N.C. Woman Charged with Leaking Military Secrets to ‘Fort Bragg Cartel’ Author

A North Carolina woman is charged with giving military secrets to the author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, a book that says military and civilian authorities looked the other way when a Delta Force soldier involved in illicit drug dealing in Fayetteville killed a fellow soldier.

Courtney Paige Williams, 40 of Scotland County, was arrested on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said. An FBI agent filed a criminal complaint accusing her of disclosing national defense information classified as “secret” and “no foreign dissemination” to investigative journalist and author Seth Harp.

Classified information was published in Harp’s book when it was released August 12, according to the complaint, and also in a book excerpt published by Politico the same day.

If Williams is found guilty, she could be fined and sentenced to up to 10 years in prison, according to the statute. Court filings said she is being detained, and will have a detention hearing on Monday at the federal courthouse in Raleigh. She is also to be assigned a federal public defender as her attorney.

“Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests,” FBI Director Kash Patel said on social media following Williams’ arrest. “This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way.”

Williams’ Work for Delta Force

The government said Williams was a civilian employee of a “special military unit”—identified in the book as Delta Force—from 2010 to 2016. Harp’s book says this job came after Williams completed a four-year enlistment in the Army.

Delta Force is a highly secretive special operations unit at Fort Bragg. Media accounts say Delta Force operators captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a raid in January.

Harp’s book has descriptions of Delta Force’s facilities on Fort Bragg. He discusses how many people work there, in general what they do, and the types of vehicles they drive—mostly SUVs and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. He notes the memorabilia on the walls of a central hallway in the main building, portrays various offices, the dining facilities (it says there is a chef and sous-chef and waiters), and other amenities such as bars stocked with alcoholic beverages, and says there is an underground nuclear war shelter.

Williams laid out her duties and experiences to Harp, who cited and quoted her in the 10th chapter.

“Williams’ official job title was ‘signature reduction specialist,’” Harp wrote. “For a base salary of $80,000 a year, she served as the custodian of a controlled repository of valid but fictitious passports, identity documents and financial instruments, which were issued to operators upon deployment and checked back in when they returned from overseas.”

Further, Harp wrote, Williams helped maintain front companies in the civilian world attached to the fictitious identities of the soldiers who were deployed under their aliases. These fake companies had real assets, such as offices in other states, he said, and Williams sometimes had to visit them to do everyday things to avoid suspicion, such as pick up the mail or deal with a burst pipe.

The book details how Williams helped special operators leave their real identities behind and assume aliases when they traveled overseas.

When the rise of social media made the lack of a social media footprint a signal to foreign counterintelligence services that someone was likely operating under a fictitious name, Harp said, Williams developed a technique to deal with that. Quoting and citing her, he described how it works.

Williams and another former employee told Harp that the Delta Force lacks ethnic diversity. They described a frat-house, often drunken, culture of harassment of female and non-white employees.

Williams told Harp she filed a grievance after incidents of harassment from her supervisor. She said this was followed with a poor performance review that led her to file complaints with the inspector general and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And those, she told Harp, were followed with cancellation of her security clearance and reassignment to a proofreading job that did not involve classified information.

According to the book, Williams said her EEOC complaint was settled with a payment.

‘Definitely Would Have Been Concerned’

The complaint said the FBI examined Williams’ telephone records and email records, and found that she had communicated with Harp from 2022 to 2025.

“During this period, Williams and the Journalist had over 10 hours of telephone calls and exchanged more than 180 messages,” the Justice Department said in the news release announcing her arrest. “In addition to her disclosures to the Journalist, Williams also made unauthorized disclosures of national defense information via her social media accounts.”

After the book and book excerpt were published on August 12, the complaint said, Williams texted Harp.

“After quickly reading through everything I will just say I wish you had sent me a copy of what was to be published prior to publishing,” she wrote. “Other than a few factual errors, I would definitely have been concerned with the amount of classified information being disclosed.”

The complaint said Williams also communicated with her mother about the publication.

“I might actually get arrested, and I don’t even get a free copy of the book,” she allegedly told her mother. Her mother asked why, the complaint said, and Williams answered, “for disclosing classified information.”

Author Backs Williams

Harp is standing up for Williams.

“Courtney Williams is a courageous whistleblower who exposed rampant gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the US Army’s Delta Force,” he wrote in a statement on social media. “Unlike many of my sources, she was adamant that she be quoted by name and made no attempt to conceal her identity because her actions were entirely above-board, legitimate, and admirable.”

Harp described the criminal complaint as “ridden with embarrassing factual errors.”

“Every day, without any legal consequence, former Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 operators go on podcasts and YouTube shows and incidentally reveal exactly the sorts of ‘tactics, techniques, and procedures’ that the DOJ now claims it was a crime for Courtney to reveal in the course of relating her harrowing narrative of discrimination and harassment,” he said. “The DOJ indicted Courtney not to protect such information from disclosure but to retaliate against a women who only sought to improve workplace conditions for female soldiers and civilian employees of the military.

“Ironically, while the FBI was monitoring my phone and investigating Courtney on vague and weak charges, the perpetrators of half a dozen murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers involved in the drug trade have gone entirely unsolved,” Harp wrote. “A real police agency would go after real criminals instead of engaging in this sort of penny-ante political theater.”

Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.

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