Sebastian Gorka: British intelligence asset?

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Sebastian Gorka’s involvement with British intelligence cost him a security clearance in Hungary. His longtime mentor is a UK spook currently engaged in covert operations against Russia. Is the Ukraine hawk and Trump counter-terror appointee operating on London time?

(Article by Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal republished from TheGrayzone.com)

After years in the wilderness of right-wing radio, where he flamboyantly proclaimed his loyalty to president-elect Donald Trump for years, Sebastian Gorka has finally found his way back into Trump’s inner circle, earning an appointment as incoming White House counter-terror advisor.

Gorka served as Trump’s deputy assistant advisor on national security issues for eight months in 2017, storming out of his job with a petulant resignation letter that blamed “forces” within the administration that did not support Trump’s “MAGA promise.” During his brief tenure in the White House, Gorka, a London-born immigrant, was credited with masterminding the President’s so-called “Muslim ban,” which refused admission to the US for citizens of countries identified as national security threats.

While Democrats have hammered Gorka as “a far-right extremist” and MAGA sycophant, he has stood out as a voice of Biden foreign policy continuity within Trumpworld, pledging further aggression against Russia and even greater military aid to Kiev. During a November 23 interview, for example, Gorka promised that “the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts” if “the murderous KGB colonel” Vladimir Putin does not obey Trump’s dictates.

Sebastian Gorka, who Trump just named a Director of national security policy in the White House, says that Trump's strategy for ending the Ukraine war will include threatening Putin to provide Ukraine with exponentially more military "aid" pic.twitter.com/SB9RTWtqth

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 23, 2024

Gorka’s full origin story explains why his views on the Ukraine proxy war track more closely with those of the anti-Trump turncoat John Bolton than incoming Vice President J.D. Vance, who has vowed to negotiate an end to the conflict. As this investigation will demonstrate, the mindset of the Transatlantic policy operative was molded primarily through his intimate involvement in British intelligence circles—not his role within the America First movement.

The son of an anti-communist Hungarian exile, Gorka joined a British Army intelligence unit while still in university. When he entered the world of national security studies, he learned at the knee of a notoriously conniving British military intelligence officer named Chris Donnelly, who has dedicated his career to instigating conflict with Russia, and was exposed by The Grayzone as an architect of the notorious Kerch Bridge bombing.

Donnelly personally endorsed Gorka’s PhD thesis, granting him the imprimatur of a top intelligence officer in the British Ministry of Defence. The relationship fueled Gorka’s career within the burgeoning Atlanticist military infrastructure, yet ultimately cost him security clearance in his family’s native Hungary, where the country’s National Security Office suspected him of being a UK spy.

Soon after Gorka resigned from the first Trump administration, leaked documents exposed Donnelly as the founder of a secret, UK state-funded influence operation called the Integrity Initiative, which was aimed at drumming up war with Russia through a covert international propaganda network. A 2017 funding proposal submitted by the Integrity Initiative to the British Ministry of Defence promised to deliver a “tougher stance on Russia” by arranging for “more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures.”

When Donnelly visited Washington in 2018 to expand his secret initiative, the first item on his agenda was breakfast with Gorka. To this day, Gorka refuses to discuss the meeting, or any aspect of his relationship with Donnelly, erupting with rage at reporters who have dared to inquire about the long friendship.

Gorka in the UK Territory Army Intelligence Corps

Gorka’s security clearance rejected “due to his connections with British intelligence”

Sebastian Gorka grew up in London in the shadow of his father, Paul, an exiled Hungarian nationalist activist affiliated with the Vitezi Rend, an anti-communist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. Sebastian Gorka blames Kim Philby, the British double agent, for betraying his father to the Soviets, leading to his imprisonment – and seemingly exposing his father’s role as an MI6 asset. However, Paul Gorka provided a different account of his capture in an interview with the British historian and Holocaust revisionist, David Irving, claiming Hungarian intelligence broke his cell after discovering papers on one of his cell’s couriers.

Paul Gorka on a firing range at Bisley, UK

After members of Vitezi Rend broke Paul Gorka out of prison during their failed, Western-backed 1956 attempt to topple the country’s communist leadership, he found refuge in the UK. From London, Paul Gorka worked for the British government, helping them vet anti-communist emigres arriving from Hungary. Young Gorka’s mother, Susan, found part-time work as a translator to Irving, the Holocaust revisionist historian. She was credited as an interpreter in his 740-page tome, “Uprising! One Nation’s Nightmare, 1956,” which portrayed the CIA and MI6-backed Hungarian rebellion of 1956 as a worker’s insurrection against a corrupt communist leadership, which happened to be disproportionately Jewish.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Sebastian Gorka set his sights on a career serving British national security interests. From 1990 to 1993, Gorka served in Unit 22 of the British military’s Territorial Army Intelligence Corps as an interrogator. The duties he carried out in the intelligence unit later became a source of intrigue, and remain mysterious to this day.

Sebastian Gorka (second to right, second row) with the Intelligence Corps, UK Territorial Army.

In 1999, following a fellowship at NATO, Gorka returned to Hungary to advise the first government of Victor Orban, and established himself as a prominent national security commentator in the country of his family’s origin. Three years later, when Hungary’s new Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy faced accusations that he had conducted counter-espionage operations for the country’s communist government 20 years prior, Gorka was selected to investigate the charges on a parliamentary committee. However, the country’s National Security Office rejected the security clearance he needed to join the committee because, as the Hungarian news outlet Origo reported, it “became risky from a national security point of view due to [Gorka’s] connections with British intelligence.”

As the scandal swirled in Hungarian media, dramatically different accounts of Gorka’s involvement in British Army intelligence appeared in the media. The UK’s Sunday Times reported that Gorka’s duties in the unit included gathering “evidence for the war crimes tribunal set up after the collapse of Yugoslavia.” However, Gorka claimed to Hungarian media, “I never dealt with intelligence… we were tasked with guarding key facilities [in Northern Ireland], such as fending off IRA threats.”

It was unclear how Gorka could have served in two regions at around the same time, or what his intelligence duties actually entailed. When contacted by American reporters about his service, the British Military of Defense declined to provide details.

A year after being publicly accused of working for British intelligence, Gorka left Hungary for the US. “My American wife and I woke up one morning and realized America was the future,” he claimed.