BOOK REVIEW: THE FORT BRAGG CARTEL: DRUG TRAFFICKING AND MURDER IN THE SPECIAL FORCES
By Seth Harp / Viking
Reviewed by: Anna M. Gielas, PhD
The Reviewer — Anna M. Gielas holds a PhD in the History of Science from the University of St Andrews, UK, and has published over a dozen peer-reviewed academic articles on special operations forces and the integration of emerging technologies into the armed forces. Following fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, she is now a Research Associate with the Emerging Threats Group at the University of Oxford.
REVIEW — Seth Harp brands the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) a “blood-drenched, amphetamine-fueled killing machine” and uses chapter titles like “You can’t make this shit up.” This tone signals the sensationalist approach that shapes his book. Readers drawn to true crime will welcome The Fort Bragg Cartel as an entertaining diversion. But those looking for a credible, balanced account of drug use and trafficking inside Delta Force and the U.S. Special Forces will come up short—Harp’s book is unconvincing at best, and troubling at worst.
The author loosely centers his narrative on three men—Delta Force operator William Joseph Lavigne II; Timothy James Dumas Sr., a member of the Special Forces support personnel; and Freddie Wayne Huff II, a state trooper turned drug trafficker. Their intertwined relationships form the book’s main link between a drug cartel and the special operations community: Huff working with the Los Zetas cartel, Dumas acting as his business partner, and Lavigne serving as both dealer and enforcer. Harp’s primary sources are ex-wives, children, parents, siblings, friends, and former lovers of these three men. Relying on such subjective accounts does not provide a strong evidentiary foundation, leaving Harp’s narrative more suggestive than authoritative.
Lavigne, Dumas, and Huff fade in and out of the narrative, appearing between chapters on Delta Force’s origins, JSOC’s counterterrorism operations during the Global War on Terror—and a confusing array of other characters. Throughout the book, Harp names more than 150 individuals. They include fourteen Delta members tied to Fort Bragg—five if counting only those with criminal charges—and nineteen members of the broader Special Forces community, ten of whom faced criminal charges. The sheer number of names creates an impression of investigative depth but ultimately does not compensate for Harp’s lack of evidentiary rigor—the essential requirement for establishing, rather than merely alleging, a systemic “Fort Bragg cartel”.
One of the book’s stronger sections is the chapter “Alleged Mexican White,” because here Harp relies on outside sources, drawing heavily from outlets like The New York Times and The Times, also leaning on Sean Naylor’s bestseller Relentless Strike. Harp describes how Afghanistan came to dominate the global opium trade in the first two decades of this century. The country’s transformation into a “narco-state”—as described by Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown and other experts—makes it plausible that Delta operators could have had access to high-grade heroin and the infrastructure to move it. Harp offers some detail on the time Lavigne and his team spent in Mazar-e-Sharif, a city known as a node in northern Afghanistan’s opiate trafficking routes, due to its connectivity to Central Asian drug corridors. Ultimately, however, Harp substitutes correlation for causation, leaving a narrative that gestures at possibility but falls short of proof. Like many authors before him, Harp is constrained by the secrecy surrounding Delta and JSOC, leaving him unable to uncover their inner workings—let alone any criminal structures connected to them.
The Cipher Brief brings expert-level context to national and global security stories. It’s never been more important to understand what’s happening in the world. Upgrade your access to exclusive content by becoming a subscriber.
Faced with these difficulties, the author doubles down on sensationalism. Harp peppers his narrative with hyperbolic quotes attributed to special operations personnel—lines such as “I kill people for a living” and “SOF has killed more people than cancer.” His sweeping characterization of Delta as consumed by a “toxic culture of addiction, criminality, madness, violence, and impunity” reads more like tabloid copy than serious reporting. The author also leans on testimony from men who attempted Delta selection but failed. One describes Delta as split between “teetotalers, the guys who are super Christian, warriors of God” and “complete fucking derelicts, constantly doing nefarious shit.” Add a British accent, and the portrayal resembles the popular television drama Rogue Heroes, which depicts the early days of the British Army Special Air Service. Harp rides the growing wave of popular culture that casts SOF as antiheroes—but his depiction too often substitutes caricature for serious inquiry.
More troubling, however, is the way Harp conflates two distinct issues: Special Operations Forces’ (SOF) reliance on prescribed, nonprescribed, and illicit drugs to maintain operational readiness—and their alleged or actual involvement in drug trafficking. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2025, General Bryan P. Fenton, outgoing Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, reported that crisis-response missions had surged more than 170 percent above the previous decade’s annual average. More deployments, combined with recruiting and retention shortfalls, mean fewer active-duty personnel are carrying a heavier load. Training accidents—long flagged by the Government Accountability Office—and deployment injuries often do not have time to heal, turning acute pain into chronic conditions. The result can be grim: a 35-year-old operator who feels like a 95-year-old may still be expected and deeply committed to parachute into hostile territory on a presidentially directed mission. In that context, reliance on prescription drugs or self-medication is not merely a personal coping strategy but a national security concern. Yet Harp barely addresses the physical and psychological toll of SOF service, which some medical researchers describe as “Operator Syndrome.” In doing so, he squanders an important opportunity to engage seriously with these challenges.
Ultimately, Harp also misses the chance to seriously examine SOF’s role in drug-related crime. He introduces an intriguing lens—Fort Bragg as a potential hub in cartel trafficking networks. The author argues that the Dixie Highway “is one of the busiest drug-trafficking routes in the world”—but he likely means the Interstate 95 corridor usually highlighted by the Department of Justice. Rather than focus on Fort Bragg itself, Harp singles out the Raeford Drop Zone, a privately owned facility near—but not part of—the installation. Raeford’s airfield has reportedly been used to move drugs, and Harp suggests Special Forces personnel were involved. The one facility on the actual military base that the author describes in detail is the Delta compound. By stopping there, he leaves Fort Bragg’s broader infrastructure—and its potential role in drug-related activity—largely unexplored.
Absent is also any serious effort to propose remedies for the dysfunctions Harp highlights. Even the epilogue drifts into barbed asides, calling Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a “dipsomaniacal former National Guard officer,” former national security adviser Mike Waltz “a thuggish warmongering dullard,” and President Donald Trump “malignant.” Readers are better off skipping the book and waiting for the HBO adaptation—the network has already secured the rights.
The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.
Sign up for our free Undercover newsletter to make sure you stay on top of all of the new releases and expert reviews.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business
