WASHINGTON — Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council and a Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump, took Breitbart News viewers inside both the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room with exclusive inside details of President Trump’s decision to eliminate an ISIS terrorism less than two weeks into his second term as president.
In this second part of a major exclusive interview explaining the counterterrorism strategy in Trump’s administration taped in mid-March at the White House, Breitbart News pulled up footage the White House released of the U.S. strike that eliminated an ISIS recruiter in northern Somalia. Gorka, who was instrumental in getting the president the information he needed to order the strike, explains what is happening in the footage as the strike goes down.
“So this is actually the number one target,” Gorka explains as video shows the terrorist walking around outside a cave in Somalia. “There are multiple targets. This is a cave complex—more than half a dozen caves across northern Somalia used by ISIS and this is just incredibly fortuitous that as we were prepared to drop munitions he starts walking outside the cave. This individual walking around this cave, this is a key—there he goes, and the munitions have been dropped and he ceases to exist. It’s just the first part of a multi, multi munitions drop operation.”
Asked to explain what viewers see when the munitions go off and the terrorist is killed, Gorka said it was a “U.S. strike.”
“That is a certain platform deploying munitions,” Gorka said. “That’s a certain U.S. capability that has just dealt the final blow to a key recruiter, financier—this individual, who we’ve been monitoring under the Biden administration for more than a year had been recruiting. This is why it’s important. This isn’t just about Somalia or ISIS. He was recruiting foreign nationals to bring them to this complex to train them, to fund them, and then to send them to America and send them to allied nations, to Europe, to kill innocent people. This isn’t just a jihadi, this is a person who had a force multiplier effect for ISIS.”
Gorka said the way this strike came to be was he and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz visited President Trump in the Oval Office on the second Thursday of Trump’s second term. He said the meeting with Trump was quick.
“The whole meeting in the Oval was maybe two minutes long,” Gorka said. “We put out the map. We showed him the cave complex. We said this is the number one guy hiding here. He’s recruited foreigners. He’s killed Americans. He’s going to recruit more. He just said ‘kill him.’ Less than 30 hours later we’re in the Situation Room, with the National Security Adviser and with my CT team and we’re watching this video live and it’s not a movie. It’s not Jason Bourne or Mission Impossible. That is not a special effect. That is a real munition dealing death to a key ISIS jihadi.”
But the backstory before the awesome U.S. powers that can wipe a terrorist out so quickly and easily is much more complicated.
“It starts with weeks and maybe months of intelligence preparation,” Gorka said. “People in the bowels of certain buildings around this area who are using our platforms to follow, to track, to film the most dangerous leaders of Al Qaeda, of ISIS, of Al Shabaab, of the Houthis, so we generate this huge amount of intelligence. It’s called patterns of life—where these people go, who they meet with, where they hide out, where they train, where they eat. So we create this full picture of where the high-value targets are.”
He said the terror groups and specific terrorists are grouped into various tiers.
“The way this is done is—let’s step back a little bit,” Gorka said. “I won’t go into all the details but the Intelligence Community based upon the president’s directions has listed the most famous global jihadi groups in tiers. We have tier one, tier two, tier three—depending upon the threat they pose to America, to U.S. citizens, and to our servicemen abroad.”
This particular terrorist, he said, was “tier one, totally.”
“Our Intelligence Community vectors our intelligence assets—technical, satellite, signals intelligence, human intelligence, liaison services, partners and allies who maybe have access to one of these targets—they vector them against the people who we have already identified as key members,” Gorka continued. “Then through that intelligence—their cell phone usage, what they’re doing on the internet—we identify who is doing what. Is one of them the ideologue like Bin Laden? Is one of them a recruiter like this individual? Is the other person a logistician who is bringing the parts together for bombs and so forth? As a result, just like the groups are stacked in tiers, within a threat group like Al Qaeda or ISIS, we stack the individuals. We call them personas, based upon how crucial they are to the organization. If you’re the bag carrier for this guy, you’re not that crucial. If you’re his driver, not that crucial. If you’re the actual recruiter, the financier, if you’re the head of their social media output, that puts you at a top level within the organization. So that’s how we prioritize the persona list.”
The high-value targets are from “tier one” groups, and usually represent what Gorka said is some kind of “senior leadership, or somebody who has a skill set that is hard to replace.”
“So now, and this is kind of what I’m doing in terms of reform or getting the Intelligence Community to be better on CT, if they have somebody who’s really good at social media, who’s really good at videos, at putting things out on Telegram and their favorite platforms, that guy may not be a leader in terms of commanding jihadi terrorists to do stuff but he’s incredibly important in terms of recruitment, bringing people into the organization,” Gorka said. “So, not just leaders and financiers and recruiters, but also people who are good at media and propaganda are deemed to be high-value targets. So that’s how we begin. We collect the intelligence. We rack and stack organizations. Then we rack and stack the people inside the organizations.”
In the case of this particular terrorist, Gorka said the United States had been tracking him for more than 18 months—most of which except for those first two weeks of Trump’s presidency was during the previous administration when Democrat Joe Biden was president.
“For more than a year and a half, they had this guy in their sights, they had the patterns of life that he would go to this cave compound, he would usually spend a certain amount of time there, which cave he was in,” Gorka said. “This was all known to the Biden administration.”
Gorka, without revealing specific names or identities, said career intelligence and military officials were horrified that Joe Biden and his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan did nothing about this terrorist that they could have stopped.
“Let me just share this with you with names divulged,” Gorka said. “Someone said to me within the community, the counterterrorism community, ‘can you imagine what it’s like to be a targeter, a person who watches these screens, you go to the bowels of a building at 6 o’clock at night and you spend the next 12 hours looking at computer screens, looking at thermal images, looking at surveillance video, for 12 hours a day and you’re reporting up the chain that I saw this HVT go into this house, I saw this member of Al Qaeda go into this cave complex, and for more than a year—for two years, for three years, for four years—under Biden, nothing happens.’ You’re pushing intelligence up the chain from the Intelligence Community, from the Department of Defense, to the White House, to the NSC, to the National Security Adviser, to the Oval Office, and nothing happens. Can you imagine what that does to your morale? You’re watching evil people plot, plan, kill, and nothing’s happening? That’s what President Trump turned around on the second Thursday of the Trump administration.”
Everything changed when Trump returned to the White House on Jan. 20. Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, the president ordered the strike that eliminated this ISIS recruiter. “It was the second Thursday, so it was like nine days in,” Gorka told Breitbart News.
Gorka and Waltz, who are not in Senate confirmed positions, began work immediately when Trump took the Oath of Office at the U.S. Capitol. Gorka told Breitbart News he was standing at the gate outside the White House when Trump was sworn in so he could start instantly.
“It’s really funny. I was standing at the gate you walk through at 12 o’clock,” Gorka said. “By law, I’m not Senate confirmed. So I can technically start work the second the president takes the Oath of Office as Commander-in-Chief. So I’m waiting at the gate, I’ve been told by the White House logistics people that your access card will start to work at 12:01, so I’m waiting at the gate and I swipe my card because I’m listening on my phone to the president give his Oath of Office, I’m listening on YouTube, so as soon as he does I swipe my brand new ID card, the thing opens, and I walk in and because I’m not Senate confirmed I’m Deputy Assistant to the president and Senior Director of Counterterrorism at 12:01 on January the 20th and I walk into this building and we get to work.”
While Gorka and Waltz were the political appointees who took the plan to the president, and the president ordered the strike, Gorka made clear it is the career officials in the Intelligence Community and U.S. military that did the work to make this happen. He said he went to Waltz with a draft of the plan, and Waltz made some adjustments before they took it to Trump.
“Let me be very, very clear. You don’t get to kill a leading ISIS jihadi 10 days into the administration because of what Seb Gorka did,” Gorka said. “This is because of the incredible people we have inside the empire of the U.S. military and Intelligence Community. Without JSOC, without the CIA, without the DOD, without Delta Force and everybody else and the SEALs, we don’t—it’s not like Gorka walks in the building and suddenly we have counterterrorism. It is because of patriots who want to do the job they weren’t allowed to do for four years. So, they’re ready with the plan, they just haven’t been allowed to initiate it. So I have the plan. I present it to Mike Waltz, the National Security Adviser and former Green Beret, he said ‘okay, change this here, make this map bigger.’ The president loves visuals. He wants to see maps because he is a strategic thinker.”
Gorka then explained what happened inside the Oval Office—with some extra detail on how Ric Grenell, the president’s special envoy, was meeting with the president alongside the Secretary of State on how Grenell was going to retrieve U.S. hostages held in Venezuela right before this.
“We’ve got a big color map with the cave complex, a photograph of the HVT—the high-value target—we’re going after,” Gorka said. “We lay it down on the Resolute Desk—sorry, first things first, we’re waiting outside as the president’s schedule is a little bit plastic. You’ve got to be flexible with the president. We were supposed to present this at 5 p.m. on Thursday, and my Delta Force guy and I are standing outside the Oval until about 5:50, and Mike [Waltz] is inside with Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and with Ric Grenell, Special Envoy, they’re talking about another issue. I got to tell you this funny part. You know the president and what he’s like. He sees me loitering in the outer office and he’s still talking to Mike, Secretary Rubio, and Ric Grenell, and he says ‘Seb, come on in, come on in,’ he shoos us into the thing and he says ‘go sit down, go sit down,’ so we sit down on the comfy sofa next to the fireplace which is so cool and roaring with natural wood. This is not the Biden administration. He’s got a roaring wood fire going in the fireplace in the Oval Office. It’s super cool with roaring logs. So we’re sitting on the couch waiting with our maps and then Ric gets up—this is the speed of Trump. Think of this. Only in this Trump administration—this is the second Thursday. Ric says ‘I’ve got to go Mr. President, I’m catching a plane to Venezuela to try and get our hostages out.’ I went up to Ric and shook his hand and said ‘good luck, Ric, tell us if you need us to send down Delta to rescue you.’ Why’s it funny? I’ll jump forward 20 hours when I’m leaving the office and I see this tweet from Grenell with a selfie of him on a plane with six hostages. I’m going ‘this has got to be photoshopped, there’s no way less than 24 hours later the Special Envoy to the President is on his way back with six illegally detained U.S. citizens from Venezuela.’ This is the speed of Trump.”
After Grenell and Rubio left the Oval Office, the whole meeting with Trump—Gorka said—took less than two minutes for the president to sign off. Then it was off to the White House Situation Room less than two days later to see it play out live in real time.
“So Ric leaves, Secretary Rubio leaves, we had the paperwork open and Mike puts it on the Resolute Desk and he says this photograph of this individual, this high-value target is an ISIS financier, planner, and recruiter, we’re watching him in this cave complex in northern Somalia,” Gorka said. “He’s key to ISIS and we’ve been following him for more than a year and a half. The president goes, ‘what do you mean we’ve been watching him? Biden’s been watching him? Kill him.’ He gets out his black sharpie pen, the classic iconic pen, and there’s a box on the operational orders, he ticks the ‘Go’ box, he hands it off to us, the whole meeting was maybe 180 seconds. He says ‘go and do it.’ My military member is plugged into all the places that need to know. He says ‘okay, it’s time to go, it’s time to get ready.’ Then the launch time was 9:50 on Saturday. So the president says ‘yes’ at 6 p.m. on Thursday, and we are back in the White House on Saturday morning underneath the West Wing in the famous Situation Room and my team has lashed up the view screens. This is less than 48 hours later. We’re lashed up with the elements, with the platforms, we’re watching this stuff live. Go time is 9:50, and it’s 9:48 and Mike is in a meeting in the Oval—I’m going ‘Mike has got to be here, we need the National Security Adviser.’ He walks in 90 seconds before—this is when you realize there is only one power like America’s. He walks in at 9:48 and 30 seconds into the Situation Room, sits down at the head of the Situation Room table, and at exactly 9:50, 9,000 miles away in Somalia, that footage. It’s just, you think you’re in a Mission Impossible movie, but you know it’s real and you’re actually seeing bad people be killed.”
Asked what it’s like seeing this happen in real time, Gorka said it’s “kind of surreal.”
“You’re inside a movie, you’re in a Jason Bourne film, you’re in a Mission Impossible movie, but you realize that’s not special effects,” Gorka said. “That’s not CGI. That’s a massive piece of munitions being dropped on the head of an ISIS killer. Just the idea that we’re sitting in Washington DC and it’s not a recording. It’s live. It’s coming from, I’ll just use the official phrase, an exquisite platform. The way it works is usually—if you have footage of this quality, I did not think we would actually see him walking around the cave, usually if you’ve been following them long enough you can tell by dress, you can tell by gait—gait, the way somebody walks is incredibly useful in terms of identification, however and I won’t go into all the ways it is done but we usually wait between 24 and 48 hours for what we call the jackpot which is the ID confirmation which is done in situ if we have forces who can verify and go in. People go in and they get photographic confirmation—body parts, so forth. Or, we do genetic testing. If the individual had been in our custody or in the custody of an allied nation that took a swab and has genetic confirmation, then we will run it past our record in our database and we will say—here’s the important thing to remember. We don’t announce the identity until we have the 100 percent confirmation. So the president announced this the same day. My incredible team got the declassified video within 3 hours. We have, from the lanyard—this is my catchphrase from my team’s lanyards that we put on, his viral tweet that day, he said after that successful attack he said if you threaten Americans we will find you, we will kill you. For my team members, based upon the president’s viral tweet after that operation, we have we will find you, we will kill you if you threaten Americans. So we announce a successful strike on an ISIS leader or an Al Qaeda leader, but we don’t mention the name until we have the 100 percent verification which is usually a day or two later.”
Two more parts from Gorka’s in-depth exclusive interview with Breitbart News on counterterrorism in Trump’s second term are forthcoming soon.
