completely counter to the unit's culture of silence. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because I just got a tip yesterday from somebody who went to rehab with Billy in Bandera, Texas, who confirmed that Billy was working on this book. And in fact, this friend from rehab has a copy of it. Haven't had the chance to read it yet, although he sent it to me. But he said that Billy in this book was writing that about doing cocaine with top officers and that, and other things, you know, exposing other elements that the unit didn't want exposed. And he said, according to this tipster, Socom sent people on three occasions down to the rehab center to talk to Billy and to try to convince him not to publish this or not to attempt to write it and that and that Billy refused because he too was being kicked out of the army finally at the end of everything. He was being outprocessed and separated. So it's just it's a it's a crucial fact or it's an operative fact in this in this murder mystery, the fact that

both of these guys who were found dead have been writing, you know, either a book or a letter which contained secrets that the special operations command really didn't want to get out. How were Levine and Dumas killed specifically? So Dumas, in the place where they were found in the woods on Fort Bragg next to Lake MacArthur, Dumas apparently had been killed execution style with a shot to the forehead. Levine was found shot multiple times in the torso, wrapped in a blanket and placed in the back of his own truck, which was abandoned at that location. So Army CID, which was the first law enforcement agency to investigate, developed the hypothesis that Dumas had been contracted to kill Levine with somebody else, that they had tracked Levine down somewhere and killed him, wrapped his body in this blanket, put him in the back of his own truck, and then driven him out to this lake in order to get rid of his body, at which point the truck got stuck out there because it had just rained.

And at that point, according to CID's theory of the case, the other guy, the unidentified third man, decided to kill Dumas to get rid of any witnesses. And then he himself took, you know, third man, then took all the guns. If there was, if there was money there, he took it. If there was drugs there, he took it too, because the site was sterilized. There was nothing except for a few shell casings recovered from that scene. When you report out a story like this, and you try to capture as much detail that it can be corroborated, as much of the things you can get on the record, what does it like to work on a story like this, knowing just like with the thumb drive, there probably won't be any actual summation or conclusion to like a double murder like this? The entire time I was writing the book, I was haunted by the possibility that I would never figure out who killed Billy Levine and Timothy, doom us. But the Department of Justice actually accused someone in 2023 formally of this murder.

I don't want to spoil the ending in the book, but I will just say that the person they accused is not at all who you would think. I interview a lot of sources who cast doubt on the idea that he could have been responsible. And he has pleaded not guilty. And his trial is scheduled to begin in January of 2026. So that, plus the other revelations, new tips that I'm getting that are coming in as a result of the book's publication, tell me that the story is not over yet. To just like to bring the story like into the present day, into 2025, what do you make of the like the current state of J-Sach and their relation to this like perpetual state of war that this country is engaged in, especially now that Trump is back in office?

and is flanked by, you know, a bozo like Pete Hegseth. And, like, what do you make of also, like, the transition from, like, the Joe Biden doctrine into the Trump II doctrine? Well, it's always hard to know what J-Soc is up to because they leak so much less than the CIA and they're so secretive. I think there's a fair amount of continuity across presidential administrations and how the unit operates. I can say that during.

Trump's first term, he first of all surrounded himself with some of the coochiest people in the special ops community, including, of course, Michael Flynn. And he also introduced, as I said before, the J-Sox rules of engagement are classified. But according to the best reporting, I've seen Trump loosened those ROE, whatever they are, and delegated authority to make decisions for targeted kills to commanders in the field. Biden, when he first came into office announced that they were going to do a big, the inspector general, the Pentagon was going to do a big investigation into potential war crimes committed by special operations.

Many reporters, myself included, believed that there would be some kind of reckoning with the announcement of this IG investigation, but in typical like Biden and, you know, slash the Democrats fashion, it ended up being a complete, you know, it was nothing in the end. I mean, the report I read it, it says nothing that they don't look at any actual war crimes. They just examine the technical mechanisms that are in place for service members to report war crimes and offered these piddling, you know, tweaks to administrative regulations. So Biden did nothing to reform these organizations. Now Trump is president again. And I believe that, all of the trends that I identify in the book will are likely to grow worse under Trump because of

his uniquely malignant command influence, including the rampant drug use among, you know, top Trump officials. Rolling Stone published a great article some years ago about drug use in Trump's first White House and Trump's personal doctor, Ronnie Jackson, who went on to become a congressman. You know, Ronnie Jackson was a Navy officer and an Iraq veteran, a physician, obviously. And he was running an unlicensed pharmacy in the White House in which he was distributing prescription drugs to Trump staffers for free and without a prescription, for which he was actually demoted by the Navy for that. So I think that kind of, you know, just hedonistic and decadent and depraved atmosphere that exists in the top echelons of the Republican Party inevitably trickles down

to military organizations like J-Soc and Delta and the Holgreen Berets. Yeah, I mean, I was just really struck about like this, this repeated pattern. Like, you know, Obama and his empowering of J-Soc as like a global assassination racket or mafia or whatever just assassination hit squad. And like the Democrats, of course, they love it because it's so efficient, ruthless, meritocratic and like, you know, seemingly bloodless as far as the American public is concerned. But then like they create the global apparatus for trafficking drugs and killing people, but they want it to be. be respectable or just like they do a good job of trying to make it appear above a board. But then, of course, as someone like Trump or the Republicans get in power, and then they have the keys to the same engine, the same car that they get to drive now, and they just get to have

fun with it and just unleash the id of the American Empire and seemingly having fun doing it, getting blitzed on amphetamines and just killing people. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And, you know, the people in this community also want to be respectable. In fact, it's interesting, you hear nothing about good things about President Obama and the community. They think he was one of the best presidents, if not the best president. Whereas the support you hear for Trump that's voiced among, you know, the operator community tends to be either more muted or just more mixed. And there's certainly an argument that you can make as a person who belongs to, like,

let's say, Delta Force and cares about those institutions and their legitimacy that Trump is actually really bad for them. take the case of Eddie Gallagher, you know, he wasn't J-Soc, he was just a regular Navy SEAL, but, you know, the SEALs, they wanted Gallagher gone. I mean, he was a total disgrace to them an embarrassment, but Trump, you know, really elevated him and made, you know, the celebration of Eddie Gallagher part of his political persona. But with regard to the respectability piece of it, I wanted to also say that people in the community, you know, I do monitor the reactions. because I care about what they think, and it's informative to hear what they're saying.

And some of the criticism is sort of like, you know, what am I trying to say? They are almost offended that a writer or a journalist would take a hard look at them. And I want to say, you go out and kill people as your job, and then you're surprised that people are critical of that. It is contradictory. And, you know, if that's what you're dedicated in your life to, you shouldn't be surprised that people like me just think the entire enterprise is illegitimate. I don't care if you follow ROE. I don't care if, like, you refrain from killing someone who surrenders. Like, these guys want points for that or they want credit for that.

And I want to say, you know, I regard the entire Delta Force as an illegitimate institution because it's carrying out lethal military operations completely in. secret in a purportedly democratic country, I don't even think it should exist at all. So that's a little all over the place that response, but your mission of respect to the That leads into like, I guess my like final, final question I wanted to ask you, which is more of like a existential or philosophical one that something that struck me reading this book is like when you invite in, you know, like a vampire, like the demon of war on empire. And then like you think it will just be directed at the end. of this country. But like, this world of secrecy and murder and corruption, do you see its

effects playing out in the broader American culture? I mean, like, I just think, like, the way we have become so inert, so, like, numb to this. And I see these, like, obese morons cosplaying as operators just signing up for ICE so that they can intimidate guys in, like, a Home Depot parking lot. I'm thinking about the way our entire political and media apparatus is more or less look the other way or actively supported just the unrestrained mass murder of civilians in Gaza. How do you see like the culture and like the consequences of special forces playing out like in the broader American culture? Well, you know, that's a question. That cultural analysis I think is very central to, you know, y'all's own project running this podcast because I can

recall, you know, the first episode, one of the first that y'all did was making fun of that movie 13 hours. Oh my God. Yeah, which is about the fucking first episode. Yeah. The secret soldiers have Benghazi. In that movie, they're portrayed as doing like arms buybacks to like quote, get them off the streets of Libya. But like they were just directly buying arms to ship to Syria to like, you know, to fight a civil war. That CIA base was responsible for transferring the weapons that had been in Moa Mark Gaddafi's safe stockpiles. two ports on the Syrian coast where they could be transferred to, you know, radical Sunni opponents of the Assad regime that later became, you know,

HTS and ISIS. So that's a great example of how Hollywood just completely inverts the reality of what these guys are doing in order to make them heroes. Now, of course, they're gritty, complex, dark heroes, anti-heroes, but that's still a sort of airbrush view of the brutal reality. that actually exist. And there have been so many more movies like that as well, from American sniper to the,

what's the one where they're teamed up with the Northern Alliance on horseback? Oh, yeah. Horse soldiers or 12th. 12throng. 12throng, one of the most boring movies we have ever fucking watched for the show. Pretty bad.

That doesn't even deserve my criticism. You're right. But the other ones that are like zero dark 30, they're lone survivor. Loan survivor, of course. One of the, Lone Survivor is one of the most evil movies I've ever seen. I mean, Seth, I'm sure that you've talked to a few people who've brought this up. Just how, like, how much of that movie is just completely fabricated?

Right. Like, Charles' story in the first place. Yeah, yeah. A lot of these guys, you know, are known for their, you know, for being liars. I don't have to tell you that it's kind of the stereotype of a Navy SEAL in particular. Delta guys, a little bit. different um well they keep their mouth shut unlike the navy seal guys who all get a fucking book deal but the delta guys more and more are going on podcasts and talking there's more of that

material than ever i wish i could have included even more of it in the book because there's it's really versioned over the last few years but to jump off on the cultural uh aspect of it you know this figure of an operator this figure of a bearded special forces soldier you know i write in the book about its centrality to a certain vision of masculinity in the United States and how it sort of reincarnates and recapitulates the tropes of the of the frontiersmen and the cowboy. And the operator is the 21st century version of all this, you know, the rugged, stoic man of violence who's bringing law and order to the gritty fringes of empire. And this avatar of American masculinity, I think, is deeply toxic. And it has a huge influence on

our culture, you know, talking about the guys joining ICE, but it's just, you see it absolutely everywhere. You see it in people's clothes and the trucks that they drive, the way they act, talk, the media that they consume the way they think and approach the world. And I think that it is very ripe for subversion. And that's one of the things that I was trying to do with my which my book is totally upend and subvert and invert this figure that's for so long been at the like apex of our cultural firmament, you know, to no good effects. Well, I guess I was like, you know, like these guys, like they follow your work and they're very cognizant of like both journalism and pop cultural depictions of, you know, themselves or what they do for a living. I know you mentioned that there was sort of a one-star review bomb of this book on Amazon, but like how do these guys interact with you? And like, are there anyone who have been supportive

of your journalism? Yeah. You know, in the forums, it's surprisingly, there's a surprising amount of support for the work that I do because I think because I didn't wear rose-tended lenses at all. And because so many journalists I think are kind of, you know, I come from a very working class environment. And I came up through Texas, public school in Texas and the Army. And so I don't have this sort of gauzy, troop respecting,

reflexive attitude that I think a lot of reporters who come from the elite classes sort of reflexively take towards the military because they're so remote from them. Like having actually... Sort of their own guilt about never considering joining the armed forces. Exactly, yeah.

But because I, to me, I kind of know these guys. you know, the portrayal of them in my book, although it's obviously highly adversarial, it's also realistic in a way that other books are not. And so, and I'm saying a lot of things that a lot of guys in this community already know and that many of them perhaps think is a problem, because, you know, although they're guided by a different sort of ethics than I am, you know, there are people, you know, what you could say that there are, you know, arguably good ones. By that, I don't mean that what they're doing and their work is good.

But they're not just complete criminals. They're not, you know, raping women or trafficking drugs or killing people. By their own lights, they're ethical people. And they're actually concerned about some of the stuff that I've been reporting on. So you do see a lot of supportive statements that are posted, you know, from people who are in the know. That being said, I recently discovered this thing called Kiwi Farms. And I'm a little bit more shook than I was before because those discussions were a bit off the rails. well yeah i mean like uh you mentioned like uh these guys get offended i mean like you know i've offended

people doing the show but i would be shook if i offended guys who like spent much of their adult life killing people and being trained to kill people at the highest level well i uh you know it's ironic a lot of people point that out or ask me aren't you worried that one of them is going to do something but before this i was working you know as a war reporter and like uh ukraine and Mexico and Syria and Iraq and stuff. And so actually when I got the opportunity to write the book, I was thinking, well, this is great. I'll be able to do something that's safe for once and not put my life at risk.

So I'm not sure what to, you know, I'm just going to have to go with a no comment on that one. I don't know what to say. But I don't let it affect what I write. That's for sure. I don't censor anything that I write out of fear that there might be repercussions. Well, Seth, I'll leave it there for today. But really, I just would like to reiterate for anyone listening out here.

Like, what we've discussed on today's show is just really like a tiny fraction of like the scope of the narrative that you've really unfolded in this book. And really like, Seth, Ford Brack Cartel is an astounding piece of work. And you should be really proud of it. Yeah. Yeah, I just want to echo what Will said about just how incredibly it's written. You mentioned Eric Haney's book. uh in this book and uh i've read that one and i've read all the mark boden like you the badass guys black hawk down every one yeah killing pablo i read those books in high school

it's just so great to actually read something about jay sock and bregg that isn't either like completely like blowing them or a guy trying to get a movie deal or is just um like scrolled with the cram like Eric Haney's book. Well, thank you guys so much for saying. So I'm really glad that, that, you know, you like the book. And I'm so appreciative of the opportunity to hop on the pod and talk about it. And for folks who are listening out there, you know, if you can afford it, you know, buy the book because it helps to shift the over some window of what we're allowed to say about U.S. foreign policy, you know, and the military when there's strong sales numbers that shows that there's a real market for this. So thank you to everyone who has bought the book.

And if you haven't already, please consider doing so if you can't. Buy the book, even if you can't afford it. Seth Hart, I really want to thank you so much for your time for the book. The Fort Bragg Cartel is available in stores now. Once again, Seth Hart, thank you so much for the book and for your time today. Thank you, guys. I've done two tours of duty in Vietnam. I came home with a brand new plane.

I take the seat from Columbia, Mexico I just planted up a hotter down Copperhead Road Now the DA's got a chopper in air We got screaming like I'm back over there I learned a thing or two from Charlie, don't you know You better stay away from Copperhead Road