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Sebastian Gorka: British intelligence asset?

Kit Klarenberg and Max BlumenthalNovember 25, 2024

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?

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. 

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.

Donnelly praises Gorka’s “academic excellence”

The scandal over Gorka’s security clearance received a smattering of coverage from liberal blogs when he was appointed to serve during the first Trump administration in 2017. But US media has not written a word about the much more consequential relationship he enjoyed with the British intelligence officer Chris Donnelly.

Donnelly brought Gorka under his wing during the post-Cold War period, while he personally lobbied for NATO enlargement in former Soviet satellite states like Hungary. The officer’s 2005 work, “Nations, Alliances and Security,” was edited by Gorka, who also wrote its foreword. 

Two years later, Gorka published a PhD dissertation on “Content and End-State-based Alteration in the Practice of Political Violence since the End of the Cold War.” Donnelly, then-chief of the British Ministry of Defence intelligence unit known as the Advanced Research and Assessment Group, authored a glowing “external review” of Gorka’s doctorate, describing it as “a work not only of academic excellence, but also of significant current policy relevance.”

In October 2008, Britain’s Ditchley Foundation, which holds regular conferences on the topic of British-American relations, convened an event in conjunction with the Foreign Office, on “the future of NATO, in Europe and globally.” Both Donnelly and Gorka appeared on the discussion panel, alongside spies, high-ranking military NATO officials, and lawmakers. The meeting was “deliberately timed to sit between the Bucharest summit of April 2008 and the 60th Anniversary Summit in April 2009.”

The Bucharest summit was where NATO member states agreed Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO.” Then-US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has since written with intense regret about the decision, which laid the foundations for Russia’s crushing of Tbilisi in a brief war five months later, as well as the current Ukraine proxy conflict.

When Gorka and his mentor reunited in Washington almost a decade later, Donnelly was intent on working his connections to drive conflict with Russia.

Below: Chris Donnelly’s passport, leaked in the Integrity Initiative files

Donnelly meets secretly in DC with Gorka, pushing war with Russia

During Trump’s first term, as the president battled a deluge of partisan propaganda painting him as a Putin puppet, and with American liberals transformed overnight into frothing Russophobes, British intelligence gleaned a perfect opportunity to escalate a simmering new Cold War.

On September 18, 2018, Integrity Initiative chief Chris Donelly flew into Washington to expand his new covert influence network. The following morning, he headed straight to breakfast with his former understudy, Sebastian Gorka. 

Afterwards, Donnelly took a car to the Arlington, Virginia offices of CNA, the think tank adjunct of the US Center for Naval Analyses and key Integrity Initiative “partner” in DC, to deliver a lengthy presentation on “mapping Russian influence activities.” 

Leaked files of Donnelly’s Initiative listed Gorka’s wife, Katharine, as a key contact. At the time, she was a senior advisor at the Department of Homeland Security. (Today, she is the chair of the GOP in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, a hub for private military and intelligence contractors).

The same file described how the organization’s clusters “engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal contacts…and try to influence them gently.”

On that basis, both Gorkas clearly fit the bill for Integrity Initiative cluster members, even though the covert operation played an apparent role in several propaganda operations aimed at destroying Trump and subverting his agenda.

For instance, Integrity Initiative operatives were instrumental in circulating disgraced MI6 officer Christopher Steele’s bogus “Trump-Russia” dossier at the highest levels of the US government, and in turn, disseminating it throughout Western media. That connivance was clearly aimed at delegitimizing Trump while boxing his administration into a belligerent stance on Russia.

In Britain, Integrity Initiative operatives fraudulently linked the Brexit referendum’s result to Russian meddling. In Spain, meanwhile, the Initiative spread disinformation falsely portrayjng the Catalan independence movement as a Russian-controlled operation, delivering a body blow to cordial relations between Madrid and Russia. 

In March 2021, when grilled by The American Conservative about his secret meeting in DC with Donnelly, Gorka exploded, telling the outlet’s reporter to “go to hell,” and asking “who the hell” they were to ask him about “private conversations…with a friend.” Gorka refused to discuss his bond with Donnelly any further.

He similarly ignored questions sent by The Grayzone through direct message to his personal Twitter/X account.

Today, Donnelly helps oversee Britain’s clandestine role in the Ukraine proxy war. As The Grayzone revealed, Donnelly oversaw the blueprints for the Ukrainian terror attack which damaged the Russian-built Kerch Bridge in October 2022. By design, the bombing was a pivotal step up the escalation ladder.

Now, as Trump sets out to fulfill his promise to end the conflict in Ukraine, Donnelly enjoys a direct line to one of the president’s top national security aides, who happens to be his longtime understudy.