To mark the 20th anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq, CIA Director William J. Burns stood in the lobby of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, trying out the ghosts of pre-war intelligence failures to float. the building to this day.
In a speech to some 100 CIA officials on March 19, Mr. Burns how the agency catastrophically blundered in its assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he noted, according to two people present, that there were enough accusations going around. The culprits included an overconfidence of the Bush White House and the State Department — where Mr. Burns served as a senior official at the time — which he said had an unwarranted confidence that it could derail invasion plans.
Mr Burns in particular added: “We learned from that hard lesson.” The intelligence the agency and others gathered about Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, he said, “is a powerful example of that. It enabled us to issue strong, firm and confident warnings, to help Ukrainians defend themselves and to help the president build a strong coalition.”
The tableau was a reminder that the 67-year-old Burns has been an almost ubiquitous, if understated, actor on the US foreign policy scene for decades, having served every Democratic and Republican president since Ronald Reagan, with the exception of Donald J. Trump. And yet the moment only hinted at how Mr. Burns, a key figure in the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine, has more influence than most, if not all, previous CIA directors.
His ascent is an improbable twist for a tall, discreet figure with wary eyes, ashen hair and a cropped moustache, the sort easily imagined in a John Le Carre novel whispering in the ear of a dignitary at an embassy party where the city is up to. the rebels and a boat are waiting in the harbor at midnight.
The impact of his two-year tenure has been as profound as it is subtle. The CIA, demoralized and marginalized during the Trump years by a president who publicly said he believed Mr. Putin over his own intelligence agencies, has entered a period of resurgent prestige. As a member of Mr. Biden’s inner circle, who once served as ambassador to Russia, Mr. Burns helped restore America’s rule over Mr. Putin. While spy chiefs are typically shrouded in the shadows, the Biden administration has put theirs in the spotlight.
It was Mr. Burns, not Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who sent Mr. Biden to Moscow in November 2021, where the CIA director spoke via a Kremlin phone to Mr. Putin (who was in Sochi that day) for an hour and warned him not to invade Ukraine. Three months earlier, Mr. Burns in Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders to lend legitimacy to the regime as the United States withdrew troops from Afghanistan.
Mr. Burns, who declined to be interviewed for this article, also made some three dozen trips abroad during his two years as director, often to meet department heads and their foreign counterparts, as is customary, but also to discuss US policy with foreign leaders in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. Mr. Biden regularly asks Mr. Burns to accompany the regular CIA briefer to the Oval Office for the president’s daily national security briefing, when the president sometimes seeks and receives Mr. Burns’ views on policy issues said a government official.
Past CIA directors have played a role in US foreign policy — George Tenet has been harshly criticized for modifying intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and served as a talking point in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians — but the position traditionally seen as an objective oversight of intelligence gathering, separate from policy and political influence.
However, Mr. Burns is the first CIA director who was previously a career diplomat (for 32 years) and is a first name to numerous foreign leaders. He speaks Russian, French and Arabic. “He’s a guy that you didn’t bring in and you had to break out a card for, or explain why the Turks don’t like the Kurds,” said Eric Traupe, who was the CIA’s deputy director until last summer. for the Near East.
Mr Burns, Mr Traupe said, is being used as an internal resource for the administration, including by Mr Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, on how to deal with foreign adversaries. It’s “how is he, how do you negotiate with him?” said Mr. Traupe, praising Mr. Burns’ agility thus far in “not being the center of attention.”
Of course, the absence of drama in the Biden foreign policy team could also lead to “groupthink,” said Douglas London, a former CIA Secret Service officer who later served as a counter-terrorism adviser to the Biden campaign and is now an author and professor. in Georgetown. University.
As an example, he cited the government’s failure to foresee the rapid collapse of the Afghan military when US troops withdrew from the country in August 2021. end of the scale,” National Intelligence Director Avril D. Haines acknowledged after the collapse that it “unfolded faster than we expected, including in the intelligence community.”
The son of a two-star Army general who fought in Vietnam, Mr. Burns attended La Salle University in Philadelphia and then won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he developed his appetite for international relations. He met his future wife, Lisa Carty, in 1982, when the two sat next to each other alphabetically during foreign service orientation. (Ms. Carty is now ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.)
Mr. Burns and Mr. Biden go back about a quarter century, when Mr. Burns was the US ambassador to Jordan and Mr. Biden was the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They grew closer during the Obama years, when Mr. Burns was Deputy Secretary of State and Mr. Biden vice president. In discussions of national security, Mr. Biden and Mr. Burns agreed not to aggressively pressure Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak to resign during the 2011 Arab Spring, but they differed on carrying out airstrikes on the Gaddafi regime in Libya and the invasion of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden took refuge. In both cases, Mr. Biden urged restraint and Mr. Burns urged action.
As Mr. Burns prepared to retire from public service in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported last month, a mutual friend introduced him to Jeffrey Epstein, the financial adviser who would later be convicted of multiple sex crimes. A spokeswoman for the CIA said Mr. Burns met with Mr. Epstein twice, both times to discuss private sector opportunities, and that he did not associate with him.
In a statement to DailyExpertNews, Mr. Burns that he deeply regrets that Mr. Epstein didn’t know who he was, adding, “I wish I’d done my homework first.”
After Mr Biden won the presidency in 2020, transition officials asked Mr Burns if he was interested in an ambassadorship to Japan or China, according to two people familiar with the dialogue. But before Mr. Burns could respond, Mr. Biden’s favorite candidate for CIA director, Thomas E. Donilon, a former national security adviser to Obama, declined to take the job. Mr Biden then focused on Mr Burns, who had never joined a partisan cause and thus would not face a difficult path to confirmation. He was eventually confirmed in the Senate by a vote.
Mr. Burns inherited an office reeling from Mr. Trump’s open contempt for the intelligence community, not to mention the lingering aftershocks of two wars and a terrorist attack on US soil. Mr Trump’s first CIA director, Mike Pompeo, had come into office with a conservative agenda and, according to a witness at an early meeting, accused senior analysts of “having already made up their mind” before producing an assessment that Russia had tried to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016.
Mr Pompeo’s replacement, Gina Haspel, a career counselor, made a more conscious effort to insulate the agency from Mr Trump’s whims, former officials said, but at times her attempts to appease him came across as inappropriate to some in the agency about. That included when she publicly praised Mr. Trump’s “wisdom” in his dealings with North Korea in 2019 and when she stood up and applauded the president during his State of the Union address a year later.
All this is to say that Mr Burns had a low bar to clear when he took office in March 2021. Current and former members of the intelligence community credit him for some internal changes, including working to stabilize the agency, pushing for more diversity in the workforce and establishing a mission center dedicated to employee well-being.
There have been more tangible successes externally, notably intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which is widely believed to better enable Kiev to anticipate Russian military maneuvers. An additional source of support for Ukraine was the selective release of intelligence documents to expose Russian disinformation, which arose from discussions between Mr Burns, Mr Sullivan and Ms Haines after Ms Haines’ office formalized a system to prevent sources from being revealed. and processes in the process.
In contrast, the CIA under Mr. Burns exercised restraint on the origin of the coronavirus. In February, new information led the Energy Department to conclude that the virus was most likely accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But the department did so with “little confidence,” and the CIA remains unconvinced, according to two people familiar with the process. The CIA has so far refused to issue its own conclusion.
In the meantime, Mr. Burns called China’s main adversary, one whose influence permeates nearly every aspect of the agency’s intelligence-gathering mission, from military capability to digital clout to mineral resource acquisition. As a result, the director has grouped the CIA’s disparate China-related departments into a single mission center. This — along with his increasing promotion of the agency’s efforts to deal with the flood of fentanyl across the U.S.-Mexico border — aligns with Mr. Biden’s political agenda as the president heads into a bloody re-election campaign.
Should the president win a second term, those close to the administration are speculating that Mr. Burns would be a candidate to replace Mr. Blinken should Mr. Blinken choose to resign. Mr. Burns refuses to talk about it, as do his colleagues. Richard Armitage, Mr. Burns’ friend and former State Department superior, said only, “Whatever the president asks, he will do it.”