The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, by Seth Harp, Penguin Random House, 368 pages, $30
Despite the drug war, U.S. intelligence agencies have sometimes made common cause with rebel forces or client states that dealt in narcotics. Alfred McCoy's bombshell 1972 book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, exposed opium-fueled proxy warfare in Vietnam and Laos, embarrassing the CIA. The Kerry Committee report in 1989 did the same for cocaine-funded operations in Nicaragua. Similar reports popped up throughout the long U.S. engagement in Afghanistan.
The Fort Bragg Cartel, by the longtime Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp, is about something different: U.S. troops themselves running a smuggling ring inside America. Throughout the early 2020s, there was a wave of disturbing crimes related to the shadowy Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Harp demonstrates that government officials turned a blind eye as JSOC operators stole, killed, raped, and smuggled, shielding them from both military and civilian justice.
