Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

The Fort Bragg Cartel; Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, Seth Harp, 2025

(H.R.) Bush’s subsequent tenure in the Executive Building coincided with a transfer of power from the CIA to the military, which, thanks to the creation of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), now had operatives fully capable of carrying out the same skullduggery as civilian spies, but without the added baggage of congressional meddling.

Over the next eight years (1980s) , as Reagan and Bush waged off-the-books dirty wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and also intervened in Columbia, Haiti, and Grenada, the administration leaned heavily on Delta Force and other undercover soldiers. The militarization of covert action was tied up with the rapidly metastasizing “global war on drugs,” another brainchild of George H. W. Bush’s, and partially exposed by the hydra-headed Iran-Contra Affair, the essence of which was the use of illegal arms deals and the sale of other untraceable commodities to fund secret operations. A classified White House memorandum that Reagan signed in 1984 reads like a sketchy blueprint to the “global war on terror” that Bush’s son and political heir would institute at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Among other things, the memo authorized killing in “preemptive self-defense,” so long as the targets were defined as “terrorists.”

That same Orwellian year, The New York Times belatedly broke the news of JSOC’s existence. The article titled “U.S. Military Creates Secret Units for Use in Sensitive Tasks Abroad,” was sourced to members of Congress and intelligence committee staffers. “The worry,” concerned lawmakers told the Times, was that JSOC might become “a uniformed version of the Central Intelligence Agency,,” used by the executive branch “to circumvent Congressional restrictions and reporting requirements.”

Under U.S. occupation, Afghanistan had become the world’s leading narco-state, with an economy almost entirely dependent on the the drug trade. Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster, opium production had returned to record levels. “The significant increase,” the DEA reported “is attributable to the fall of the Taliban, and the Taliban poppy ban.” …By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. The 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons. By comparison, in a far distant second place, produced just fifty tons that year.

The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers.

According to the DEA, virtually none of the heroin consumed in America during the surge in usage seen in the 2020s and 2010s came from Afghanistan. Less than 1 percent is the official figure.

In his second term in office, President Obama completely abandoned any remaining effort to counter narcotics in Afghanistan, and it became implicit U.S. policy to allow poppy to flourish unimpeded. The amount of land under poppy cultivation expanded to nearly a quarter million hectares. Major traffickers protected by the Karzai cartel, such al Lal Jan Ishaqzai, became untouchable.

Ever since World War II, illegal drugs have served as a common coin for the purposes of espionage, paramilitary operations, and covert actions, and the foreign entities that choose to work for the U.S. military and the CIA — the twin sentinels of global capitalism — often profit from this most capitalistic of all enterprises. Throughout its history, the CIA has worked to achieve American national security objectives in partnership with known drug traffickers, including the anticommunist Kuomintang, the founders of modern-day Taiwan; France’s Corsican mafia syndicates; Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro; Hmong irregulars in Laos as well as the Royal Lao Army; and the contra rebels of Nicaragua. But American foreign policy elites’ complicity in the international drug trade was never so substantial, sustained, witting, and consequential as in Afghanistan…No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working classes across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza.

But over time, a sea change took place in the composition of the Special Forces. A good number of those who stayed in the Army for the second decade of the GWOT (Global War on Terror) were animated by baser character traits, including a sheer love of fighting, addiction to the gun-slinging lifestyle, and a mercenary attitude toward killing. Theft of government funds, seen as a victimless crime became commonplace… According to Special forces quartermaster James Dumas Sr.’s son “They’re bringing the drugs from overseas into Fort Bragg. They say a group of Special Forces are pushing and selling drugs. They fly it in, put it out on the street. Said they have been doing that for years.”

But the wars that won him (Admiral William McRaven 2014) and his privileged ilk so many encomiums were, for the rest of the nation, an era of cataclysmic abasement. The wars that made SOCOM a budgetary and bureaucratic juggernaut were not worth fighting, in the opinion of a majority of Americans, including supermajorities of combat veterans. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine, the United States failed to achieve its stated ex anti objectives and succeeded only in killing millions of people, displacing millions of people, displacing tens of millions, squandering trillions of dollars, and making America the great villain of the twenty-first century in the eyes of most of the world. Ten years after McRaven’s speech, the iconic archetype of the rugged special operator no longer occupied the same vaunted position in the cultural firmament. The prototype figure of the bearded commando had taken on a grittier, dirtier, darker cast in the popular imagination.

“You start to see behind the curtain,” said former Delta Force soldier and Army Ranger Tyler Grey to the podcast host Sean “Buck” Rogers, an ex-Green Beret, of his service alongside the CIA in Iraq and Syria. “Dude, this is not what I thought it was,” Grey realized. “We’re not who I thought we were. We’re not doing this for the reasons I thought.”

Over tine, the suspicion that the Americans might actually be the bad guys “just continues to grow,” Grey said, speaking in 2023. “To were now I see why veterans or wars, when they’re older, feel a certain way,” he said. “I’m starting to be that guy.”

Grey went on to say that if he could speak to a young person thinking of joining the military and pursuing a career in special operations, he’d be tempted to tell the kid, “Don’t do it. It’s a trap. Run, go live your life, man.” He added, “Don’t trust your recruiter. Don’t believe them.”

Between January 2017 and September 2022, a total of 15,293 active duty service members suffered drug overdoses, and 322 of those were fatal, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Defense. The data showed that Fort Bragg had far more overdoses than any other military base, in both absolute and per capita terms, and that Fort Bragg soldiers were significantly more likely to overdose and die than the average American.

There were at least twenty-four murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers between 2020 and 2024. Many remained unsolved years after the fact.