Exclusive — Gorka on Staring into ‘Apocalyptic Evil’ Eyes of Abbey Gate Bombing Mastermind ‘Jafar’: ‘I Saw the Pits of Hell, an Absolute Human with No Soul’

WASHINGTON, DC — Dr. Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trump’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the White House, told Breitbart News exclusively about inside details of the operation to capture the mastermind of the Abbey Gate terrorist attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the summer of 2021.

Gorka, who was there on the tarmac at Dulles airport in Northern Virginia when U.S. authorities transferred the man known as “Jafar” into U.S. custody for charges he faces in federal court proceedings just hours after Trump delivered his joint address to Congress in March, told Breitbart News what it was like staring into his eyes when federal agents were processing him upon landing at the airport.

“I’ll tell you, you know me, I’m not a shrinking violet,” Gorka told Breitbart News. “I looked into the black eyes of this man and I saw the pits of hell, an absolute human with no soul.”

Gorka said Jafar did not say anything to him, but stared back at him. “He looked at me—he looked at me for an extended period,” Gorka said. “I could see he was broken. He realized this is the end of the road for you my friend. His eyes had this deep, just kind of apocalyptic evil to them.”

While Jafar did not say anything to him, Gorka said he looked defeated.

“There was a kind of—as I said—there was a level of a kind of acceptance maybe,” Gorka said. “Like, ‘I’m not getting out of this one. I may have escaped from a prison earlier in the region, I may have been able to pay somebody to do something.’ But when a Boeing plane that belongs to the Department of Justice picks you up in Pakistan and flies you across the world to Dulles…”

These revelations came during the third and fourth parts of a lengthy exclusive interview taped with Gorka at the White House back in mid-March, focused on counterterrorism. Previously published parts of this interview focused on a strike the president ordered on a terrorist recruiter in Somalia, and on the broader counterterrorism strategy shift under Trump as compared with former President Joe Biden. These last two parts being published here now focus on the capture of Jafar, which President Trump announced to great fanfare during his address to a joint session of Congress in March, and Jafar’s transfer back to the United States as well as more on the bigger counterterrorism strategy particularly focused on another strike the president ordered on an ISIS leader in Iraq and on actions the president was taking against the Houthis in Yemen. While it is a tenuous situation there, since this interview was recorded the White House has announced a deal with the Houthis for the time being, but it remains to be seen if that holds long-term. Gorka also details in these final two parts key elements of the president’s counterterrorism strategy, which he is charged with authoring. It’s worth noting too that when this interview was recorded at the White House, taped in the Secretary of War suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB), Mike Waltz was still the National Security Adviser. The president has since assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to overtake the National Security Council—Gorka still runs counterterrorism for the NSC under Rubio—and reassigned Waltz to now be his U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Waltz is awaiting a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing and eventually full confirmation vote for that position.

WATCH:  Exclusive — Gorka Explains Importance of Houthi Strikes:

“This is one of the most incredible things to date,” Gorka said when asked about the Jafar capture and shown a photo of Jafar in U.S. custody. “I can’t believe we’re just what, 54 days in, and we can already tell this story. I walked into my SCIF—my Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility. I work in this building but in a part of it that handles classified information. As we discussed already on the first day I walked in at 12:01 because I was officially the Counterterrorism Senior Director for the president. I’m old school. I like white boards. So I got out a white board. I wrote on the white board my four priorities for the president in counterterrorism. In American counterterrorism, what are the big, big things—the big, big wins—I want for America. At the top, right next to hostages because getting our hostages back is so important to him, right next to that at the top was the letter ‘J.’ It was just the letter ‘J’ because his name was classified at that time, a nom de guerre in ISIS. Why did I have ‘J’? Because Jafar was the real guy behind Abbey Gate. I wanted to move heaven and earth, I wanted to move the whole Intelligence Community, the whole counterterrorism enterprise, to find this guy to kill him or bring him to justice. Forty-one days in, President Trump did it. I’ve got to give a huge shoutout to our Intelligence Community, especially the National Security Agency (NSA). Because of the NSA, we were able to provide a certain piece of intelligence to the Pakistani government and with that piece of intelligence the Pakistani government found this evil piece of human filth in the Afghan-Pakistan border area. They captured him. They interviewed him. He was then allowed our fly team, which are the mobile FBI agents, who flew out to Islamabad, they interviewed him and he confessed to Abbey Gate and he confessed to more than 20 terrorist massacres including a recent attack in Russia and in Iran and also the 2016 bombing of the U.S. Afghan embassy that killed 10 of our security guards. He confessed to it all and this is the incredible story. I’m watching the joint session in a secure location and then at 2 a.m. after the president announced we have Jafar and he’s on his way home I with my team go to Dulles, to a special part of Dulles airport. I am standing on the tarmac—think of what this says about the Trump administration that on the tarmac we have Tulsi Gabbard, former Democrat and President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, Pam Bondi the Attorney General of the United States and then we have Kash Patel the brand new director of the FBI, standing there in the cold at 2 a.m. and the plane lands.”

Shown a second photo, this one of Gorka himself on the plane standing next to Jafar and a number of U.S. officials taking him into custody, Gorka explained what viewers see.

“We’ve had to obscure the faces because these are all FBI agents, intelligence analysts, that work in the field,” Gorka said. “This individual is fingerprinting Jafar right now because he’s on U.S. soil and we want confirmation of ID. That’s Jafar standing there in a blue jumpsuit. I’m on the deck of the aircraft because I wanted to look into the face of this man who killed 13 of our warfighters.”

Jafar, he said, admitted to U.S. authorities to killing “probably over a thousand” people in more than 20 terrorist attacks worldwide.

“The one Abbey Gate attack was at least 150 if you add up the Afghans to the American warfighters,” Gorka said. “Probably over a thousand innocent people because this guy Jafar was an ex-ops planner—external operations. This is the guy who’s planning and recruiting operations across the world for ISIS. This is why he was such another high-value target. I’m standing on the tarmac and I let the principals go up—I let Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, John Ratcliffe, Pam Bondi go up there and look at the guy as he’s being processed. They leave and I decide to go up and to look into this man’s face.”

When Gorka walked off the plane after seeing Jafar for himself, he then saw some senior Intelligence Community analysts waiting planeside and told a story about how he personally escorted them up to see Jafar on board.

“Then I walked down from the plane and then I realized something,” Gorka said. “Standing behind me on the tarmac is a woman I recognized. I go, ‘what are you doing here?’ It’s a very senior member of the Intelligence Community who had briefed me multiple times since I entered the White House. She’s standing near a gaggle of maybe a dozen people who don’t look like FBI SWAT guys, don’t look like Delta Force or anything else—they look like intellectual analysts, which is what they are. Here’s the real beautiful moment in all of that evil. This woman is a very senior person in the Intelligence Community whose team have been hunting that man for three years, since Abbey Gate, some of whom like one of the linguists who was there were born in Afghanistan, who works for us as an American citizen and whose family was trapped in Afghanistan after the Abbey Gate bombing because of the Biden surrender. This brave woman, this senior leader, said ‘even if we never get to see him, I want my team at the airport when this piece of walking evil arrives.’ There are these moments when you realize there are things you just have to do. I said, ‘break your group into threes, and I am going to walk you up onto the deck of that aircraft and I’m going to let you look into the face of the man you helped capture. You may not carry a badge or a gun, or wear Multicam Crye Precision combat fatigues, but you are part of this measure of justice.’ They were very grateful to me. I’ve received a very nice missive since then. They’re members of the team as well. They’re maybe not, you know, a snake-eating member of Delta Force but without the exquisite intelligence these people provided, that man doesn’t get locked away for the rest of his life or maybe even better.”

Gorka also said the Pakistanis were instrumental in making this capture. He said it was a critical missing piece of intelligence, too, that U.S. officials shared with them that helped the Pakistani government solve the puzzle and find Jafar—who had evaded capture for more than three years.

“I have to commend the Pakistanis because they were looking for him anyway, they knew he was a priority for my team and for Ratcliffe and the president and for the National Security Adviser and for Tulsi Gabbard, and they were looking for him quite aggressively,” Gorka said. “They were missing a piece of the puzzle. Thanks to the NSA, that exquisite piece of intelligence was located by us and National Security Adviser Waltz, DCIA Ratcliffe… So we made this decision—let’s share this very sensitive piece of intelligence. It was that missing piece of the puzzle that allowed the Pakistani authorities to finally locate this individual and capture him alive. That’s when we were informed that it was a success and so then we said okay we’re going into overdrive to identify, verify this is the guy. We had had some false stats in the past. The FBI flight team went out and they interviewed him. They verified it. We had fingerprints and prior instances to verify who this guy was. Then they got him on a plane and it was like touch and go because I didn’t want to jeopardize anything but we put it into the president’s speech that morning.”

Gorka also said Trump, alongside him and Waltz, called the families of the 13 fallen Abbey Gate bombing U.S. service members from the White House before the president went to deliver his speech to Congress that night to tell them the news personally.

“Oh, and so important, that afternoon—this is who President Trump is—that afternoon, before his first new speech to the joint session, he took time and I was with him, just me and Mike Waltz the National Security Adviser in the China Room underneath the residence, we called up members of the 13 Abbey Gate families because we wanted them to know first,” Gorka said. “We wanted the families to know after three years of not seeing justice done, of the catastrophe that was the Afghan withdrawal, we have the man responsible for the death of your sons, your daughters, your brothers, your sisters, in custody. So that was incredible. The call was just—the call was very heavy and a very emotional call. They put the line, the announcement, into the president’s draft speech and he made the announcement and I don’t even think the Democrats stood up for that either—not for the 13-year-old kid with cancer, not for the mother of Jocelyn Nungaray, not for the bringing to justice of Jafar the man behind Abbey Gate. But we sent a message to the world, to all terrorists, that President Trump is back—the old sheriff is back in town, justice will be done and it will be seen to be done and then a few hours later I’m on the tarmac with those analysts, with the FBI, with the heads of the Intelligence Community, and at least a little bit of closure can be afforded to the families.”

In addition to the Jafar story, Gorka also told the story of Trump having ordered the elimination of an ISIS jihadi in Iraq right around the time this interview was taped.

“This was Abu Khadija, was his nom de guerre, and what you need to understand is this is the guy who called himself, until we neutralized him, the governor of Iraq,” Gorka said. “So this is the guy of the rump caliphate if you will—and this is an individual in the big scheme because of the president’s crushing of the original caliphate ISIS has been forced to disperse, right? It’s not safe for them anymore in Syria or Iraq. The leader of ISIS is actually hiding out in Somalia—this is how much pressure we put on them as a U.S. counterterrorism community. As a result, this is the number one guy in Iraq and again we say a huge thank you to the government in Baghdad and we say a special thank you to the Kurds as well, the regional Kurdish authority. They were key to this. This was a U.S. action, but it was assisted by the assets of both Baghdad and the Kurdish regional authority. The significance of this is this is their number one guy in Iraq and he’s gone—absolutely gone. This is what I’m trying to represent as the face of the Trump presidency’s new counterterrorism strategy.”

Gorka further explained how the president’s new counterterrorism strategy is focused on a very “simple” objective: Stop terrorists from executing attacks on Americans.

“The number one element you need to understand, if you ever come into my SCIF, you will see a giant photograph of the Twin Towers prior to 9/11 with the beautiful blue sky behind it,” Gorka said. “That’s because of my wife, Katie, who was a presidential appointee in the first Trump administration and maybe three weeks into my time here, she raised—she’s a national security expert as well—she said ‘you know, in all your meetings with the government, when you’re talking to the CIA and DOD and various members of the counterterrorism community, there’s really only one question you need to ask: The 9/11 question. Are we doing what needs to be done to prevent the next 9/11?’ So whether it’s that strike in Iraq, whether it’s the strikes in Somalia, whether it’s what the president did this weekend with regard to the Houthis, these strikes send a very simple message. The National Security Council is supposed to coordinate and formulate policy for the whole of government. I tell them, look, whatever you’re meeting on—whether it’s policy in Syria, policy in Iraq, policy on Gaza, from my perspective on counterterrorism, from what the president cares for, there’s only one question. It’s really that simple. Don’t overthink it. The only question that matters is, is that piece of territory being used to plan, finance, and execute a mass casualty attack against Americans here in America or against our servicemen abroad? Counterterrorism is really that simple. Is that piece of land, wherever you’re focusing, being used to plan attacks against U.S. citizens? That’s what the next CT strategy is going to focus on.”

Regarding the Houthis, too, Gorka said there is a major economic reason for the importance of protecting freedom of navigation in those waterways.

“When you look at just the raw data, it’s really quite shocking because this is a strategic waterway… that region is controlled by this ragtag group of terrorists,” Gorka said. “That waterway has witnessed under Biden in the last year and a half more than a hundred attacks on U.S. vessels by the Houthis. Our military planes are being shot at. A U.S. vessel has not been permitted to cross that strait unharmed for more than a year. The president looks at that and he says ‘excuse me?’ This isn’t just about the U.S. economy and the effect it has on U.S. economics and prices and manufacturing. This is global trade. Freedom of maritime sea lanes is non-negotiable. The idea that a bunch of jihadis who are funded by Iran can hold hostage one of the most important waterways in the world, the president said on Thursday ‘that ends now.’ He told Secretary Hegseth who informed General Kurilla at Central Command that we are going to do a counterterrorism operation against the Houthis to allow maritime freedom of traffic. That’s what it’s about. The president is a businessman. He understands economics and he understands you can’t have jihadist terrorists holding one of the most important waterways hostage and if you read his amazing Truth he posted on why he’s doing what he’s doing you also have to read the last sentence—the last sentence is as important as the rest of the Truth. He sent a message to Iran—Iran, we know where the missiles the Houthis are using, the drones they are using, are coming from. And you better stop supplying those kinds of materials to non-state actors like the Houthis or Hamas or Hezbollah. This isn’t about a bunch of just, you know, pirates—this is also about Iran.”

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