‘My Life Became a Living Hell’: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit
Courtney Williams wanted to serve her country. What happened next shocked her.
By Seth Harp
Courtney Williams was 24 years old when she learned of an intriguing job opportunity at an unnamed “special mission unit” at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the top secret Joint Special Operations Command. It was 2010, and she was coming off a four-year enlistment in the Army, in which she’d been an interrogator and Arabic linguist but never deployed. She was recruited at a job fair by K2 Solutions, a contractor in Southern Pines, North Carolina run by former members of Delta Force, the Army component of JSOC.
The day of her interview, Williams noticed something unusual. All five women being considered for the job looked exactly like her. “We were all young, petite, attractive, well dressed and blond,” she said. The applicants even had on similar outfits: black pantsuits with blue dress shirts and high heels. “What are the odds?” they asked each other, laughing. At the time, it seemed like a coincidence.
The job opening was in the mission support troop of the intelligence support squadron of Delta Force, a covert commando unit that has been at the bleeding edge of every American war since 2001. Because the job of the MST was to create and maintain fictitious cover identities for Delta Force operators to use on clandestine missions, and because of the widespread perception that most of the troop’s employees were women hired principally for their good looks, everyone in the unit referred to them, informally, as the Cover Girls.
One of Williams’s former colleagues, Esther Licea, said that most MST employees fit a distinct physical profile. “The general type,” she said, “was white, in shape, with blond hair.” In short, “a pretty girl.” Licea herself didn’t fit the mold, being bigger and brown-skinned. She was hired not for her appearance but for certain internet technology skills. Back then, “there were only three Latinas in the whole Building,” she said, using a discreet metonym to refer to the unmarked compound on Fort Bragg that houses the Delta Force headquarters.
I thought of the Cover Girls last year, when President Donald Trump appointed Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. In his confirmation hearing, Hegseth faced tough questions about his past comments on women in the military. He had previously argued that women should not serve in combat roles, armor units, artillery or special mission units like Delta Force. “We need moms,” he once said. “But not in the military, especially in combat roles.” A National Guard veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth has adopted the attitude and style of a heavily tattooed special operator and positioned himself as a fierce defender of the special operations community, an institution ridden with prejudice and violence against women.
I first learned about the Cover Girls in the course of reporting my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. My investigation began in December 2020, when two veteran special operations soldiers, including an active-duty member of Delta Force named Billy Lavigne, turned up murdered in the woods on Fort Bragg. I soon learned that there had been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg, dozens of fatal overdoses and a pattern of coverups and collusion between military and civilian police. There was even a shadowy drug ring, made up of paratroopers and Green Berets as well as a local cops and marines from Camp Lejeune, that was trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine into the United States from Mexico and allegedly smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan. Underlying it all was a cartoonishly macho culture of drinking, drugs, sex and lawlessness.
As the new military leadership scrutinized so-called “DEI” initiatives aimed at gender equity, I thought of the vicious harassment that Williams faced during her eight years at Delta Force. Her story is a cautionary tale for just how bad it can get for female service members and civilian employees in elite units shrouded in secrecy and steeped in privilege and impunity. It is a rebuke to those who believe, wrongly, that the military panders to women and minorities.
Eight years have passed since Williams left Delta Force, but with American-sponsored shadow wars and proxy conflicts raging in places like Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine and Gaza, the unit’s preeminent role in the new American way of making war is more integral than ever. Things haven’t improved much for women, either. Since Williams left the force, female servicemembers have continued to fear retaliation should they report rape. The phrase “murder-suicide” shows up in news copy all too often, with female servicemembers being killed by their male partners, and male veterans killing their wives and girlfriends.
A spokesperson for the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) declined to comment on Williams’ experience or the broader problems with Delta Force. The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in an emailed statement that “the Department applauds all of the work the Special Operations Community does to keep our nation safe. This Department has a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of harassment. Additionally, no matter what skin color our warfighters are, they bleed red. Our nation is grateful to the honorable, upstanding men and women who serve our country.”
It’s not just women who are sidelined and denigrated in this hyper-competitive, ultra-macho environment. Delta Force, which is overwhelmingly male, has plenty of Black and brown men serving as support soldiers. But in Williams’ time, less than one in 100 of the actual operators were nonwhite. “It is very, very, very rare,” said former Fort Bragg paratrooper Jordan Terrell, who felt out of place simply being a Black man in the airborne infantry. The Army as a whole is tremendously diverse, but the infantry is mostly white, the Special Forces is even whiter and Delta Force is the whitest of all. “I could not believe, mathematically,” said Licea, “that there were not more minorities.”
For the most ambitious officers, the high-speed West Point studs looking to rise in the ranks, Delta Force is a steppingstone to the highest echelons of the Army and the Pentagon. “All those unit commanders have their paths laid out for them,” said Licea. “Next stop is probably USASOC. Then MacDill Air Force Base as some sort of SOCOM [United States Special Operations Command] deputy CO,” she said, using an acronym for commanding officer. “Eventually, they all make general.”
In his memoir, former JSOC commander Stanley McChrystal obliquely critiques Army special operators for being excessively tribalistic, insular, strong-willed, opinionated, arrogant and entitled. In a telling passage, he writes of feeling intimidated and eager to make a good impression when he came down from the Pentagon to take command of JSOC. He had risen in the ranks through the 75th Ranger Regiment, not the Delta Force “old boys’ club,” as he calls it, and was susceptible to the pangs of an inferiority complex.
The imprimatur that the unit leaves on top officers is invisible to outsiders, but looking at photos of known ex-commanders, you begin to develop an eye for the signature steely-eyed, square-jawed look of the generals who came up through the Delta Force mafia. You see the physiognomic continuity, too, when you walk down the spine of the building, past portrait after portrait of former commanders in an unbroken sequence that does not include a single Black or brown face. “That makes an impression,” said Williams.
Both women said that the unit was even less tolerant of gays and lesbians, who were not represented even in support roles. At work, Licea heard homophobic slurs uttered “all the time.” There was one longtime contractor rumored to be gay, said Williams, but “he sure as hell wasn’t talking about it.”
Williams’ official job title was “signature reduction specialist.” 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. “Everything is accountable,” she said. “Whether it’s a passport, driver’s license or credit card, it’s all logged. Sign it out, sign it back in, just like you would a gun or anything else that’s sensitive, so that the backstory stays consistent.”
Williams’ experience on the job provides a unique window into how the military carries out some of America’s most classified national security operations, involving plainclothes troops in civilian guises living undercover in foreign countries, where they abduct or assassinate high-value targets on orders from the White House, or conduct espionage and bugging missions against hostile governments.
The State Department, Social Security Administration, postmaster general, credit card companies and motor vehicle departments of most American states have memorandums of understanding with the military to provide Delta Force with “fully backstopped personas,” said Licea, including real passports and Social Security numbers issued to nonexistent people. These enable operators to travel internationally, disguised as civilians and blending in with the populace, without leaving a digital trail traceable back to an actual person.
“The things you see on TV and think they don’t exist, they really do exist,” said Williams. At first it was “shocking,” she said, to see how the government counterfeited its own instruments for the purposes of international espionage and assassinations. But over time, “it becomes day-to-day life,” she said. “I’ve got to get this guy a driver’s license. Got to get him a Social. New name, new identity, new backstory, new passport. Sitting at your desk doing paperwork.”
Part of her job was to support a compartmented element of the unit called G Squadron, made up of 40 or 50 veteran Delta Force men and a very small number of female operators, the only ones in the unit. “They are the most professional soldiers,” said Williams. “The most well rounded and mature. The top tier of operators.”
G Squadron’s missions are truly covert. They are the blackest of black ops, the dirty deeds that official representatives of the White House, Pentagon and State Department will stand behind a lectern and falsely disavow with the utmost apparent sincerity. “High-level, specialized ‘read ins’ with no ties to the U.S. government,” said Williams, describing a process by which participants are granted access to “sensitive compartmented information,” which involves taking a polygraph, undergoing a background check, signing a nondisclosure agreement and being “read in” or indoctrinated about the specifics of an above-top-secret program.
“We worked with DIA, CIA,” she continued. “All the agencies worked with JSOC together. We’d get executive-level orders from the White House to either collect information or capture a target, or to kill, depending on what the mission was.” She added, “Usually we were going after high-profile targets that nobody knew the American government was after.”
Besides fake identities, it was Williams’ job to maintain the existence of front companies used by G Squadron operatives as “commercial cover” when they deployed on “alias operations,” she said. Her duties included paying rent and utility bills on behalf of spurious business entities used as cutouts, work that often entailed expenditures of her time and taxpayer money that she saw as wasteful. She recalled taking a chartered flight to a small town in Maine simply to check the mail at an empty office. The MST would send people on monthly rotations to a city in Florida merely to be seen walking in and out of a vacant building. They once sent Williams to California with $10,000 in cash to buy a bunch of cell phones straight from the factory — no receipt needed.
Another time, a pipe burst in the untenanted suite of a front company in Washington, causing the landlord to become suspicious because the place flooded and no one was around to open the door. Williams and a co-worker jumped into one of the unit’s brand-new sport-utility trucks and drove at top speed all the way to D.C. to deal with the situation. “Sorry,” they told the incredulous landlord. “Everybody’s away.”
Williams’ time in the unit was a roller-coaster eight years of her life. She was expected to wear a pager at all times and be at the Building within an hour of it going off. She juggled multiple cell phones, and when one would ring, she’d have to remind herself which front company it pertained to, and what role she played in relation to that fictitious entity. “In two seconds,” she said, “you have to swap mentally.” Staffers were routinely dragooned into supporting training exercises, and in airline hijacking scenarios Williams was invariably cast in the part of a damsel in distress. “I got shot a bunch of times in the face with a paintball gun,” she wryly recalled. The operators were forever playing pranks on the Cover Girls, packing their desks with plastic explosives, for example, or coming down from the team bays with savage war dogs straining against their leashes to frighten the women who were afraid of dogs. “It was not a professional environment,” said Williams, and Licea agreed. “Having worked in corporate America prior to going to the unit,” Licea said, “this stuff would never fly. You’d be fired.”
Fat people on the support staff were relentlessly mocked. A soldier of Asian descent was called a “chink” to his face. The boozing in the team bays inevitably degenerated into obstreperous roughhousing. “That’s it, we’re not fucking drinking anymore,” a sergeant major would bellow in frustration. “You guys are out of control.” But the dry spells never lasted long. “It was like they were trying to herd cattle,” said Williams, “or take care of a bunch of children.”
The operators who came down to Williams’ office for paperwork purposes routinely propositioned her for sex. “The comments were just ridiculous,” she said. “Don’t you think your job would be better,” one man said, boldly looking her right in the eyes, “if you were under the desk sucking my dick?” Others massaged her shoulders, took big whiffs of her hair, made comments about the size of her breasts or drunkenly proposed marriage. A besotted sergeant major often seen walking around with a beer in one hand and a tomahawk in the other once punctuated his declarations of affection by hurling his ax into the wall.
On two occasions that both Williams and Licea recalled, aggrieved women came on base and went to the front gate of the unit demanding to speak to the commander. One claimed that an operator had attempted to rape her at his apartment after a date. The other was an operator’s wife who had learned that her husband had married another woman while working under an alias identity in Jordan. On neither occasion did the commander grant an audience. The unit sent counterintelligence personnel to placate the women and pretend that something would be done about their complaints.
“There is zero respect for women in that community,” said Valeria Zavala, a psyops soldier who deployed to Afghanistan with JSOC. “I know this is specifically about Delta Force,” she said, “but it’s like this across the whole of USASOC.”
Some operators, said Williams, “were more mature” and resented the madhouse atmosphere. Ryan Savard, who was killed by machine-gun fire in Kunduz in 2012, was one of them, she recalled. “He’d come down and talk to me about this a lot. He wanted to start a family and be faithful to his wife,” and was annoyed by the unit’s aggressively virile culture of philandering, seduction and conquest.
“‘I’m so frustrated with this fraternity-like mentality,’” she quoted Savard as saying. “But no one in their right mind would choose to leave Delta and go back to the regular Army,” Williams said. “Because at Delta, you didn’t have to be at work at nine. As long as you got your training, paperwork and pre-deployment stuff done, you just showed up whenever the fuck you felt like it. So even if they were sick of the culture, they’d vent to me about it, but they’d rather die than go back to the regular Army.”
One day over lunch in the dining facility, seated across the table from the commander of the intelligence squadron, Williams raised the possibility of deploying with the unit overseas, as support staff often do, and which would have been a boon to her professionally. Her boss’s reaction caught her completely off guard. He started laughing hysterically, hitting the table with his hands. “You’re not hired to be deployed with the operators,” he told her once he’d regained his composure. “You were hired for your assets,” he said, making a hefting gesture at chest level, “and if they want you to deploy with them, it’s because they all want to fucking run a train on you.”
Williams stood up without a word and walked out of the cafeteria. She managed to get into the hallway before the tears began to flow. “It was like everything that I already knew and feared, he just said to my face,” she said. “How I had been made to feel for the whole time that I had been working there. Those were the exact words that he used.”
Previously, the same lieutenant colonel had called Williams into his office for a supposed dress code violation. Concerned that her white pants were transparent, he and the squadron sergeant major had directed her to turn around and bend over to assess whether her underwear could be seen through the fabric. Williams had complied, but got the impression that their real intention was to humiliate her. “So that I could walk out of their office,” she said, “and make them laugh.” Licea learned about the white pants incident afterward and witnessed the interchange in the cafeteria firsthand. I interviewed her separately from Williams, and she confirmed that both of these incidents took place, and that Williams was “unfairly targeted.” But Williams made things worse for herself by never backing down from a conflict, Licea said. As a mellow Southerner whose family comes from a Caribbean island, Licea sympathized with Williams’ plight, but had trouble relating to her acerbic Yankee pugnacity. “A lot of times I felt like telling her, ‘Dude, Courtney, pick your battles,’” she said. “But to Courtney, everything was a battle.”
Williams filed a grievance at the squadron and unit level, but nothing was done. The next time she came up for a performance review, she received a mediocre rating. Now she was really angry. “My work,” she said, “was immaculate.” She appealed the performance review, submitted a complaint with USASOC’s inspector general and eventually filed a discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Once she started speaking up,” said Licea, “things kept getting worse and worse for her. They came after her hard.” If Williams were one minute late, she received a counseling statement. If she rushed home to take care of her sick daughter, she was clapped with an AWOL. Then, in 2016, the unit yanked her security clearance on the grounds that her dispute with the leadership made her a security risk. “From that point on,” said Williams, “my life became a living hell.”
Still employed but unable to view classified material, she had to wear a big red badge on her arm and be escorted everywhere in the Building, even to the bathroom. They moved her desk into a cramped storage closet and assigned her the task of proofreading a spreadsheet that contained some 8 million entries. Such drudgery would have driven another person insane, but Williams’ irrational tenacity powered her through the tedious labor for more than a year. “I’m one of those people,” she said. “I’m so fucking stubborn. I was not going to let this happen to me.”
She was never going to win this battle of wills, though. She was up against a force much bigger than herself. Not wanting to get crosswise of the Special Forces command, none of the attorneys in Moore County Williams reached would represent her, forcing her and her husband to burn through their savings on out-of-town lawyers. Then the administrative law judge overseeing the EEOC hearing granted a motion to protect classified information contained in the materials at issue, greatly increasing the cost of continuing to prosecute the case. That ruling is what finally broke her. “I was trapped,” she said. “I’d exhausted everything. I had lost years of my life and was just completely drained.”
Given enough time, anyone who has adverse dealings with an entity like Delta Force will inevitably drift into paranoia. Williams was sitting at a traffic light in Fayetteville when it first occurred to her that she was mired in a rancorous legal dispute with an organization that kills people in secret. The question of whether she was putting her own life at risk necessarily followed. “Am I going to be one of these people,” she asked herself, “who dies in a car crash and it’s not really a car crash?”
Finally, she agreed to sit down to settlement talks. The unit’s lawyers initially offered her pittances in the realm of $5,000 or $10,000, but a changeover in leadership at USASOC in the summer of 2018 resulted in a significantly more amenable offer, a sum sufficient “to buy a small house in North Carolina,” she said. She took the money and was medically retired so that she and her kids didn’t lose their health insurance.
