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, Va., and sought to banish the ghosts of those Pre-war intelligence failures are haunting. building to this day.
Addressing about 100 CIA officials on March 19, Burns acknowledged how catastrophically the agency had made a mistake in its assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he noted, according to two people present, that there were a lot of bugs to go around. The perpetrators included Bush’s arrogant White House as well as the State Department – where Mr. Burns served at the time as a senior official – which he said unfoundedly believed it was. could thwart invasion plans.
Notably, Mr. Burns added: “We learned from that hard lesson.” The intelligence that the agency and others have gathered Russia’s plan to invade Ukraine, he said, “is a powerful example of that. It allows us to issue a strong, resolute and confident warning, to help Ukrainians defend themselves, and to help the president forge a strong alliance.”
The animation is a reminder that Mr. Burns, 67, has for decades been near-ubiquitous if subdued on the American foreign policy stage, has served every Democratic president and Republicans since Ronald Reagan, with the exception of Donald J. Trump. However, the moment only hints at how Mr. Burns, a key figure in the Biden administration’s support of Ukraine, has amassed influence beyond most if not all CIA directors. before.
His ascension was an unlikely turn of events for a tall, reserved figure with wary eyes, ash gray hair and a trimmed mustache, the kind you could easily imagine in a novel by John Le Carre whispering in the ear of an official at an embassy party that the city is falling. rebels and a boat will be waiting in the harbor at midnight.
The impact of his two-year term was both far-reaching and subtle. CIA, demoralized and marginalized during the Trump years by one president said publicly that he believed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for its own intelligence agencies, has entered a period of prestige revival. A confidant of Mr. Biden and a former ambassador to Russia, Mr. Burns helped restore America’s primacy over Mr. Putin. Although spy chiefs are often in the dark, the Biden administration has them in the spotlight.
It was Mr. Burns, not Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, whom Mr. Biden sent to Moscow in November 2021, where, from the Kremlin phone, the CIA director spoke to Mr. Putin (who was in residence). Sochi that day) in a phone call. hour and warned him not to invade Ukraine. Three months earlier, Mr. Burns had been in Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders and thus give legitimacy to the regime as the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan.
Mr. Burns, who declined to be interviewed on file for this article, also made about three dozen overseas trips during his two years as director, often to meet with agency heads and partners. their foreign partners, as is customary, but also to discuss U.S. policy with foreign leaders in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. Mr. Biden often asked Mr. Burns to accompany a regular reporter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Oval Office for the president’s daily national security briefing, when the president sometimes solicits and solicits opinions. Mr. Burns’ opinions on policy issues. administrative official said.
Former CIA directors have played a role in U.S. foreign policy — George Tenet was harshly criticized for tweaking intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and serving as a interlocutor in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — but this position has traditionally been considered an objective monitor of intelligence gathering separate from policy and political influence.
However, Mr. Burns is the first CIA director to have served as a professional diplomat (for 32 years), and has close relationships with many foreign leaders. He speaks Russian, French and Arabic. Eric Traupe, who until last summer was an assistant director of the CIA, said: “He’s someone you don’t invite in and have to map out, or have to explain why the Turks are. Ky doesn’t like the Kurds. for the Near East.
Mr. Burns, Mr. Traupe said, was trusted as an internal resource to the administration, including Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, on how to deal with foreign adversaries. It is “how is he, how do you negotiate with him?” Mr. Traupe said, who has commended Mr. Burns’ ingenuity so far in “not being the center of attention.”
Of course, the lack of drama in Biden’s foreign policy team could also create “group thinking,” said Douglas London, a former CIA secret service agent who later served as a counterterrorism adviser to the CIA. Biden campaign and is now an author and professor at Georgetown. University.
As an example, he cited the administration’s failure to anticipate the rapid collapse of the Afghan military when US troops withdrew from the country in August 2021. Although Mr. Burns has publicly asserted that the The CIA’s assessment of the Afghan military’s resolve is “somewhat pessimistic”. end of scale,” director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, admitted after the fall that it “rolled out faster than we anticipated, including in the intelligence community.”
The son of a two-star army general who served in Vietnam, Burns attended La Salle College in Philadelphia, later winning a scholarship to Oxford University, where he developed a passion for international relations. economic. He met his future wife, Lisa Carty, in 1982, when the two sat side by side in alphabetical order during a foreign service orientation. (Ms. Carty is currently an ambassador at the United Nations Economic and Social Council.)
Mr. Burns and Mr. Biden go back about a quarter of a century, when Mr. Burns was the US ambassador to Jordan and Mr. Biden was a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They became closer during the Obama years, when Burns was deputy secretary of state and Biden was vice president. During national security discussions, Mr. Biden and Mr. Burns agreed not to actively push President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to resign during the 2011 Arab Spring, but they turned their attention to conducting airstrikes on the Qaddafi regime in Libya and attacks on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was hiding. In both cases, Mr. Biden called for restraint and Mr. Burns called for action.
As Mr. Burns prepared to step down in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported last month, a mutual friend introduced him to Jeffrey Epstein, the financial consultant who was later convicted of multiple sex crimes. A CIA spokesman said Burns met with Epstein twice, both times to discuss private sector opportunities and not to associate with him.
In a statement to The New York Times, Mr Burns said he deeply regretted meeting Mr Epstein and not knowing who he was, adding: “I wish I had done my homework first. “
After Mr. Biden was elected president in 2020, transition officials asked Mr. Burns if he was interested in being an ambassador to Japan or China, according to two people familiar with the conversation. But before Mr. Burns could respond, Biden’s favorite candidate for the position of CIA director, Thomas E. Donilon, Obama’s former national security adviser, decided not to take the job. Mr. Biden then focused on Mr. Burns, who has never been affiliated with any partisan targets and would therefore have no difficulty confirming. He was finally confirmed in the Senate by a voice vote.
Mr. Burns inherited an agency that has been plagued by Trump’s public disdain for the intelligence community, not to mention the lingering aftershocks of two wars and a terrorist attack on American soil. Mr Trump’s first CIA director, Mike Pompeo, took office with a conservative agenda and in an early meeting, according to one witness, accused senior analysts of “thinking it over”. before making an assessment that Russia tried to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016.
Former officials said Pompeo’s replacement, Gina Haspel, a career officer, made a more conscious effort to protect the agency from Mr. Trump’s whims, but sometimes Her efforts to appease him have been deemed inappropriate by some in the agency. Include when she publicly praised Mr. Trump’s “wisdom” in dealing with North Korea in 2019 and as she stood to applaud the president during his State of the Union speech a year later.
All that said, Mr. Burns has a low hurdle to deal with when he takes office in March 2021. Current and former members of the intelligence community commend him for a number of internal changes. , including working to stabilize the agency, promote more diversity in the workforce, and establish a mission center devoted to employee wellness.
Externally there have been more tangible successes, most notably intelligence-sharing with Ukraine that is said to have improved Kyiv’s ability to predict Russian military maneuvers. An additional source of support for Ukraine was the selective declassification of intelligence documents to expose Russian disinformation, which arose out of discussions between Mr. Burns, Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Haines, after the written statement. Ms. Haines’ office formalizes a system to avoid disclosure of sources and methods in the process.
In contrast, the CIA under Burns has shown restraint on the origin of the corona virus. February new intelligence led the Department of Energy to conclude that the virus was most likely accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But the department did so with “low confidence” and the CIA remained unconvinced, according to two people familiar with the process. The CIA has so far refused to draw its own conclusions.
Meanwhile, Burns has called China America’s top enemy, whose influence encompasses nearly every aspect of the agency’s intelligence-gathering mission, from military capabilities to influence. digital to collect mineral resources. As a result, the director turned the various CIA departments involved in China into a single mission center. Doing so — along with him increasingly pushing the agency’s efforts to tackle the fentanyl flood across the U.S.-Mexico border — fits into Mr Biden’s political agenda as the president enters the war. fierce re-election campaign.
If the president wins a second term, people close to the administration speculate that Mr Burns will be the candidate to replace Mr. Blinken, should Blinken decide to step down. Mr. Burns declined to talk about it, as did his colleagues. Richard Armitage, a friend of Burns and a former senior at the State Department, simply said: “Whatever the president asks, he will do.”
