Seth Harp exposes Fort Bragg’s 2020 murders of Delta Force operator Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, linked to drug trafficking and blackmail documents, with Levine’s violent past—including a covered-up 2018 murder—and PTSD-fueled crack addiction ignored by the military. Harp ties the U.S. opioid crisis to Afghanistan’s post-2001 heroin boom, accusing CIA-backed traffickers like Hamid Karzai of flooding markets while U.S. agencies turned a blind eye, despite Taliban eradication efforts proving prior claims false. The Pentagon’s systemic drug abuse—rampant in special forces—mirrors broader institutional rot, with weapons theft fueling Mexican cartels and no accountability for complicit officials, leaving the military’s decline unchecked as China closes the capability gap. [Automatically generated summary]
I first read about a double homicide on Fort Bragg that took place at the tail end of 2020.
Just 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 of Fort Bragg.
They'd both been shot to death and their bodies had been dumped in the woods.
I also read that Billy Levine was a Delta Force operator and...
And 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.
And the police were saying that this was believed to be a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong.
And so I knew that there had to be more to the story because you can imagine if like, 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.
I mean, that's the level of secrecy.
And that's how elite Delta Force is in the military.
Delta Force is what's called a special mission unit.
It is an army unit.
It's part of what's called the Joint Special Operations Command.
It was created in the late 1970s to be an elite counterterrorism force for things like hostage rescue.
For 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.
This is all pre-9-11.
After 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.
And what they primarily specialize in are clandestine operations, covert operations, what we might call black operations.
That's Delta Force and it's headquartered at Fort Bragg.
I 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.
And 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.
Other than that, for 20 years, they kept their name completely out of the news.
There are former Delta Force officers who I've seen occasionally talk on TV.
But 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, something to that effect.
It's very much part of their culture not to come on TV shows and not to talk and not to write books.
That's the question that animates this book from the beginning to the end.
I mean, although I talk a lot about military history, I talk a lot about foreign policy.
Really, it's a murder mystery.
This book is at its heart.
And the question is: who killed those two guys?
And the fact is that there are many, many possible suspects.
And that kind of is what made it such a rich topic for exploration.
It turns out that Billy Levine, 18 months before he himself was found murdered, had killed a guy at his house in Fayetteville.
In fact, he had shot and killed his best friend and fellow Green Beret, a guy named Mark Leschaker, right in front of his Mark Leschiker's daughter, who was about six years old at the time.
And the police, the local police, the Sheriff's Department, the District Attorney of Cumberland County, North Carolina, and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division completely covered up that murder.
And I use that word covered up advisedly.
I'm actually an attorney myself, so I don't use it lightly, but I devote the first two chapters of the book to showing what the evidence was against Levine and how that case was adjudicated and how he was not even placed under arrest.
He was just lightly questioned and let go that same night on the grounds that it had been supposedly a justifiable homicide.
When in fact, that theory, that defense was definitively contradicted by the physical evidence.
So Levine, having previously killed a guy, then goes on to commit three, or excuse me, I think four or five felony offenses in Fayetteville over the next 18 months, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shooting at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville, manufacturing controlled substance for cooking crack in his house, lots of weapons charges.
He'd even been arrested for harboring an escapee, which is a new one to me.
And in every case, the DA had dropped the charges against him.
He had done more than 12 deployments, more than a dozen deployments in his career.
He wasn't a high-level officer in the Delta Force, but he was a veteran operator who had been deep experience in America's classified assassination programs in Iraq and Syria and in Afghanistan.
So that was the reason why I think he was not, he was dealt with with such leniency by the authorities.
Levine was not a, he was not a one-dimensional character by any means.
He's someone whose military career and whose downward trajectory I reconstruct in the book because I think it's so illustrative of what's happened to our military over the past 20 years.
He was such a great example of what has happened.
He developed very severe PTSD moral injury.
He came to believe that the wars in which he was participating were morally wrong.
He had severe substance abuse issues, very severe.
He was smoking crack every day and doing a lot of other drugs as well.
But my understanding was, and your description suggests that these guys are like basically Olympic athletes whose physical condition is going to be monitored, I assume, by the unit doctor or somebody.
Well, you know, Operators have a particular type of physical fitness that you really only find in the army, which is the kind of guy who can run a two-mile run in 12 minutes, but also smoke a pack a day and get drunk five times a week.
And I was shocked to the degree to which, because not only, you know, I served in the conventional part of the military, not in the special forces, and I had also been out for more than 10 years.
So I was very, very surprised when I started investigating Fort Bragg and learning the extent to which cocaine use has normalized in the Green Berets, not just in Delta Force, but in all of the Army Special Forces, which is a much larger organization.
And Delta Force is pretty small.
But the Green Berets has thousands of troops and people just, you know, people that live in this community live in Fayetteville or live in Moore County.
You know, to them, it's just understood that this is just part of the lifestyle.
The reason for that is because once you have done 10 deployments in service of covert operations, assassination operations, it is an unacceptable national security outcome from the perspective of authorities for you to go to prison, for you to be in a courtroom for any reason.
Those guys, they are not supposed to exist.
And they just can't process them through the criminal justice system in ordinary ways.
And to me, that's what made his death so intriguing because so many people alleged the sources that I quote, I want to be responsible about this and not say that it's what I believe, but the sort of conventional wisdom that when I first got into the case, people were saying that the military itself had killed Billy Levine because he had turned into such a problem and was messing up so badly.
In 2001, President George W. Bush signed secret orders that essentially, and they're secret, so I haven't read them, but based on the best reporting that that I've seen, he signed secret orders that essentially reverse the assassination ban that had been put in place decades earlier.
Actually, the groundwork for that legal move had been laid under President Reagan.
There were memos in place or certain authorities, executive orders in place that did allow for assassination in the case when the target was deemed to be a terrorist.
Those authorities actually weren't used, to my understanding, for decades.
But when after the September 11th attacks, you know, Bush reversed that.
And, you know, you're saying that you haven't heard too much about it, but that's because we often hear about it by a certain euphemism, which is night raids.
So you may have heard, I'm sure you have heard that under President Obama, the war, the war making, all of the war effort in Afghanistan became about drone strikes and night raids.
Well, night raids is just a euphemism for assassinations.
Yes, if somebody comes out waving a white flag, well, he'll probably get shot anyway.
But under certain circumstances, they will take people prisoner.
But for the most part, you know, when they hit a target, every military-age man, as they say, on that target dies.
I mean, there's no accountability over this because it all depends upon the determinations of intelligence analysts in the Joint Special Operations Command and in the CIA and what have you, the people that generate targets.
Delta Force just hits the targets.
They may not necessarily generate them, although they do have substantial intelligence assets that develop targets.
But there's no way to check their work and say, you know, who these people really were.
But, you know, as I talk about extensively in the book and trying to get some clarity around this, the error rate is believed to be very high, at least 50%.
So I'm not a military historian by any means, but my understanding is that there was extensive assassination operations also in Vietnam.
And we call that the, that's known as the Phoenix program, where the CIA was using assassinations to dismantle what was perceived as enemy command and control networks.
You know, actually, I think that a lot of people in the sort of national security set did, although it elicited a great deal of repugnance in the public, I think that my sense is that it was perceived as an effective way of waging war.
And I think a lot of people, including people who are anti-war and who would prefer to see a more isolationist foreign policy, complacently assume that because we spend ungodly amounts of money on our military, a trillion dollars this year on the national defense budget, that whatever else you think of our foreign policy, at least we have the world's most powerful military.
That assumption goes largely unexamined.
And the reality is we don't.
I was just at Trump's military parade in Washington, D.C. A magazine sent me to cover that.
And a lot of those troops were from Fort Bragg.
And you may have seen on TV what a joke the parade turned out to be, how disorganized, how unimpressive it was.
And the technology that was on display, you know, people expected to be this fascistic spectacle, this authoritarian spectacle like you might see in North Korea or whatever.
But I was looking at the troops going by, not even marching in step.
You know, the Bradley fighting vehicles, which are 40 years old and perform very poorly, haven't been replaced with anything newer.
Same goes for the Abrams tank.
It's been in service for more than 40 years.
The Blackhawk helicopter, just before the parade, a Blackhawk helicopter had crashed into a passenger plane over the Potomac River, lest we forget, killed 68 people, worst aviation disaster since 2001.
I'm looking at all of this and I'm thinking, man, our army is in sorry, sorry shape.
And that was the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army because the Army actually predates the Constitution and predates the creation of our nation.
And to me, it is very worrisome to see the state of decline and disrepair in which it, in which it's currently languishing.
And I think the stuff that's going on at Fort Bragg is highly symptomatic of just that.
So if you're fighting a war or you're in some protracted struggle with violence, I don't know if it's a war, but you're like fighting.
Why wouldn't, if you could, why wouldn't you capture key players from the other side in order to extract intelligence from that, usable intelligence from them?
Well, that's another big component of the evolution of the American way of making war, waging war for the past 20 years, is the increasing secrecy around all of this, which I think also has had an extremely deleterious effect.
I 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.
He said, since my inauguration, we have eliminated 68 terrorists in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia.
Some 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.
And, you know, when he perceives small threats, like with his buddy Mark Leschkart's house barging his front door because they're both out of their head on drugs, you know, he just, as a reflexive mechanism, pulls out his gun and shoots the other guy.
So I think one of the first signs of his, and I'm tracking about 24 murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers in the book since 2020, in which it was either the Fort Bragg soldier who was murdered, accused of murder, or convicted of murder.
I think it should be if you're an employee of the government, if you're an active duty soldier, you're supposed to be the most disciplined people in the world, right?
He was a middle-class guy from working class guy from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who joined the Army when he was 17 years old before 9-11 happened.
And 9-11 took place while he was still in training.
And he soon got taken up the pipeline of the first Special Forces Group.
And then from there, by 2009, he was a relatively young man of 26, I think, at the time that he was selected for Delta Force.
Well, very 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.
A lot of these guys are big-time adrenaline junkies, jumping out of planes, you know, parachuting is a big part of what they do.
So he was like those guys in all these respects.
But 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.
And the other guy either was, his name was Timothy Dumas.
Not to reduce them to their respective races, but to keep it clear.
One was a white guy, one was a black guy.
Levine's a white guy.
Dumas is a black guy.
He also was not someone who would have been easy to kill.
He wasn't an operator.
He was a supply officer who was attached to JSOC.
He served in the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade and had done many deployments to Afghanistan in service of the JSOC-led task force in Afghanistan.
So 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.
And he was deeply, he's a whole separate story that we could go into.
But to come back to what we were saying about the murder itself, you 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.
So 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, you know, I interviewed several Army CID agents who worked the scene of the murder.
And by all accounts, they found no drugs, no guns, no money, and maybe a couple of shell casings.
But, you know, there weren't even like footprints on the ground.
Levine's body had been wrapped up in a sort of tarp or blanket and placed in the back of his own truck.
And then someone had driven out there and abandoned the truck in the woods with his body in the back.
And so there's lots of theories of this murder, but the CID theory was that somebody had 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.
So someone left with the guns at a minimum.
And so Army CID presumes that Dumas, who was a really bad, a bad guy, to be honest, he was a drug trafficker and by some accounts, a hitman.
He had just been expelled from the military for his criminal behavior.
And 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, or a few months shy of his 20th year, in which case he would have been eligible for a lifetime pension.
You know, if you serve 20 years in the military, you get a pension.
So 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.
So 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.
They 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.
But the truck got stuck in the woods, or it got stuck in the mud because it wasn't on a road.
It was on a firebreak trail.
And 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.
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What's the theory as to why Dumas would have been hired to kill Levine?
And 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.
One is that Mark Leschaker, the Green Beret who he killed, his teammates, by some accounts, wanted revenge.
The fact that that murder went completely unpunished, as you might imagine, leads to resentment in the community, leads to a lot of whispers.
I mean, you know, you can't just kill somebody.
Maybe get off legally, but there's going to be repercussions.
So they had enemies in the drug world, dangerous enemies, people that will kill you if you don't pay for your product.
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.
And we touched on this in the beginning of our conversation about how much the unit frowns on people writing books.
Levine's ex-wife told me that he was writing a book.
She showed me the text messages where he texted her and said, I'm writing a book.
And he also said that someone already wanted to turn it into a movie.
Now, Dumas at the, so put a pin in that.
Dumas, because he had been kicked out of the army just shy of his pension eligibility date, he also was writing something, variously described to me as a book or a letter in which it wasn't a memoir.
It was actually deliberately intended as a blackmail document.
He 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.
By the Afghan client state that the U.S. supported for 20 years.
Yeah.
So all these guys, having served many times in Afghanistan, would have been very close and 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.
So 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 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.
So 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 theory for explaining their deaths.
I 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.
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.
Again, it's not, folks who read the book, they will, they will see the direction in which I lean ultimately.
And I don't want to spoil the ending, but bottom line, no arrests have been made.
That's not true.
And a further complication comes in with regard to just that.
So recently, I don't want to spoil the last chapter of the book, but recently the Department of Justice accused someone of committing these murders.
And let me just say that it is not at all who you would think.
And virtually all, or I can just say all of the sources that I talked to about this Either dismiss it out of hand and say there's no way, or they just have a really hard time believing it.
He's someone who people struggle to understand how he could have, how anyone could imagine that this person would travel from where he lived, which was not in the area, go on to Fort Bragg and murder these two guys who are, you know, one of them is like a real life Jason Bourne and the other one, you know, also a very dangerous man.
How he could have done that and gotten away with it.
And also the indictment is very strange.
The, you know, the victims are identified only by their initials.
A lot of the cases under seal.
The whole thing is very suspicious.
I don't want to dance around it.
A lot of people that I've talked to say the government is framing this kid because he was 20 years old at the time, 20.
And Levine's 37.
Dumas is 44.
You know, these are mature men who the idea that a 20-year-old stick-up kid could have killed them defies credulity in a lot of people's opinion.
Now, personally, I have to think that the Department of Justice doesn't indict people for murder lightly.
And yes, it was known that he was the guy that dealt drugs to his fellow operators.
I mean, I talked to Mark Leschiker's family.
So Mark and Billy, they were best friends.
And so Mark's wife and his mom, even they all knew Billy Levine.
They had all spent time at his house.
And they and many other witnesses, you know, I interviewed lots of family members and friends of both of these men.
They said that, you know, you would go into Billy's house and there was just cocaine everywhere.
And all his fellow operators from Dole DeForce were at his house too.
And there's a bunch of Coke on the table.
They're doing MDMA.
They're even smoking heroin, you know.
And it's considered to be totally normal in this community.
That's what to me was the most shocking to hear again and again, 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.
I mean, I remember when I was in the army, one guy, a sergeant in my company tested positive for cocaine in a piss test, and he was just gone after that.
So all members of the military are subject to random drug testing, but apparently they consider it a joke.
I mean, there's a lot of reporting on this around the Navy SEALs.
A 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.
In particular, you can get a tip off when you, and because it's supposed to be random.
It's not something they do regularly.
And maybe that's what they need to be doing.
But as the random, at the randomized testing, you know, you can be told by someone in time, hey, your name is on the list.
And that gives you time to like suck down a bunch of water and stop doing drugs and pass the test.
You got to remember these guys are intelligent, highly trained.
They're spies just as much as they are assassins.
Many of them are.
There's various levels within Delta Force.
There's compartmented elements.
There's the line squadrons, etc.
So it depends on the person.
But, you know, these are people who are their job is to do covert action.
So they're very good at getting away with things.
When 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, a drug test isn't going to be something that you're too worried about, I think.
You know, I'm not, my story is really not part of the book, but the relevant background would be that I actually deployed to Iraq at the same time as Levine's first tour in Iraq.
And, you know, I, 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 carry out this invasion on the grounds that there were supposedly weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there weren't.
And in fact, you know, I sometimes in retrospect struggle to explain to folks how it could have been that I opposed the Iraq war and had no interest in fighting in 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.
But, you know, before I even deployed back to the United States, I was writing editorials for the Daily Text Inc.
because I wrote for my student newspaper, 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.
So that's kind of like my sort of origin story and how I came to.
You know, I think a lot of people had certainly had rougher deployments than I did.
I've read books about some of the units that had the toughest, that had the most casualties.
I don't want to, you know, exaggerate what my experience was like, but at the same time, it was pretty rough.
It was pretty rough.
I mean, there were guys in my unit who were killed.
We were attacked on a fairly regular basis.
Nothing crazy, but getting shot at and getting mortar was a continuous thing.
We were often outside the wire because we were, although we were non-combat troops, we built bridges and roads was our job.
We did a lot of construction work and dirt work in war zones or in areas where there had been fighting, especially to repair roads that have been damaged by ADs.
So several of our convoys were ambushed.
A lot of, I think maybe five or six guys were shot and survived.
And then also there were other bad things that went on.
You know, I in one circumstance, there was a soldier who 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.
And, you know, he said that he thought that, you know, they were approaching too fast.
I won'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.
And I have dedicated all my work as a journalist and reporter ever since then to opposing the continuation of these wars.
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.
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.
And if you listen to operator-type podcasts, you'll hear a lot of that.
I mean, yeah, it's they're not the most jingoistic and pro-war people, like you said before, are cable news, cable news anchors, not soldiers.
The soldiers, I think, have a more nuanced perspective, almost as a rule.
I 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.
That's shocking, but it doesn't seem to have shocked their superiors.
To what extent is drug trafficking tolerated in the military?
I can't believe I'm asking this question, but it sounds like it is.
It's hard to imagine that you would have to ask that question.
And yet, from what I was able to learn, it's not an isolated case, Levine and Dumas.
In fact, it seems that after 2020, these like the drug trafficking rings that permeate Fort Bragg only increased.
And you even had public statements from Fort Bragg officials acknowledging, you know, for example, that they had a 100% increase in drug crime on base from 2020 to 2021.
It 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.
Folks, I'm going to look that up, look up the case of Jacob Dickardson, Dickerson, who was an MP on Fort Bragg, who was busted for drug trafficking.
In 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.
And 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.
And even he was just given a slap on the wrist.
I think he got a month or two in the stockade and a dishonorable discharge.
But there is a, I would say, pervasive practice of, or there's, there's drug availability on Fort Bragg that's comparable to any, you know, dense urban city in the United States.
It's a quasi-military, quasi-civilian police agency that has jurisdiction to investigate crimes involving American soldiers.
So you have MPs who are the uniformed officers, and then above them, you have CID.
So they're the ones who investigate, you know, major crimes on bases.
And they told me about closed-door meetings in which the Fort Bragg brass mostly seemed concerned with massaging the statistics that they kept just to make it seem like drug crime was under control when in fact it's not.
One connection that I've almost never heard anybody make, but I've thought about.
So the war in Vietnam really starts in 1964 with the Gulf of Tong Kin incident and extends all the way really to the to the final end in April of 1975.
That coincided almost exactly with the rise of a real drug epidemic in the United States.
Vietnam is in a drug, is a poppy growing region near the Golden Triangle.
And for a bunch of different reasons, that war seemed to have had a material effect on drug use in the United States.
And a lot of people died from drugs during the period of the Vietnam War.
And I think there must be a connection.
You see the exact same phenomenon around the war in Afghanistan starts in 2001, ends three years ago, and it coincides precisely with this explosion in opioid drug use and the inevitable death toll from that.
Is there a direct connection between those two things?
The number one cause of death for Americans age 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdose.
And 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.
And so it's very important to ask what were the causes of the heroin crisis.
So, 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 brief to the essentials, because it actually goes back to the 1980s.
So in the 1980s, the CIA 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.
And they won that war.
That's what we call Charlie Wilson's War, the movie, of course.
But after the CIA withdrew, those warlords that they had previously set up took over Afghanistan and ruled it in the 1990s.
And they were all major drug traffickers.
They're the ones who were responsible for turning Afghanistan into the narco-state that it became.
You know, Gulbedin Hekmatyar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, was the main recipient of CIA cash.
And he turned into by far the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan.
There's also the clan of Nassim Akunzada in the Helman province, who is another major recipient of CIA aid and who turned the Helmond into the world's most prolific opium, poppy, heroin, morphine producing area in the world.
The Taliban, we hear so much about the Taliban's oppression of women and making music illegal, and they do those things.
The Taliban is an arch conservative movement whose ethics and morality I absolutely do not share.
All the drug trafficking that was going on in their country.
And what made the Taliban popular originally was their suppression of the drug industry in Afghanistan.
They eliminated, they took over and eliminated all of the drug production that was taking place there because you can see how it's ideologically consistent with their Sharia law.
In 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.
That's another subject that's absolutely part of this.
And I almost hesitate to go there because it is apparent.
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 that was something that the U.S.-backed client state was deeply implicated in child sex trafficking.
Another 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.
But to return to the heroin thing, it was actually in the summer of 2001.
In this case, yes, because although I had served in the military and worked as a war reporter, I'd actually never been to Afghanistan.
So I had to educate myself on the Afghan war starting from scratch.
And what I learned was that the Taliban eliminated the drug industry just months before the U.S. invaded.
The DEA and the UN certified the eradication campaign that the Taliban had carried out.
And when the U.S. invaded in 2001, they teamed up with the exact same narco warlords that had previously ruled Afghanistan, what we call the Northern Alliance.
And those people took over and Hamid Karzai was installed as CIA puppet president of Afghanistan and immediately legalized poppy production in Afghanistan.
And within the span of, let's say, two years, maybe three years, heroin production increased something like seven or 8,000% in Afghanistan.
My view, there's a paranoid point of view, conspiratorial point of view among people who believe that this is some kind of this is some kind of societal program, some nefarious program that the U.S. government wants the whole world to be inundated with heroin.
I personally am more inclined to the view that they just don't care and that these type of mercenary drug traffickers make natural allies to a foreign power that's invading your country.
Is there a difference between negligence and malice?
If I leave my toddler in the car with the windows closed on a hot day to go gamble to a casino and he suffocates, does it matter if I wanted to kill him or if I just didn't care enough?
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.
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.
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.
Now, here's where the cover-up comes in, because all 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 rise in heroin supplies in the United States, they claimed that none of it was coming from Afghanistan.
Less than 1% is the official figure.
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.
You 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?
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.
And it was, 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 trafficked through airports on the eastern seaboard, whereas Mexico kind of supplies the west of the United States in the south.
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.
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.
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 who, and all of them acknowledged that they knew that it was going on.
And SIGAR is an agency, its acronym, discuss 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.
And the same story goes to the CIA, except SIGAR 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.
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.
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.
And they make these organization charts where they purport to show Maduro at the top and these other guys.
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.
And he's someone who, you know, is sitting down to dine with President Obama and all these other top U.S. officials.
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 and I'm buying heroin for $1,000 a pound when I can resell it for many, many times that it's going to be kind of tempting to bring some home, right?
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: a drug trafficking organization involving special forces soldiers who were trafficking heroin from Afghanistan to the United States on military planes.
And he was killed before that letter was ever made public.
I never read the letter, but I interviewed someone who did read the letter.
I interviewed three people who knew about the letter, including Dumas' son and also his partner in crime, a very corrupt former North Carolina state trooper named Freddie Wayne Huff, who was entrusted with a copy of the letter and read it.
And he said that it was addressed to a high-ranking general.
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.
But it doesn't seem to have been a very wise maneuver on his part.
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.
So 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.
And 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.
Well, I haven't seen that reporting, but I will tell you this about Ukraine.
That 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.
Because Saigar turned into a real embarrassment for the war in Afghanistan because apparently they took their job seriously and did it correctly.
But when it happens in the Senate, you're like, okay, of course, Ted Cruz is corrupt.
Look at him.
But 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 that they're trafficking sex slaves, 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.
Or it's no big deal for me to grab a couple of bricks of this heroin and put it in my foot locker and then sell it for 50 grand when I go when I get back to Fayetteville.
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.
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.
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.
I 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.
I mean, there's clearly, you have to be an idiot not to see the connection.
But has anyone ever been indicted, arrested, convicted for participating in that?
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.
And, you know, you wonder what's going on now because Afghanistan is fading rapidly into the past.
You know, the war ended in 2021.
And, you know, is there massive drug trafficking taking place under the auspices of U.S. military control right now?
Not that I know of, but there's other things.
You know, Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe before the war there, before Russia invaded.
And we've dumped so much money and so much equipment into that country with no oversight at all and transferred it to a political class that we know is corrupt to the bone.
So that would be the place to look now, in my opinion, for the contemporary examples of you'd get assassinated if you tried to do that.
There's a lot of things that are crazy these days.
I 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, which was that, you know, the Taliban took over after the U.S. withdrew in 21 and then proceeded to do exactly what they had done in the year 2000, 2001, which was to completely eradicate all drugs from the country.
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 that drug production were just two sides of the same coin.
And what made it, what gave me the, I guess what gave me the confidence to really hit as hard as I could in this narrative was seeing the Taliban in 2023.
They completed another eradication campaign where they once again totally eliminated heroin production and drug production from Afghanistan.
So at that point, you know, I had doubts as a reporter because I'm not omniscient and, you know, there's always conflict, this conflicting information.
So I kind of doubt my own conclusions.
I'm thinking, well, they must have been involved to some degree.
We hear that said so often from the most prestigious institutions of media and government.
There must be some truth to it.
But seeing the Taliban totally eliminate drugs from their country, again, made me realize, okay, this was always a one-sided thing.
It wasn't that both sides were involved in it.
And like I said, that didn't happen until 2023.
And so, and that's what I think makes it possible to tell the true story of Afghanistan for the first time.
Well, Afghanistan came to have the highest rates of drug use in the world, highest addiction rate in the world, which is a tragedy and something that was that was foisted on them.
And it's a source of profound misery and blight.
And the Taliban's way of dealing with it once the U.S. left was to simply round up addicts.
If they found them on the street, they would just put them onto buses and it was involuntary, take them to these detox wards where they're not given any kind of method of medication.
They're just given, you know, food, water, and a place to stay.
And then they just wait it out.
You know, they're basically locked in there and they suffer through withdrawals.
And then once they're sober, you know, they're allowed to leave at that point.
And it was amazing to me to see the hostility in the Western reaction to the drug, to the Taliban's drug detox program.
I mean, you can read all these think tank pieces, all these NGOs where they're talking about how inhumane this is.
If you're standing leaning against a trash can in the fentanyl haze, if you're tweaking your brains out and picking open wounds on your face from meth, that is it.
You are in hell.
You're dying.
You're a fellow American.
I have an obligation to help you.
You're beyond helping yourself in the way that a child, a toddler, is beyond helping himself, in the way that a schizophrenic is beyond helping himself.
You don't have reason.
You don't have free will.
And it's incumbent on me to love you through action.
And we can argue about the details of treatment.
I personally think that when possible and not physically dangerous, total withdrawal is the best way, you know, having done it.
But I also think more bigger than that is you can't allow this and call yourself a decent society.
You cannot allow this.
This is hell.
And anyone who doesn't think it's hell doesn't know anything about it.
What if that was your daughter getting pimped out?
You know what I mean?
Like it's that ugly and you're from a city where it's just totally destroyed your downtown.
But most American cities can say that and no one does anything.
So yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow.
This is a country where we force people to take the COVID vaccs.
So don't lecture me about civil liberties, asshole.
Sorry.
Yeah, I do feel that way strongly.
And how many addicts do I know personally who got sober in jail?
If you had a child who's addicted to fentanyl, like standing like this, you'd be like, I'm going to chain you to the freaking radiator until you get better.
And one of them is something we're really not here to talk about today, but it's the downward mobility that we see in our society and the lack of economic prospects that people have.
And I think that, you know, the government now, under Trump, what they're trying to do is declare war on Mexican drug cartels or on the Venezuelan government.
And this, I think, is totally misguided and will be ineffectual if they actually go through with it.
And it's again, it's not what I was saying before.
It's not, you know, a top-down conspiracy where it's actually the purpose.
It's a side effect of our imperialism and the permanent war paradigm.
And in Mexico, I've spent a lot of time in Mexico before I was working on this book as a reporter reporting on the drug wars there, the cartel wars there.
And it's one thing, you know, Trump can tell people, he can tell his voters, we're going to declare war on Mexican drug cartels.
And people will buy into that because they see them, you know, they as vicious criminals and murderers who are pumping drugs into this country.
They can't find any because the drug industry in Mexico is incredibly complex.
The first thing to understand is that it's not a collection of organizations.
It's a market.
And the demand component of that market is in the United States.
So people in this country wanting drugs is the battery that's running this whole thing.
Because once there's that demand, suppliers inevitably arise to feed it.
And in Mexico, those suppliers, yes, there are low-level traffickers.
There are the people, the disposable people who are bringing the drugs across the border, the disposable hitmen who are 14 years old and carrying out hits.
But the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the military and the police, politicians, lawyers, deep-pocketed investors.
They're the ones that are going in on drug trafficking ventures essentially as joint ventures, as investments.
It's much more organic and spontaneous than we're led to believe.
The organization, to the extent that it exists, can be found in high-level army generals or high-level police officers who are taking a cut from all the little fish who are swimming through certain drug trafficking routes.
So the sort of idea that we have of a cartel where it's just bad guys hiding out in their lair, having meetings with the bosses, that just simply doesn't exist in Mexico.
But the bottom line is they've, I just want you to say it again, the U.S. government nor the Mexican government has never confiscated any of this wealth that we were told he had.
Because the real power behind the drug industry in Mexico is the political class that's like this with the United States security state that is fun, that gets all of their, you know, the Mexican army.
Things have changed in Mexico, by the way.
This is a moving target to discuss because Mexico is starting in 2018 has gone through profound political changes.
Yeah, Amlo and then his successor, Claudio Shaniba.
But at the bottom, especially in the northern states of Mexico along the Texas border, I don't think so much has changed there.
And if you look, just take a state like Tamaulipas, which is just south of Texas, which has probably the highest intensity of drug trafficking anywhere in the world, bringing it to the United States.
Who are the real powers there?
I mean, you could say it's the Gulf cartel, or you could say it's Los Setas.
These are the organizations that we've been trained by the media to believe are the sort of puppet masters that are making all this happen.
The idea that we often also hear that the Mexican state is outgunned by drug traffickers.
In fact, I get that too.
I made a comment about that earlier about the high-power weapons that they have.
There's some element of truth to that, but the reality is that the cartels are not a threat to the Mexican state.
In fact, they're an appendage of the Mexican state in a certain way.
And the elite class in Mexico, they're kind of a shadow paramilitary structure of, let's say, a state government, like the state government of Tamaulipas and the police forces there and the military divisions that are stationed there.
And we're not going to go to war with those people because there are allies.
I mean, people may not realize this, but there's close security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico.
I mean, they're armed, the Mexican army, we arm them.
We give them their Blackhawk helicopters and their armored vehicles and also the state police forces in the north of Mexico.
We arm all of them and they get training from the State Department and from American police officers and so on.
And they're the real cartel to the extent a cartel exists.
And you can see that in other places in the world, notably in Colombia, where, you know, again, it's changing there because they also have a new president.
Latin America is changing rapidly in recent years.
But for Pat, in the past, for many years, in Colombia, the Colombian federal government and the Colombian military have been the biggest drug, most responsible for moving the most weight in drugs, I would say.
And once again, they're closely backed by the U.S. government.
So to bring it home and wrap up this point, you can say we're going to target drug cartels in Mexico.
But the fact is, one, they have no idea who these people are, the people that they're setting up as drug traffickers.
They may have developed some targets.
To fight a war, you need not only political will, you need targets.
That was a problem incidentally, parenthetically, in Afghanistan.
It was hard for them to develop targets there because it's such a big, remote country.
Anyway, in Mexico, they're not going to be able to find those targets.
And to the extent that they are, they're going to be people that are protected by the State Department and the CIA.
And so it's just not going to happen.
This is this drug war, this war on Mexican drug cartels.
I don't see it happening.
And if it does, it'll be in the nature of very isolated strikes.
I mean, don't want to cast just reckless aspersions, but here's something that's concrete: Rolling Stone, a magazine I've written for for many years, reported on drug use in Trump's first White House.
And in fact, Trump's personal doctor, Ronnie the Candyman Jackson, they called him.
He was an admiral, if I'm not mistaken, in the Navy, a physician, who was demoted by the Navy for running an unlicensed pharmacy in the White House because he was giving Trump's people prescription drugs without a prescription and for free.
And even if you're the president's personal physician, that's illegal.
So there's evidence that all of those people were, and you see it in their behavior as well.
And I'm not just picking on the Republicans here because look at Kamala Harris, for example.
I don't know her personally, and I can't say for sure, but did she seem like someone who was taking a lot of prescription pills?
Talking nonsensically, like weird, you know, laugh reactions, weird reactions, people who just are not quite there in a certain way and seem kind of zonked out in a certain way.
You know, again, I'm not here to be a drug warrior or paternalistic or to lecture people who struggle with substance abuse, but I certainly agree with you that we should, that that should be a value.
You should know, Seth, that the real danger is Sharia law.
Sharia law.
And you can tell when you go to a place like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, like, oh man, I hope we don't ever wind up with a society like this with a rape rate of zero where you leave your keys in your Lamborghini and don't ever worry about it being stolen.
And, you know, if people want to get wasted, they do it at home.
So let me just put a bow on this really super interesting conversation.
Thank you.
With the question, like, how were your interactions during the two and a half years you were writing this or more with the author with like DOD, for example, with the Pentagon?
Like you must have called over there to the PIOs and said, you know, I have the list of following questions.
And I was in touch with them just yesterday because Politico is publishing an excerpt of the book.
And so we had to go back to them again for comment.
And 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 Yusuf Sock yesterday.
They said, because your question implicates the special mission unit, you know, our policy is to not comment.
So for the most part, they didn't give me anything.
But so here you have a documented case of one of their guys murdering someone in his house.
Obviously, there was drug trafficking.
There was indisputably drug use, narcotic use by federal employees, and they don't have to answer any of your questions because the missions are shrouded in secrecy.
I will say, you know, I try not to be, I try to be fair when possible or to give credit where credit is due.
There was a case where the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the commander 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 and asked him to address the cases of drug trafficking and unsolved murders.
And 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.
But whether those sentiments that they expressed to members of Congress was actually backed up with real action, I don't know.
But 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, elevates these people who are among their own colleagues are considered loose cannons, not credible.
You 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.
I mean, you're talking about guys who are not bleeding heart liberals by any stretch of the imagination.
They're there with Chief Gallagher next to him, seeing what he's doing, and they're not okay with it.
They turn him in.
The command wants nothing to do with Gallagher.
They also think that he's an embarrassment and a disgrace and a murderer.
But Trump intervenes to prevent him from losing his trident.
And Trump touts him and he becomes this big influencer and so forth.
So that type of incredible irresponsibility and malignancy on Trump's part, his uniquely malignant influence as commander-in-chief, I think augur very poorly for the possibility of reform in at least in the next three years.
Well, 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.
And you have to think that they're operating on a different and elevated moral plane.
Yes, that's what I was saying before about the founding of the U.S. Army 250 years ago.
It is a core institution for our country, for our nation.
So to see the degree of decline everywhere, you know, possible to observe, it's very concerning.
And I really don't think people are aware of the degree to which the military is incapable of fulfilling its functions.
I don't know that you can say that the U.S. has the most powerful military in the world anymore.
I think that a strong case could be made that China has a more competent military, even though they have never been in combat.
They have totally untested.
So there's a big caveat there.
But just looking on the surface, I don't think Chinese soldiers are trafficking drugs and killing each other.
I don't think Chinese soldiers are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses right and left.
And also, China has a much bigger army than us, while our army is shrinking to a degree that's really shocking.
I mean, they're really running out of people.
This year, recruiting was a little bit better, but you're still talking about, you know, a long, long deficit in recruiting.
The army's never been smaller than it is right now.
They can't get qualified helicopter pilots, let's say, as we saw so, you know, tragically demonstrated over the Potomac River in January.
So 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.
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It's immoral.
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