The Fort Bragg Cartel is a new book written by former reporter and Army veteran John Rocha, who covers the elite Delta Force unit. In this episode, John talks about what it's like to be a member of the elite unit, why it exists, and why it's so shrouded in secrecy.
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00:00:39.000So you got out of the military in 2011.
00:00:42.020This is how I understand the genesis of the book that comes out today, The Fort Bragg Cartel.
00:00:51.440At some point, you start to understand that there are a lot of deaths at Fort Bragg, which is America's biggest army base, some of the special forces.
00:01:03.000And you start to investigate those deaths.
00:01:07.780I first read about a double homicide on Fort Bragg that took place at the tail end of 2020.
00:01:14.500Just an ordinary article in the New York Times that said that these two veteran special operations soldiers, Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, have been found murdered on a remote training range at Fort Bragg.
00:01:27.500They've both been shot to death and their bodies have been dumped in the woods.
00:01:30.220I also read that Billy Levine was a Delta Force operator.
00:01:56.180And in all my time reporting on the military, working as a war reporter, and then before that serving in the army myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason, because it's the most secretive and elite unit in the entire military.
00:02:16.020And the police were saying that this was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong.
00:02:21.900And so I knew that there had to be more to the story, because you can imagine if, let's say, a CIA agent was found shot to death and dumped in a park in Maryland or something like that, and the police were saying it was a drug deal.
00:02:35.100I mean, that's the level of secrecy, and that's how elite Delta Force is as a military unit.
00:02:50.160It's part of what's called the Joint Special Operations Command.
00:02:53.840It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue.
00:03:01.640For many years, they were obsessed with the problem or the danger of loose nuclear weapons and drilled constantly for scenarios in which they would be called upon to secure a loose nuclear weapon.
00:03:15.060After 2001, after the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, Delta Force grew quite a bit and came to have a much more prominent role in U.S. military operations.
00:03:28.100And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, what we might call black operations.
00:03:35.340That's Delta Force and it's headquartered at Fort Bragg.
00:03:40.760I actually looked into this when I was writing the book to see if they had ever been talked about in the 20 years that the U.S. had been at war since 2001.
00:03:49.960And I found that, in fact, they were talked about in the context of the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal and had been implicated in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
00:04:00.480Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news.
00:04:04.540So there are other units, famously, that have worked with Hollywood filmmakers a lot, whose members retire and go on talk shows, including this one.
00:04:16.700And, you know, you sort of know quite a bit about the SEALs, for example, the various SEAL teams and their training, etc.
00:04:22.240But has there ever been a Delta operator in public talking about the training or the missions or anything like that?
00:04:30.560There are former Delta Force officers who I've seen occasionally talk on TV.
00:04:37.720But as far as the regular enlisted guys go, their culture really is, you know, the saying that they have that I've heard repeated is that, you know, SEALs write books, Delta guys write history.
00:28:42.900So they use labs, advanced labs, that measure up to 110 key biomarkers.
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00:29:54.960I can tell you what they're doing right now because Trump made an interesting comment in one of his speeches earlier this year where he talked about, he said something to the effect of, since my inauguration, it had been a few months since he was inaugurated.
00:30:09.160He said, since my inauguration, we have eliminated 68 terrorists in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia.
00:30:32.380Well, some of that blowback, I fully agree.
00:30:36.040Some of that blowback can be seen in cases like Billy Levine, where he's someone who has, since he was a very young man, has been raised in this system of violence, who comes back and is unable to control it.
00:30:49.000And, you know, when he perceives small threats, like with his buddy Mark Leshker at his house, barging in his front door because they're both out of their head on drugs.
00:30:57.120You know, he just, you know, he just, as a reflexive mechanism, pulls out his gun and shoots the other guy.
00:31:03.480So, I think one of the first signs of it is, and I'm tracking about 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers.
00:31:50.040He was a middle-class guy, working-class guy from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, who joined the Army when he was 17 years old, before 9-11 happened.
00:32:01.380And 9-11 took place while he was still in training.
00:32:05.020And he soon got taken up the pipeline of the first Special Forces group.
00:32:12.120And then from there, by 2009, he was a relatively young man, 26, I think, at the time that he was selected for Delta Force.
00:32:20.400So, he was an extraordinary person in that he was clearly suited to the job.
00:32:25.520Very physically fit, very outdoorsy, very tough, you know, a guy who had the self-confidence that is necessary for this type of work, you know, an adrenaline junkie for sure.
00:32:39.080A lot of these guys are big-time adrenaline junkies, jumping out of planes, you know, parachuting is a big part of what they do.
00:32:44.880So, he was like those guys in all these respects.
00:32:48.560But at its core, Billy Levine was somebody who also had a sense of ethics and right and wrong that his time in the service really degraded to a tragic, tragic effect.
00:33:01.540So, he murders his best friend in front of the daughter, gets away with it, no penalty whatsoever.
00:33:59.200He was a supply officer who was attached to JSOC.
00:34:03.760He served in the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade and had done many deployments to Afghanistan in service of the JSOC-led task force in Afghanistan.
00:34:15.340So, he's a guy who gets the operators all the stuff that they need in the field, including cash, weapons, ammunition, food, all the basics, gas.
00:34:27.860And he's a whole separate story that we could go into.
00:34:29.640But to come back to what we were saying about the murder itself.
00:34:33.240You know, both of them were very, very tough guys who never went anywhere unarmed, who kept their heads on a swivel, and who had been to war repeatedly.
00:34:42.240So, the fact that both of them were cleanly taken out and then dumped in this remote area and that the scene was free of any kind of...
00:34:51.880You know, I interviewed several Army CID agents who worked the scene of the murder.
00:34:58.560And by all accounts, they found no drugs, no guns, no money, and maybe a couple of shell casings.
00:35:06.080But, you know, there weren't even, like, footprints on the ground.
00:35:36.160He was killed execution style on sight.
00:35:38.780Levine's body had been wrapped up in a sort of tarp or blanket and placed in the back of his own truck.
00:35:45.320And then someone had driven out there and abandoned the truck in the woods with his body in the back.
00:35:52.920And so, there's lots of theories of this murder, but the CID theory was that somebody, the third man, because there had to have been a third person there, these guys couldn't have shot each other because there were no guns.
00:36:06.980So, someone left with the guns at a minimum.
00:36:10.580And so, Army CID presumes that Dumas, who was a really bad guy, to be honest, he was a drug trafficker and, by some accounts, a hitman.
00:36:43.960He was not active duty at the time of his death.
00:36:45.880He had just been expelled from the military for his criminal behavior.
00:36:50.200And that is actually a key fact that we can get into because the fact that he had been kicked out when he was a few months shy of his 19th year in service.
00:37:02.720So, or a few months shy of his 20th year, in which case he would have been eligible for a lifetime pension.
00:37:10.120You know, if you serve 20 years in the military, you get a pension.
00:37:11.920So, the fact that he had been kicked out and deprived of his pension really is an operative fact in all of this because the story, it goes on from here.
00:37:22.320But what was I saying about the murder itself?
00:37:26.160So, he was killed, Dumas was killed on site.
00:37:29.620So, I was trying to recapitulate CID's theory of the case very briefly, which is that they think that Dumas was hired to kill Levine and did kill Levine with the cooperation of another person or persons.
00:37:45.060They then put Levine's body in the back of the truck, drive him out in the woods with the intention of throwing his body in a lake that's near there.
00:37:52.520But the truck got stuck in the woods, or it got stuck in the mud because it wasn't on a road.
00:38:01.500And at that point, according to CID's theory of the case, the other guy decided to just abandon the situation and decided to kill Dumas in order to get rid of any witnesses.
00:38:12.540We thought this through when we started this podcast a year ago and we decided we're never advertising anything that we or people on our staff don't use.
00:39:17.480So, there's a lot of competing possibilities.
00:39:21.400And as I said, I think that's what makes this murder mystery, for me at least as a writer, it was a productive narrative vehicle because there's lots of things to explore.
00:39:31.260One is that Mark Leszeker, the Green Beret who he killed, you know, his teammates by some accounts wanted revenge.
00:39:39.460The fact that that murder went completely unpunished, as you might imagine, leads to resentment in the community, leads to a lot of whispers.
00:39:46.700And, you know, you can't just kill somebody, maybe get off legally, but there's going to be repercussions.
00:39:52.680Yeah, a lot of dangerous people around.
00:39:56.180Okay, so that's a more human, I'm not saying justifiable, I'm not as bothered by Leszeker's buddies getting together and killing the guy who killed him.
00:40:39.720So, they had enemies in the drug world, dangerous enemies, people that will kill you if you don't pay for your product.
00:40:47.600Um, and finally, Levine, as I said before, was known to be going around telling people that he didn't believe in the mission anymore, that what the United States was doing was wrong, and was in the process of writing a book.
00:41:05.920And we touched on this in the beginning of our conversation about how much the unit frowns on people writing books.
00:41:15.140Levine's ex-wife told me that he was writing a book.
00:41:20.060She showed me the text messages where he texted her and said, I'm writing a book.
00:41:22.860And he also said that someone already wanted to turn it into a movie.
00:41:27.220Now, Dumas said that, so put a pin in that.
00:41:30.100Dumas, because he had been kicked out of the army, just shy of his pension eligibility date, he also was writing something.
00:41:38.760And it variously described to me as a book or a letter, um, in which it wasn't a memoir, he was, it was actually deliberately intended as a blackmail document.
00:41:47.920He told people that he knew about a drug trafficking ring in the special forces involving special forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side in Afghanistan, where there was a great deal of drug trafficking going on, by the way.
00:42:07.740Um, so all these guys having served many times in Afghanistan would have been very close and, um, in close proximity to working with warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, and so on, Afghans, who were some of the biggest drug traffickers in the world, period.
00:42:25.180Um, so, uh, that context I think is important, but in any event, Dumas had written this letter purporting to name all these individual members of this drug trafficking ring and the special forces.
00:42:37.160Um, and was going around telling people that because of this leverage that he had over the special forces command, he was going to get them to reinstate his pension.
00:42:45.820So, the fact that both of these guys are writing tell-all documents and then both turn up murdered on Fort Bragg is yet another potential, um, you know, theory for explaining their deaths.
00:42:58.980You must have spoken to people they knew, their friends.
00:43:03.440What is the prevailing theory among people who were there?
00:43:09.020I can't say that anybody purports to know for sure, but I would say the most common reflexive answer that you get from folks is that they think that they were murdered by elements of Delta Force, either rogue elements of the unit or the command itself.
00:43:38.640Um, one of the guys I talked to, a former Delta operator, seemed to find that, excuse me, a former Delta officer, seemed to find that perfectly plausible, which was disturbing to me.
00:43:52.000Um, but, again, it's not, folks who read the book, they will, they will see, um, the direction in which I lean ultimately.
00:44:01.760And I don't want to spoil, you know, the ending, um, but.
00:44:06.000Bottom line, no arrests have been made.
00:44:08.900Uh, and so, and, so, and a further complication comes in with regard to just that.
00:44:14.820So, in, uh, recently, I don't want to spoil the last chapter of the book, but, um, recently the Department of Justice accused someone of committing these murders.
00:44:25.880And, um, let me just say that it is not at all who you would think.
00:44:31.800And, um, virtually all, or I can just say all of the sources that I talked to about this, um, either dismiss it out of hand and say there's no way, or they just have a really hard time believing it.
00:44:44.900And the person they've accused has pleaded not guilty, and he is scheduled to go on trial in, um, January, 2026.
00:45:00.540He's someone who people struggle to understand how he could have, how anyone could imagine that this person would travel from where, from where he lived, which was not in the area, go into Fort Bragg and murder these two guys who are, you know, one of them is like a real life Jason Bourne.
00:45:20.900Um, and the other one, you know, also a very dangerous man, how he could have done that and gotten away with it.
00:45:28.700And also the indictment is very strange that, um, you know, the victims are identified only by their initials.
00:45:36.080A lot of the cases under seal, the whole thing is very suspicious.
00:45:41.460Um, a lot of people that I've talked to say the government is framing this kid.
00:45:45.380Um, maybe because he was 20 years old at the time, 20 and Levine's 37, Dumas is 44.
00:45:53.020You know, these are mature, um, men who, um, the idea that a 20 year old stick up kid could have killed them defies credulity in a lot of people's opinion.
00:46:03.080Now, personally, I have to think that the department of justice doesn't indict people for murder lightly.
00:48:00.260Um, they're even smoking heroin, you know, I, and it's considered to be totally normal in this community.
00:48:06.160That's what, to me, was the most shocking to hear again and again.
00:48:08.800And like, not only to be told that all these people, these guys are using drugs, but that people just seem to think that that's kind of what they do, which I didn't know that.
00:48:28.780It sounds like it destroyed Billy Levine.
00:48:30.980The second is like, where's the Pentagon in this?
00:48:33.940This is the premier unit in the United States military and people are openly using cocaine and smoking crack and shooting their friends and no one's doing anything about it.
00:49:02.620So all members of the military are subject to random drug testing, but apparently they considered a joke.
00:49:07.840I mean, there's a lot of reporting on this around the Navy SEALs.
00:49:10.340A lot of Navy SEALs have gone on the record to say that, you know, they were using constantly during their time in service and that the drug testing regimen was a complete joke because there's ways to defeat it.
00:49:21.020In particular, you can get a tip off because it's supposed to be random.
00:50:08.400But, you know, these are people who are, their job is to do covert action.
00:50:13.880So they're very good at getting away with things.
00:50:18.760When your job is to penetrate a foreign country that's guarded by paranoid counterintelligence officials, to go into that country and, I don't know, bug an embassy or kidnap a guy off the street.
00:50:30.400A drug test isn't going to be something that you're too worried about, I think.
00:52:17.960Um, you know, I'm not, my story is really not part of the book, but the relevant, uh, background would be that, uh, I actually deployed to Iraq at the same time as Levine's first tour in Iraq.
00:52:28.480And, um, you know, I, uh, before that deployment was over, I had come to the firm point of view that the war was not just a mistake, but a crime to, to carry out this invasion on the grounds that there were supposedly weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there weren't.
00:53:40.100Uh, and in fact, you know, I sometimes in retrospect struggle to explain to folks how it could have been that I, uh, opposed the Iraq war and had no interest in fighting.
00:53:49.240And the Iraq war and yet still joined the army reserve at a time when it was clear that the Iraq war was going to happen.
00:53:54.920Well, because the reserves were not used in that way.
00:54:05.100But even people who opposed the war assumed that it would be over pretty quickly.
00:54:09.800Um, and I can remember even asking my recruiter naively, are you sure I'm not going to get sent to this war in Iraq that everyone's talking about?
00:54:57.540But, you know, before I even deployed back to the United States, I was writing editorials for the Daily Text Sinks I wrote for my student newspaper.
00:55:06.320Um, you know, talking about the Iraq war and using my perspective as a veteran to try to convince people that this was a mistake and that this whole post 9-11 permanent war paradigm should re-examined.
00:55:17.000Um, so that's kind of like my sort of origin story and how I came to it.
00:55:21.060Wait, so how long did you spend in Iraq?
00:56:12.060We did a lot of construction work and dirt work, uh, in war zones or in, um, you know, areas where they've been fighting, especially to repair roads that have been damaged by IEDs.
00:56:22.000Um, so, uh, several of our convoys were ambushed.
00:56:26.760Um, uh, a lot of, I think maybe five or six guys were shot and survived.
00:56:32.180Uh, and then also there were other bad things that went on.
00:56:36.120Um, you know, I, uh, in one circumstance, there was a soldier who, um, shot up a car in front of me and another group of soldiers and killed the occupants of that car who were just a woman and her kid.
00:56:51.120Uh, and, you know, he said that he thought that, uh, you know, they were approaching too fast.
00:56:56.480I don't want to get into all the details of it, but the ugliness of it and the savagery and how unnecessary it all was made a deep, deep impression on me at that age.
00:57:07.080Um, and I have dedicated all my work as a journalist and reporter ever since then to opposing, you know, the continuation of these wars.
00:57:30.400Um, you know, I didn't have like the sort of stereotypical hurt locker type of experience where, you know, I wasn't like, uh, what's that movie?
00:57:42.460Um, apocalypse now where I'm laying under the ceiling fans, skinning rats.
00:59:32.120Um, I have to assume that in units like Delta Force, the majority of the guys are able to compartmentalize the ethics of it and say, or the wisdom of it and say that that's simply not their job to think about and that they just follow orders.
00:59:52.260Um, but as you can see, in the case of a guy like Billy Levine, that only lasts for so long, eventually it starts to dawn on you that this is not okay.
01:00:02.940And if you listen to operator type podcasts, you'll hear a lot of that.
01:00:06.620I mean, yeah, it's, they're not the, the most jingoistic and pro-war people, like you said before, her cable news, cable news anchors.
01:00:14.740Um, not, you know, soldiers, the soldiers, I think have a more nuanced perspective, almost as a rule.
01:00:21.160Did you ever run in to, um, any cable news anchors when you were over there?
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01:01:44.120I want to go back to the connection between Levine and his friends, his colleagues, the Delta operators, but also the other special forces community members at Fort Bragg and drug use and drug trafficking.
01:02:03.300That's shocking, but it doesn't seem to have shocked their superiors.
01:02:10.180To what extent is drug trafficking tolerated in the military?
01:02:15.780I can't believe I'm asking this question, but it sounds like it is.
01:02:18.940It's hard to imagine that you would have to ask that question.
01:02:22.540And yet, from what I was able to learn, it's not an isolated case.
01:02:27.760In fact, it seems that after 2020, the drug trafficking rings that permeate Fort Bragg only increased, and you even had public statements from Fort Bragg officials acknowledging, for example, that they had 100% increase in drug crime on base from 2020 to 2021.
01:02:49.720How could you have drug crime on a military base?
01:02:52.120It was very surprising to me as well, but you even have cases of military police officers dealing drugs out of their police cars on Fort Bragg.
01:03:01.100Folks want to look that up, look up the case of Jacob Dickerson, who was an MP on Fort Bragg who was busted for drug trafficking.
01:03:08.080In fact, I obtained the investigative files in that case and learned that there was actually four or five of these MPs on base that were trafficking drugs.
01:03:17.380And they dropped charges against all but one of the guys because he had exacerbated the trouble he was in by getting into a drunk driving accident.
01:03:28.180And even he was just given a slap on the wrist.
01:03:30.740I think he got, you know, a month or two in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge.
01:03:34.380But there is a, I would say, pervasive practice of, or there's drug availability on Fort Bragg that's comparable to any, you know, dense urban city in the United States.
01:03:51.120The military is an authoritarian structure.
01:03:53.240I don't need to tell you that since you served in it.
01:03:55.420Um, so it seems like you could prevent that if you really wanted to, you could fix that problem.
01:04:20.680It's, uh, it's a quasi-military, quasi-civilian, um, police agency that has jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving American soldiers.
01:04:30.040So you have MPs who are the uniformed officers, and then above them you have CID.
01:04:35.580So they're the ones who investigate, you know, major crimes on bases.
01:04:38.100Um, and they told me about closed-door meetings in which the Fort Bragg brass mostly seem concerned with, you know, um, massaging the statistics that they kept just to make it seem like drug crime was under control when, in fact, it's not.
01:04:57.040Well, Fort Bragg is, um, under the, the largest umbrella formation there would be the 18th Airborne Corps.
01:05:04.340So the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps is going to be the highest-ranking army officer in Fort Bragg.
01:05:10.100Um, but you also have the Joint Special Operations Command there, which is a very elite, um, formation in the military, the most elite.
01:05:19.280And so the commander of, of JSOC is also, um, a very important and powerful person who's a, who's a, uh, three-star general, if I'm not mistaken, who's on, on the base as well.
01:05:30.980So you have a collection of, of, you know, what people call the brass.
01:05:34.980And then, of course, they're subservient to the Pentagon and the Secretary of the Army, uh, and the Secretary of Defense.
01:05:42.980One, um, connection that I've almost never heard anybody make, but I've thought about, uh, so the war in Vietnam really starts in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and extends all the way really to the, to the final end in April of 1975.
01:05:59.340That coincided almost exactly with the rise of a real drug epidemic in the United States.
01:06:06.200Vietnam is in a drug, is a poppy-growing region, you know, the Golden Triangle.
01:06:11.200And for a bunch of different reasons, that war seemed to have had a material effect on drug use in the United States.
01:06:19.120Like, and a lot of people died from drugs during the period of the Vietnam War.
01:06:23.380And I think there must be a connection.
01:06:25.500You see the exact same phenomenon around the war in Afghanistan starts in 2001, ends three years ago.
01:06:34.680And it coincides precisely with this explosion in opioid drug use and the inevitable death toll from that.
01:06:43.340Is there a direct connection between those two things?
01:06:46.740And the U.S. media's failure to connect those things is probably the biggest dereliction of duty on, on part of the press corps that, that I've seen in my life.
01:06:59.420The death toll from drugs during the Vietnam period, and particularly during the Afghanistan period, dwarfs the death toll in the war itself.
01:07:07.600The number one cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdose.
01:07:12.500And where does that, that comes, that comes directly out of the heroin crisis that afflicted this country from, let's say, the mid-2000s up until 2015, 16, 17, 18.
01:07:25.160And so it's very important to ask, what were the causes of the heroin crisis?
01:07:30.860I don't think I've ever heard anyone ask that question.
01:07:33.300Well, the conventional explanation, which is not wrong, is that the roots of it lie in the, um, over-prescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s.
01:08:32.540So, and as a direct result of the U.S. invasion, and we should talk about the Taliban in this context, because I'll try to keep it, uh, to brief to the essentials, because it actually goes back to the 1980s.
01:08:44.320So, in the 1980s, um, the CIA, uh, armed and funded Afghan resistance fighters known as Mujahideen to fight the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan and were occupying Afghanistan to prop up a communist government there.
01:09:01.920That's what we call Charlie Wilson's War, the movie, of course.
01:09:04.540But after the CIA withdrew, those warlords that they had previously set up took over Afghanistan and ruled it in the 1990s.
01:09:12.820And they were all major drug traffickers.
01:09:15.400They're the ones who were responsible for turning Afghanistan into the narco state that it became.
01:09:21.960Um, you know, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, was the main recipient of CIA cash.
01:09:28.280And he turned into the big, by far the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan.
01:09:32.360There's also the clan of Nassim Akunzada in the Helmand province, who was another major recipient of CIA aid, and who turned the Helmand into the world's most prolific, um, opium poppy, heroin, morphine producing area in the world.
01:09:48.160The Taliban, we hear so much about the Taliban's oppression of women and making music illegal, and they do those things.
01:09:55.040The Taliban is an arch-conservative, uh, movement whose, um, ethics and morality I absolutely do not share.
01:10:03.940I never understood why I was supposed to give a shit about that.
01:10:06.720I mean, I want everyone to be free, just as a matter of principle, but that didn't—but moving, you know, metric tons of heroin into my country, that seems like a real story.
01:10:16.440Whether people can, you know, girls can get PhDs in feminist studies or whatever is of less concern to me, right?
01:10:23.820Right. Right. Well, the, uh, Afghan people didn't like it either, all the drug trafficking that was going on in their country.
01:10:30.980And what made the Taliban popular originally was their suppression of the drug industry in, in Afghanistan.
01:10:37.540Um, they, uh, eliminated—they took over and eliminated all of the drug production that was taking place there.
01:10:43.540Because it's—you can see how it's ideologically consistent with their Sharia law.
01:11:18.380In Afghanistan, the effect of implementing Sharia law was the total suppression of the heroin industry and the decimation of the world's supply of heroin.
01:11:26.480And a massive reduction in the rape of boys.
01:11:30.520That's another subject that's absolutely part of this.
01:11:33.720And I almost hesitate to go there, because it's a—it is a—everything I'm saying about drugs could also be talked about—I can't believe I'm even saying this, but child sex trafficking was something that took place.
01:11:44.560It was something that the U.S.-backed client state was deeply implicated in child sex trafficking.
01:11:50.100Another thing that's falsely laid at the feet of the Taliban and said, this is just part of Afghan culture when that is not true.
01:11:55.620Um, but to return to the heroin thing, the—it was actually in the summer of 2001.
01:12:03.380Do you feel like your mind explodes with, like, when you start to understand what the truth is?
01:12:17.580In this case, yes, because although I had served in the military and worked as a war reporter, I'd actually never been to Afghanistan.
01:12:22.280So I had to educate myself on the Afghan war, um, starting from scratch.
01:12:28.020Um, and what I learned was that, uh, it—the—the Taliban eliminated the drug industry just months before the U.S. invaded.
01:12:36.200The DEA and the U.N. certified the—the eradication campaign that the Taliban had carried out.
01:12:41.260And when the U.S. invaded in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same narco warlords, um, that had previously ruled Afghanistan, what we call the Northern Alliance.
01:12:51.000Um, and those people took over, and Hamid Karzai was installed as a CIA puppet president of Afghanistan and immediately legalized poppy production in Afghanistan.
01:13:04.040And within—within the span of, let's say, two years, maybe three years, heroin production increased something like 7,000 or 8,000 percent in Afghanistan.
01:13:14.860And, of course, a lot of it winds up in Europe and the United States, correct?
01:13:18.080—Yes. You know, you have, um, like I said, more heroin than the world can even absorb.
01:13:24.160—Why would the U.S. authorities, why would the CIA, why would the White House allow that?
01:13:29.720—I—my view, there's a paranoid, um, point of view, conspiratorial point of view among people who believe that this is some kind of, um, this is some kind of societal program.
01:13:46.240There's some nefarious program that the—that the U.S. government wants the whole world to be inundated with heroin.
01:13:52.120—I personally am more inclined to the view that they just don't care and that these type of mercenary drug traffickers, um, make natural allies to a foreign power that's invading your country.
01:14:06.320—Is there a difference between negligence and malice?
01:14:09.900—If I leave my toddler in the car with the windows closed on a hot day to go gamble at a casino and he suffocates, does it matter if I wanted to kill him or if I just didn't care enough?
01:14:23.640—And I'm not making an excuse for that.
01:14:24.720—No, no, I know you're not. I'm just like—the bottom line is that U.S. authorities, the Bush administration, and then the Obama administration, and then, you know, up until the end, up until the Biden administration, allowed the United States and its citizens to die of drug ODs because the country that they were running, Afghanistan, was producing all the heroin.
01:14:50.000—Yes. The, I mean, the amount of heroin that was being produced was very potent, high quality, and large amounts of it, so that obviously supply and demand depressed prices.
01:14:59.440—And you have ample reporting. It's not just Europe and Australia and Asia that's being flooded by heroin. Also, the United States in this time saw a massive increase in supply.
01:15:11.300—Now, here's where the cover-up comes in, because all of this was well-reported up until the late 2000s, let's say 2007 or so. That's when the DEA started putting out statements to the effect that, although there was rising heroin supplies in the United States, they claimed that none of it was coming from Afghanistan. Less than 1% is the official figure.
01:15:31.900—And so, in the process of writing this book, I spent a lot of time in the weeds trying to figure out how exactly the DEA made this determination, because it's kind of like saying no oil from Saudi Arabia ever gets burned in the United States.
01:15:45.720You ask, how is that possible that the world's largest consumer of drugs is not importing any drugs from the world's largest producer of drugs?
01:15:56.340—Which it controls, yeah. That seems to defy reason, yeah.
01:15:59.800—Yes, it does. That's why you're a good reporter, Seth.
01:16:02.800—If you read the book, you will see that I get deep in the nitty-gritty of it, down to the actual mathematics of it. But suffice it to say, I find that that statistic was totally bogus and invented as a way to cover up the fact this incredibly damaging effect of the war in Afghanistan had on U.S. society.
01:16:23.960—So, I guess another way to say that would be, in fact, a lot of heroin from our client state of Afghanistan was winding up in American cities.
01:16:32.960—Absolutely. Especially what's called China white heroin. It's called China because of its color, not because it actually comes from China.
01:16:40.240—Yeah. Now, the picture is slightly confounded because there was also a lot of Mexican heroin coming to the United States during the same time. But Mexican heroin is black in color and low in quality. It's called black tar heroin.
01:16:56.640—Right. But it was the China white that really flooded the U.S. during this time period and caused the most damage, especially in the northeast and in Appalachia and in the Midwest, because that's where flights from Afghanistan come. It's all traffic through airports on the eastern seaboard, whereas Mexico kind of supplies the west of the United States in the south.
01:17:15.880—Right. That's why Jerry Garcia was a black tar addict in Marin County, California, and all the junkies in Philadelphia are using China white.
01:17:27.080—Right. Right. And the China white, because it's so much more potent, is what leads to all of the huge overdose crisis that we suffered during these years.
01:17:33.880—Pretty hard to OD from smoking heroin. Possible, but hard.
01:17:42.780—That's a very good question. Not the people of Afghanistan.
01:17:45.880—The numbers that I've seen suggest that maybe a billion dollars a year was the profits that went to Afghans of one type or another. The majority of it went to drug supply chains outside of Afghanistan. And that's the most opaque aspect of all of this. And that's where I have the most unanswered questions. Who exactly was making all of this money?
01:18:13.720—So, the occupation of Afghanistan was a military occupation, diplomatic as well, intel components. But basically, we had our troops in Afghanistan, therefore we controlled Afghanistan.
01:18:24.280—So, if there's an exponential rise by thousands of percent rise in opium production, heroin manufacturing, and export of heroin, it's kind of hard to believe the U.S. military didn't know that.
01:18:37.920—Oh, they certainly knew about it. And there's an agency called the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction that, although it's a U.S. government agency, has done the most important retrospective work on this, including lots of interviews with key people.
01:18:56.160—And all of them acknowledged that they knew that it was going on. And SAIGAR is an agency, its acronym, discussed how the U.S. military didn't want anything to do with drug eradication because they saw it as detrimental to their mission because the people they were working with were drug traffickers.
01:19:16.760—And the same story goes for the CIA, except SAIGAR explicitly says in its 2018 report on counter-narcotics, that the CIA, rather than cooperating with anti-drug eradication measures, prioritized its relationship with significant drug traffickers.
01:19:33.420—That's the language of the U.S. government report. And it even names some of the major drug traffickers who worked with the CIA, who were on the CIA's payroll.
01:19:41.500—And let's not forget that the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, were on the payroll of the CIA and led this drug trafficking organization, which, you know, recently our government accused Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela of being the head of a drug cartel on some very, very flimsy evidence.
01:20:01.100—And they make these organization charts where they purport to show Maduro at the top and these other guys.
01:20:06.680—If you had taken that same lens and trained it on Afghanistan, you could have very easily created an organization structure showing the world's biggest drug cartel with Hamid Karzai at the very top.
01:20:16.600—And he's someone who, you know, is sitting down to dine with President Obama and all these other top U.S. officials.
01:20:21.980—But if I'm a special operator in Afghanistan and I'm working with the local leaders who are also drug traffickers, I mean, it's not a huge step.
01:20:35.600And I'm buying heroin for, you know, $1,000 a pound when I can resell it for many, many times that can be kind of tempting to bring some home, right?
01:20:46.380—Timothy Dumas, who was found dead next to Billy Levine on Fort Bragg in 2020, had evidently written a letter in which he outlined exactly what you're talking about.
01:20:58.680A drug trafficking organization involving special forces soldiers who were trafficking heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes.
01:21:08.720And he was killed before that letter was ever made public.
01:21:13.260—He wrote it. It was addressed to a top-ranking—I never read the letter, but I interviewed someone who did read the letter.
01:21:20.300I interviewed three people who knew about the letter, including Dumas' son, and also his partner in crime,
01:21:25.980a very corrupt former North Carolina state trooper named Freddie Wayne Huff, who was entrusted with a copy of the letter and read it.
01:21:35.160And he said that it was addressed to a high-ranking general.
01:21:37.780—As I said before, Dumas intended to use this blackmail letter to exert pressure on the special forces in order to get his pension reinstated.
01:21:46.680But it doesn't seem to have been a very wise maneuver on his part.
01:21:49.640—No, no. You can push too hard, then you wind up executed.
01:21:54.160I'm coming around to your theory, by the way, that this may have been retaliatory.
01:22:00.980—That's not my theory, although I get what you're saying, but just to be super clear about it, because these are not light allegations.
01:22:10.960So I just want to be as responsible as possible as a reporter and say that this is what people have alleged, this is what the evidence is, but we don't know for sure.
01:22:19.280And the reason we don't know is because our ignorance has been procured by the people, by the authorities who have the responsibility to investigate this stuff and are not doing it.
01:22:28.460—Do you think—nicely put, and thank you for saying that—do you think the U.S.—people in the U.S. military, in the special forces community, did participate in drug trafficking?
01:22:40.460—I find it hard to imagine that they weren't.
01:22:46.460I will say that there's other ways of making money, other types of crime that I discuss in the book.
01:22:52.280The book's not entirely about drug trafficking.
01:22:53.940—There's also a lot of weapons trafficking, a lot of weapons theft from the military.
01:23:00.360Fort Bragg, it would blow your mind if they ever disclosed how many weapons and how much in explosives that they lose annually.
01:23:29.900And it makes crystal clear that his entire career was characterized by stuff going missing, documents going missing.
01:23:38.540He was the—when he was in Afghanistan attached to JSOC, all of the records for two years, 2012 and 2013, if I'm not mistaken, went missing in their entirety.
01:23:49.660All the paperwork on all of the JSOC supply chain for that battalion was just gone.
01:24:22.620They hate it when you say that, but it's true.
01:24:23.960—Well, I haven't seen that reporting, but I will tell you this about Ukraine.
01:24:28.040That agency I mentioned earlier, Saigar, there are provisions in the laws providing aid to Ukraine that ensure that that type of accountability never takes place again.
01:24:38.160Because Saigar turned into a real embarrassment for the war in Afghanistan because apparently they took their job seriously and did it correctly.
01:24:45.600So, the aid to Ukraine can never be audited.
01:27:23.680But when it happens among people most civilians revere, like, you know, the most elite units in the U.S. military, that's dispiriting among other things, right?
01:27:35.460—I think it is, and I think my inclination is to think that it is a result of waging wars that nobody really believes in for years and years, because think about what that does to your psychology.
01:27:48.700—When you're engaged in a righteous cause that has widespread societal buy-in, you're going to be constrained by your own sense of yourself as a virtuous actor.
01:28:00.320—And you're going to know that when you're tempted to do things for money or for other motives, that that's not consistent with your self-image, and so you don't do it.
01:28:11.720—But when you're fighting for years in wars like Afghanistan that the public just doesn't even pay attention to, and you know all your allies are drug traffickers, and they're raping little boys, and they're trafficking sex slaves.
01:28:23.120—But you're just doing it because you like your work and you like being an elite soldier, then it's easier to take a mercenary attitude towards this and just think, it's not going to matter if I skim, you know, $100,000 off the top of the op fund that we have out here in the field, all this cash that we're given.
01:28:41.300Or it's no big deal for me to grab a couple of bricks of this heroin and put it in my footlocker and then sell it for $50,000 when I get back to Fayetteville.
01:28:50.060—I hope what you just said is clipped, because that's a perfect summation of what my instincts are, that the more morally corrupt the enterprise is, the more morally corrupt the people participating in the enterprise become.
01:29:04.060—And that's why I spend so much time in the book talking about the wars in which all this, the context in which this takes place, because it doesn't take place in a vacuum.
01:29:13.500—And, you know, the decisions of our leaders in this country trickle down to the lowest levels and have an influence on how people live their lives.
01:29:24.860—Has anyone ever been held accountable?
01:29:28.920I mean, I think you've confirmed my instinct, which is that there was a connection between the war in this drug-producing country and our occupation of this drug-producing country and the drug epidemic in the United States.
01:29:41.180—I mean, there's clearly—I mean, you have to be an idiot not to see the connection.
01:29:44.480—But has anyone ever been indicted, arrested, convicted for participating in that?
01:30:01.940And there's been—there was total impunity around the entire enterprise.
01:30:05.540—Man, I think the United States government, I don't think I know, is doing things right now whose consequences cannot be foreseen, but they'll be profound.
01:31:40.820There's a lot of things that are crazy these days.
01:31:44.360I think that what made it possible to write what I wrote about Afghanistan was something that happened while I was writing the book, not too long ago, in fact.
01:31:54.960Which was that, you know, the Taliban took over after the U.S. withdrew in 21.
01:32:00.000And then proceeded to do exactly what they had done in the year 2000-2001, which was to completely eradicate all drugs from the country.
01:32:07.380—And up until then, we had been told, to the extent that drug production in Afghanistan came up, we were always told that it was the Taliban and that the insurgency and the drug production were just two sides of the same coin.
01:32:26.760—And what made it—what gave me the—I guess what gave me the confidence to really—to hit as hard as I could in this narrative was seeing the Taliban in 2023.
01:32:38.480They completed another eradication campaign where they once again totally eliminated heroin production and drug production from Afghanistan.
01:32:45.380So, at that point, you know, I had doubts as a reporter because I'm not omniscient and, you know, there's always this conflicting information.
01:32:54.300So, I kind of doubt my own conclusions.
01:32:56.460I'm thinking, well, they must have been involved to some degree.
01:32:59.160We hear that said so often from the most prestigious institutions of media and government.
01:55:31.000And look, they put up Ten Commandments in front of the, I live in Austin, Texas, and they put up the Ten Commandments in front of the state capitol.
01:55:37.300And that's controversial among, you know, religious libertarians.
01:55:41.260But I'm of the view that they, I'm happy to see them put the Ten Commandments up there if they would just follow them.
01:56:00.400With the question, like, how were your interactions during the two and a half years you were writing this, or more, with the, with, like, DOD, for example, with the Pentagon?
01:56:12.500Like, you must have called over there to the PIOs and said, you know, I have the list of following questions.
01:56:21.900And I was in touch with them just yesterday because Politico is publishing an excerpt of the book.
01:56:27.960And so, we had to go back to them again for comment.
01:56:30.820And the fact that it involves Delta Force, the fact that it involves a special mission unit, you know, they said that explicitly in the response that I got from USASOC yesterday.
01:56:39.820They said, because your question implicates a special mission unit, you know, our policy is to not comment.
01:56:45.320So, for the most part, they didn't give me anything.
01:57:11.660I will say, you know, I try not to be, I try to be fair when possible or to give credit where credit is due.
01:57:18.920There was a case where the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the commander of SOCOM, which is an umbrella formation above JSOC and above all these units, questioned him in a committee, a Senate committee, about my reporting for Rolling Stone.
01:57:37.560And asked him to address, you know, the cases of drug trafficking and unsolved murders.
01:57:43.640And General Brian Fenton, who at the time was the commander of SOCOM, said that he was concerned about it and said that it was unacceptable, said that they were laser focused on eradicating it.
01:57:54.020But whether those sentiments that they expressed to members of Congress was actually backed up with real action, I don't know.
01:58:18.580None of them, I give a pass to any of them.
01:58:20.320But I do see Trump's influence here to be uniquely negative because of the way that he surrounds himself with some of the craziest people in the special operations community,
01:58:32.960elevates these people who, among their own colleagues, are considered loose cannons, not credible.
01:58:40.200You know, there's the case of Eddie Gallagher, where Trump made it such a big part of his brand to defend this disgrace to the Navy SEALs, who was turned in by his own teammates for killing a bunch of people for no reason.
01:58:50.980I mean, you're talking about guys who are not bleeding heart liberals by any stretch of the imagination.
01:58:56.380They're there with Chief Gallagher next to him, seeing what he's doing, and they're not okay with it.
01:59:02.140The command wants nothing to do with Gallagher.
01:59:03.600They also think that he's an embarrassment and a disgrace and a murderer.
01:59:07.460But Trump intervenes to prevent him from losing his trident, and Trump touts him, and he becomes this big influencer and so forth.
01:59:17.580So that type of incredible irresponsibility and malignancy on Trump's part, his uniquely malignant influence as commander-in-chief,
01:59:27.400I think augurs very poorly for the possibility of reform, at least in the next three years.
01:59:33.600Well, you want an honest, competent, decent military because, you know, it's the purest expression of power that a government has, the power to kill people.
01:59:46.660And you have to think that they're operating on a different and elevated moral plane.
01:59:51.200They can't just be like an outlaw state.
02:00:41.080But just looking on the surface, like I don't think Chinese soldiers are trafficking drugs and killing each other.
02:00:47.200I don't think Chinese soldiers are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses right and left.
02:00:51.520And also, China has a much bigger army than us, while our army is shrinking to a degree that's really shocking.
02:00:58.120I mean, they're really running out of people.
02:01:00.780This year, recruiting was a little bit better.
02:01:03.240But you're still talking about, you know, a long, long deficit in recruiting.
02:01:07.120The army's never been smaller than it is right now.
02:01:09.780They can't get qualified helicopter pilots, let's say, as we saw so, you know, tragically demonstrated over the Potomac River in January.
02:01:18.420So, I think that, you know, beyond just the drugs, there's a lot of reasons to be concerned, you know, about the health and viability of the U.S. military in general.