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WASHINGTON, DC — Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Senior Director of Counterterrorism for the National Security Council (NSC) and a Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump, told – News in a lengthy exclusive interview at the White House that Trump has totally reframed how the United States approaches elimination of jihadist terrorists.
“Let’s be clear—President Trump through his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and it’s not an accident for the first time in history a former Green Beret is the National Security Adviser, has done a 180 on our counterterrorism policy,” Gorka told – News. “Let me illustrate this by an incredible story that’s now declassified from the second week of the Trump administration. I’ve been going around the Intelligence Community, the Pentagon, our warfighters, trying to understand what happened the last four years. I was told a horrific story, especially those who are watching the bad guys 12 hours a day from our exquisite platforms, that they’d been tracking jihadis and not been allowed to do anything about it. The last administration, which was really on the side of the bad guys—if you look at the unleashing of the billions of dollars to Iran, if you look at the way they treated Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu—it was not interested in doing counterterrorism. In fact, they made it so difficult that if you wanted to take out an HVT, a high-value target, it had to go all the way up to the White House through the National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to the president, Joe Biden or to whoever was functioning with the auto-pen that day, and we thought this was insane. So Mike walked into the Oval Office with myself and with a member of my counterterrorism team in the NSC and we laid a map on the Resolute Desk of a cave complex in northern Somalia that was being used by ISIS and one of the ISIS terror groups’ key financiers, recruiters, and trainers. Mike informed the president we had been surveilling this base, this cave complex, for more than a year and a half. The president looked up from the Resolute Desk and said ‘what do you mean we’ve been watching them under Biden?’ We told him that’s exactly what happened. He said ‘kill them, and kill them now.’ With that big iconic sharpie pen he ticked the ‘go box’ on the operational orders, then my team and I and Mike, we walked out, my Delta Force guy made the requisite phone calls, and less than 30 hours later, underneath the West Wing, in the Situation Room, I was back there with National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, with my team members, and we were watching live hell rain down on this ISIS cave complex in northern Somalia. Now, let’s be clear, that is the beginning of the third week of the Trump administration. That’s how fast President Trump moves, and how decisive he is in taking the war to those who want to kill Americans.”
The interview, taped in mid-March at the White House in the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, was more than an hour long and in it Gorka went through in great detail four major actions Trump has already taken inside his first 100 days as president to turn the tide against radical Islamic terrorists.
“The Oval Office is the coolest room in the world,” Gorka said. “This is my favorite in the EEOB, the Secretary of War Suite. This incredible building, this neoclassical building, used to house the whole federal government—everything. We had the equivalent of the State Department, the Department of War was here, and this historic office space is a favorite of someone called Elon Musk—no surprise there.”
The four major actions are the strike Gorka begins to describe above that the president ordered in just his first couple weeks in office, which eliminated an ISIS recruiter hiding in a cave complex in Somalia, the capture of the mastermind behind the Abbey Gate bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) back in the summer of 2021 when then-President Joe Biden blew the U.S. withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan, a strike against an Islamic leader in Iraq, and now the most controversial of them all the president’s move to authorize the elimination of Houthis in Yemen who have been tormenting American and other ships undercutting free-flowing navigation in a region critical for global commerce. More on each of these four major actions that Trump took including behind-the-scenes details on the president’s decision-making process and how the White House conducted these operations is coming in future parts of this interview. But in this first opening part, Gorka gives a little detail on each.
“Since [the first strike against the ISIS recruiter in Somalia], as you’ve seen, there have been multiple strikes in Iraq, in Syria, in Somalia, and then [in mid-March] the biggest military act the president has taken since the Inauguration, which is basically to allow naval traffic and freedom of passage through one of the most important commercial waterways in the world that has been held hostage by the Houthi jihadists of Yemen,” Gorka said. “This is a waterway that has seen, since Biden in the last year and a half, more than 140 attacks on U.S. vessels. These are the same Houthis who are firing on our military aircraft. The president, when he was told about this, rightfully got incensed. This is now not a secret. He told the DOD, Pete Hegseth, who informed CENTCOM and General [Michael] Kurilla to neutralize the Houthis so that we can have freedom of navigation and the American economy can function again with navigation of those waterways.”
This interview was taped before the Atlantic magazine released the so-called Signal-gate messages, where that publication’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added inadvertently to a group chat among the senior-most members of President Trump’s administration in which they discussed details relating to the president’s decision to authorize these strikes. – News is breaking Gorka’s in-depth interview into four major pieces, and this first one being published now is a comprehensive overview of the broader picture of counterterrorism efforts and how things have changed with Trump back in the White House now that Biden is gone from office. Future pieces will take viewers and readers inside the Oval Office, inside the White House Situation Room, and even onto a plane where a terrorist leader was transferred into U.S. custody just hours after the president finished speaking during his joint address to Congress. This first piece also includes Gorka giving viewers and readers a comprehensive look at the active theaters of counterterrorism action worldwide, from different hotbeds in the Middle East to power vacuums in Africa and more. In here, Gorka also details several of what he calls “CT partners,” other nations that help the United States in counterterrorism, and what Trump expects of those partners.
“We call them ‘CT partners.’ We don’t put them in the same bucket as NATO allies—these are CT partners,” Gorka said, adding that the president expects more of U.S. partners and allies in his second term than he did in his first.
“Even more than eight years ago, the president expects our allies and our partners to step up to the plate,” Gorka continued. “People, especially the mainstream media, like to distort the phrase ‘America First’ and misrepresent it. America First is not America alone. President Trump is not an isolationist. You’ve seen what he’s done with NATO, strengthening NATO, and you’ve seen the ties he’s built with nations as diverse as Japan and other countries. The fact is, we expect those who declare themselves to be friends, allies, and partners to do more in our collective interest. If you say you’re a partner, if you say you’re an ally, then behave like that. That’s why we see what the president says about NATO spending, for example. That’s why the president made the comments about Gaza. Can we stop on his Gaza comments for a second? The president said, ‘we’re going to take over Gaza’ and ‘we’re going to fix Gaza.’ He wasn’t talking about gold-plated Trump towers and beaches. It’s not Gaza Lago. What was he doing? If you haven’t read the book The Art of the Deal, you don’t really understand what he’s doing. He said ‘okay we’re going to do Gaza.’ What happens? For 24 hours, regional nations say ‘what do you mean? This is outrageous’ and they get angry. Seventy-two hours later what happens? Certain nations of the region, who really haven’t done very much for the people of Gaza for the last 50 years, say ‘maybe we should invest. Maybe we should help try and fix Gaza.’ So this is what the president does. The Overton window that people talk about expanding—President Trump doesn’t gently expand the Overton window. He makes a comment, whether it’s about Greenland, whether it’s about Gaza, whether it’s about anything, and then what is he doing? He’s blasting the frames, the ceiling, and everything around the Overton window to do what? To engender a discussion so people start to do things in ways that aren’t business as usual.”
Two major such “CT partners” that the U.S. national security officials met with the week this was recorded were, per Gorka, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Jordanians. Gorka said the UAE “can be of great assistance to us with regard to the Houthis and Al-Shabaab, as they’re very active in Africa in terms of investments,” and mentioned UAE’s signing of the Abraham Accords.
“The president is always looking for—it’s not just about national security. It’s about growing the pie of international economics,” he said.
As for the Jordanians, Gorka said, they are his favorite CT partner anywhere.
“As you know, I spent many years teaching counterterrorism for the Defense Department with our partners and with our allies,” Gorka said. “My favorite students outside of the U.S. military were the Jordanians. They are an incredibly, incredibly capable counterterrorism force. The King was one of the very first heads of state to come here after January the 20th.”
Gorka noted that after Trump crushed ISIS in a matter of a few months in his first term, the group’s remnants went into hiding but during Biden’s presidency it began to reconstitute.
“So thanks to President Trump and his crushing of the ISIS caliphate during the first administration—which remember we had been told was impossible, ‘you can’t get rid of the caliphate in Iraq and Syria,’ well, when the president unleashed our special forces and our special operators that time, in five months it was gone,” Gorka said. “So they’ve been forced to reconstitute themselves. Today, under the feckless lack of leadership that was the Biden administration, the picture is not good. The picture is not good that we inherited.”
He pointed to multiple theaters, from the reemergence of Taliban leadership in Afghanistan to power vacuums in Africa to problems elsewhere throughout the Middle East fueled by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which funds various proxy groups like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen.
“Let’s look at Abbey Gate, let’s look at the surrender of Afghanistan,” Gorka said. “The nation which originally gave suckle to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is now under the control of the Taliban again. There is a recrudescence of Al Qaeda. ISIS and ISIS-K, ISIS-Khorasan, is rebuilding their capabilities especially along the Af-Pak border. We say a big thank you to Pakistan that 41 days into the administration with some intelligence we provided to them in the Trump administration that they managed to capture and render to us the Abbey Gate mastermind Jafar. We’ll talk about that separately. So, Afghanistan, number one, and the Af-Pak border region, then we have the reconstitution of ISIS in other parts of the world. They’ve shifted to Somalia, that’s why we took that strike. We have the Houthis in Yemen, who have been just allowed to run rampant and being armed by Iran—the same Iran that was given tens of billions of dollars by the Biden administration. Then, of course, we have Al-Shabaab in southern Somalia. Beyond that, there’s one area that is very disturbing to me because I’m not an Africanist—my background is Middle Eastern jihadism like Al Qaeda and ISIS. When I was briefed by the Intelligence Community on other parts of the world, there is a lot of ungoverned spaces in the African continent and militaries that are not controlled by the nascent governments of those countries. Those ungoverned spaces are being exploited by ISIS and to a certain extent by Al Qaeda. So, we have to work with our partners to help them fight these growing threats on the African continent as well.”
When it comes to what he called the “circus of Iranian proxies,” Gorka said Hezbollah in Lebanon is “the crown jewel.”
“That’s the high end of the jihadi fighting force in terms of dedication, indoctrination, weapons. Hamas were always more of the foot soldiers, more of the expendable proxies for Iran,” Gorka said.
Gorka said the pager operation from Israel has brutally devastated Iran’s proxies in the region, and praised IDF and Mossad figures for their ingenuity, having spent years “seeding” the region with the pagers in what he called an “exquisite” operation.
“They’re not out of the game, but their capability has been deeply weakened,” Gorka said. “I always tell my students when I taught in the military and counterterrorism professionals that in any war whether you’re fighting a nation like Nazi Germany or whether you’re fighting a sub-state actor like Al Qaeda there’s two targets you have to think about and only two predominant targets. Number one, is the capabilities of the enemy. What’s their technology? What’s their weaponry? Do they have tanks? Do they have IEDs? You have to attack their physical capability to do you harm, like the guns they are using or the aircraft they are using. But just as important if not more important, is the will to fight because you can do what we did in Afghanistan and what was derisively called ‘mowing the grass,’ the whack-a-mole exercise where you kill a jihadi, you kill a jihadi, you kill a jihadi. If 10 young men volunteer to replace each jihadi you send to hell, then you’re not actually making things better. You’re actually helping them in terms of their mobilization and getting more recruits. Israel has done a great job. The war isn’t over, but the president is interested in one thing and one thing alone — that the fighting stop, that the peace agreements in Gaza hold, that the hostages are released, and likewise in Ukraine that peace breaks out there as well.”
Gorka also gave his thoughts on the quickly unfolding situation in Syria after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime late last year. He argued that nobody really can know what will happen there, but the leader of the resistance that took down Assad and now runs the country has deep historical ties to radical Islamic terrorists that are concerning but at the same time the fall of Assad has disrupted Iranian and Turkish operations there.
“Let’s talk about Syria for a moment. Syria is complicated. Why? I don’t think anybody sheds a tear for the fall of the Assad regime,” Gorka said. “The Assad regime was a brutal dictatorship. Nevertheless, what you have in Damascus now isn’t some kind of Jeffersonian Democrat. This individual, [Abu Mohammad al-]Jolani, was a founding member of al-Nusra. Al-Nusra was part of Al Qaeda, it came out of Al Qaeda. So you have somebody who has won a battle to take out this secular Alawite leader and replace the dictatorship with what? We don’t know. All we know is last week this so-called interim president has said that Sharia, Islamic law, will be the law of Syria. Syria, which includes Kurds, Christians, Alawites, Druzes—this is not an exclusively Sunni Muslim nation by any means, so the jury is still out on Jolani and what he wants to do in Syria. At the same time, what do we have? We have the Kurds in the north, we have the SDF—the Syrian Defense Force—and we have the Israelis in the south. Turkey is heavily vested in the region as well. So if anyone tells you they know the future of Syria, they are a liar. Everything is flexible, everything is fluid. However I will say one thing here that is very important: We must be super grateful to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and to the IDF and to the people of Israel. After that tragic, horrific loss of life on October 7—the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust—Israel has taken very robust military action and that’s in part why I think the Assad regime fell. They have rewritten the map of the Middle East in a way that will reverberate for at least the next 100 years. One of the very positive aspects of the situation in Syria is because of the fall of the Assad regime and because Russia had to pull out, the Iranian exploitation of the territory of Syria as a resupply route for its proxies and attacks against Israel and elsewhere has basically been nullified so Syria is no longer the playground of Iran like it was just a year ago.”
More from Gorka’s deep dive exclusive interview on the president’s counterterrorism efforts, including inside looks at footage of some of them being killed by U.S. military capabilities, is coming in future pieces of this interview.
