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Bill Burns has spent much of his nearly four-decade career in government arguing about words. As he was packing up his office this week at CIA headquarters, the language of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which he had toiled over for the past 15 months, was at the top of his mind. If the parties agreed to the deal, as he was cautiously confident they would, Israeli hostages in Gaza would go free and Palestinians would receive vital humanitarian aid.
“In many ways, this [negotiation] was the hardest” of his long career, Burns told me in one of two recent conversations—harder even than the secret talks with Iran that he helped lead and that eventually produced the 2015 agreement placing restrictions on the country’s nuclear program. For starters, Hamas’s military leaders were hiding in Gaza, making communications with them cumbersome. The parties debated for months over the presence of Israeli military forces on the Gaza side of the border with Egypt, a stretch through which Israel said Hamas was smuggling weapons. “And this had such an intensely human dimension to it,” Burns said, speaking of the Israeli hostages as well as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes have been turned to rubble in Israel’s campaign against Hamas. Burns told me that he had worked to ensure that these people were not mere “brackets in text” of an official peace plan.
Words matter, but looking back on his time as the head of the world’s most important spy agency, Burns also had numbers on his mind. By his own count, he had made 84 trips overseas during his four years as director of the CIA. Even for a peripatetic former diplomat, that’s a busy travel schedule. For the chief of an intelligence agency, it’s extraordinary.
Burns has brought an unusual synthesis of diplomacy and spycraft to the role of CIA chief. You can tell the story of sequential crises that beset the Biden administration by his itinerary. Burns went to Moscow in November 2021 to tell President Vladimir Putin that the United States knew he was preparing to invade Ukraine. More than once, President Joe Biden has tasked Burns with delivering forceful messages to the Kremlin, because Burns knows the country, and its leader, better than anyone else in the Cabinet. On his tenth trip to Ukraine—one of 14 in total—President Volodymyr Zelensky joked that Burns now qualified for a free upgrade on the train from Poland, which shuttles world leaders and VIPs across the border because air travel is too dangerous.
Burns made 19 trips to participate in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the majority of them to the Middle East, working with his colleagues from Israel, Qatar, and Egypt.
In May 2023 he went to Beijing, the highest-level visit by a Biden-administration official since the U.S. military had shot down a Chinese spy balloon that floated across the continental United States three months earlier. He went back last year to meet his counterpart, the minister of state security, and open a channel of communication between rival powers that seem at times to be drifting toward military confrontation.
The Biden administration is stocked with former generals, diplomats, and strategists. And yet Burns often got the hardest assignments, the ones with big potential rewards but that were more likely to end in disappointment, or at least ambiguity. This is not the CIA director’s traditional portfolio. But in Burns—a 33-year veteran of the Foreign Service, only the second career diplomat to become deputy secretary of state, a former ambassador to Russia and Jordan—Biden got a spymaster with an unusual set of skills. So he used him.
Burns seemed as surprised as anyone when Biden chose him for the job. “Honestly, when the president called me, I almost fell off my chair,” Burns told me. He would be the first career diplomat to serve as CIA director, but that was hardly disqualifying. Plenty of his predecessors had never worked in intelligence but were reasonably successful in the role: Leon Panetta and Mike Pompeo come to mind. Burns had been considered for the top job in the State Department; he had retired from the Foreign Service in 2014. But the more he thought about running the CIA, the more it made sense.
“Diplomats and intelligence officers, in all those years I spent overseas, worked together more closely than any other two parts of the U.S. government,” Burns said. Intelligence and espionage are built on human relationships, establishing trust, and maintaining credibility. So is diplomacy. Most of Burns’s travel was devoted to CIA business, visiting stations overseas and meeting with personnel. But a sizable portion of the 1 million miles that Burns says he logged on the road as director was in the service of building new relationships with world leaders and using the ones he had already established. Thirty-plus years in diplomacy tend to fatten the Rolodex, and as several of his close aides told me, “Bill knows everybody.”
Under Burns’s watch, the CIA’s record wasn’t spotless. Critics, including some recently retired intelligence officers, have said that a top-heavy bureaucracy has at times produced sclerotic analysis that lacks depth and timeliness. Although the CIA and other agencies accurately forecast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they overestimated the invading military’s ability to swiftly conquer the country. Among CIA employees, Burns is widely admired and, early in his term, earned plaudits for ensuring that officers afflicted by the so-called Havana syndrome received adequate medical care, which they hadn’t had under his predecessor. But some of those victims were deeply disappointed that Burns, who’d initially suspected that Russia was to blame for the malady, ultimately sided with analysts who said it was not the handiwork of a foreign power.
Still, he will be remembered as a successful director, and not just for how he did the basic job of leading the CIA. He also opened doors with other leaders, cleared up miscommunications, and delivered hard messages to difficult people. The White House found this arrangement especially helpful, not least because it’s sometimes easier to send a spy to do a diplomat’s business.
Burns went to Afghanistan in August 2021, shortly after the fall of Kabul, to meet the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Sending a senior diplomat, perhaps the secretary of state, might have signaled that the Biden administration was conferring official recognition on the militant group, which had seized the capital days earlier and ordered the Americans to leave the country. This was one of several instances where the Biden administration took advantage of Burns’s diplomatic acumen without actually employing him as a diplomat.
Burns was also there to do CIA business. The United States was racing to evacuate its citizens and Afghan allies, including those who had worked with the military and the agency, amid the collapse of the Afghan government. Burns had been to Afghanistan four months earlier, when the government was just barely holding on against the Taliban, and he knew that once the United States withdrew, it would have little influence over the country’s new rulers. In April, he had warned members of Congress that a pullout would pose “significant risk” to U.S. interests, and that intelligence agencies would have a harder time monitoring terrorist groups that might reemerge in America’s absence. Intelligence analysts, including at the CIA, said the government could collapse quickly, within months or even a few weeks of a U.S. withdrawal. But no intelligence agency accurately foresaw how rapidly it would dissolve, or that the country’s leader would flee.
Burns’s talks with the Taliban helped provide the necessary “top cover to get our people out of Afghanistan,” a CIA paramilitary officer who has worked closely with the director told me. He credited Burns with helping to marshal the bureaucracy back in Washington, so that the agency’s Afghan partners and their families could obtain U.S. visas and get seats on military aircraft. Biden has called the withdrawal from Afghanistan “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” It was also a chaotic and dangerous mess in which the CIA, working alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan forces, had to secretly evacuate U.S. citizens, Afghans, and other foreign nationals using an agency compound known as Eagle Base—hardly the orderly departure that administration officials wanted.
The U.S. withdrawal marked a violent end to the longest war in the nation’s history. Thirteen troops were among the more than 180 people who died in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. As disastrous as it was, the fall of Kabul gave Burns the chance to demonstrate his commitment to the CIA’s people and its mission.
The paramilitary officer called Burns’s efforts in Washington and support of operations on the ground “morally courageous.” Embracing the agency’s employees and demonstrating solidarity with them made Burns a popular and successful leader despite his outsider status. His predecessors who failed to endear themselves in this way (Porter Goss and David Petraeus come to mind) found their time at Langley rocky and brief.
Three months after Burns’s trip to Kabul, the president again sent Burns on a sensitive mission that required the finesse of a diplomat and the discretion of a spy. Burns went to Moscow with a message for Putin, who had retreated to the seaside resort of Sochi amid a spike in coronavirus infections in the capital. From a phone in the Kremlin, Burns listened to the Russian leader recite his usual bill of grievances—an expansionist NATO threatened Russian security; Zelensky was the illegitimate leader of a non-country.
Burns, the administration’s de facto Putin whisperer, had heard it all before and understood that the Russian leader’s paranoid obsession with Ukraine was real and unshakable. But this time he had a message of his own: If you invade, you will pay an enormous price. Burns left a letter from Biden affirming that there would be consequences.
In the run-up to the February 2022 invasion, Burns and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, helped coordinate an unusual process of declassifying intelligence about Russian military activities and intentions, in order to preempt the false narratives that Burns knew Putin would try to spin—including that Russia was attacking Ukraine in self-defense.
Once the war began, some administration officials believed that Kyiv might fall within three days, a judgment that proved to deeply misunderstand Ukraine’s will to fight. U.S. officials thought that Zelenksy might have to govern in exile, if he could make it out of the capital alive. CIA officers, who had spent years helping Ukraine build its own modern intelligence system, wanted to stay at their posts. Burns backed them up, and persuaded the White House. The CIA is the only U.S. government organization whose personnel were on the ground in Ukraine before the war and never left. Agency officers there have played central roles in the United States’ assistance to Ukraine.
Russia stumbled in the first year of the war. For a time Ukraine seemed poised to repel the invasion. But as Burns leaves office, Putin is gaining ground, slowly and at extraordinary cost. At least 700,000 Russian troops have died or been wounded since the invasion, more than 10 times the Soviet casualties during a decade of war in Afghanistan, Burns said.
Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day. But to do that, Putin would have to be willing to negotiate. And Burns doesn’t think he is. “He’s put all his chips on the table,” Burns said. “He believed then, and he believes to this day, that he cannot afford to lose. So it’s a huge mistake for anybody to underestimate that.”
When two countries are at odds, their leaders often find it easier for the spies to talk, and not the diplomats or the heads of state. Wars have arguably been averted that way. “Even in the worst of the Cold War with the Soviets, when I was a young diplomat, you did have all sorts of channels” to communicate frankly, Burns said, including through intelligence agencies. “I think some of those now have been reestablished or created with the Chinese.”
China has been Burns’s long-term strategic focus as CIA director, even as he has spent time on Ukraine—and in it—and shuttling around the Middle East. And paying more attention to China has meant paying more attention to technology. From the beginning of his tenure, Burns put special emphasis on both how the agency used technology and the areas where China and other adversaries could pull ahead of the United States, such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. “I do believe this is one of those plastic moments that come along two or three times a century, where there’s some fundamental changes on the international landscape,” Burns told me. “In this case, it is the reality that we’re no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block.”
In the fall of 2021, the CIA established a new China Mission Center, to focus exclusively on gathering intelligence about the country and countering its pervasive spying on the United States. The center is the only one of its kind at the CIA, devoted to a single country. China-related work now consumes about 20 percent of the agency’s budget, a threefold increase from the start of his tenure, Burns said.
China’s advances in technology—many of them thanks to years of hacking and stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies—have allowed Beijing to create a virtual surveillance state. Those conditions have complicated the CIA’s efforts to recruit spies inside the country and keep their work for the United States a secret. In the past decade, the agency lost most of its agents in the country after they were discovered by Chinese authorities.
While the United States tries to spy on one of the hardest targets, Burns has also tried to reopen a dialogue with Beijing, including via his counterpart, Chen Yixin, the security minister. (The head of the China Mission Center, a career CIA officer fluent in Mandarin, accompanied Burns on one of his trips to Beijing.)
Burns is accustomed to having conversations that his political bosses can’t. But he said he was mindful that, as the head of an intelligence agency, he was not the one making foreign policy. “My job is to support policy makers, not become one.” But, he noted, if the president asked for his opinion, “I’ll tell him.”
And he did. One longtime aide who has known Burns since his time at the State Department reminded me that he and Biden “go way back,” and that the two men have shared a bond over their Irish Catholic upbringing. In Burns’s 2019 memoir—called, unsurprisingly, The Back Channel—he calls Biden “bighearted” and “a significant and thoughtful voice at the table” when Biden was the vice president and Burns was No. 2 at the State Department.
Burns stayed in his lane as Biden’s CIA director. But the president handed him one hard diplomatic problem after another, leading many observers to wonder when Biden would make things official and nominate Burns for secretary of state. That probably would have happened in a second Biden term or a Kamala Harris administration. But Burns will have to settle for the unique hybrid position he created: Call him the diplomatic spy.
The model may or may not be replicable. Or even advisable. Diplomats are expected to operate with a degree of transparency that doesn’t apply to spies. Reporters do not travel with the CIA director as they do with the secretary of state. In many of the Middle Eastern countries Burns knows well, intelligence chiefs conduct foreign relations not just out of a need for secrecy, but because they maintain their own power centers, even independently of the governments they serve. Burns saw diplomats and spies work closely together throughout his career, but he said their jobs shouldn’t be confused. “Having experience on the other side of the table helped,” he told me, “but I’ve been very careful to immerse myself in this agency and move away from my old world.”
On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas finally reached the cease-fire agreement that Burns and his foreign colleagues had helped design. He was reluctant to celebrate the achievement, at least outwardly. There were no champagne corks popping or high fives, he told me. Burns has seen deals fall apart before, and this one has entered only its first phase.
By its nature, intelligence work is secret, which usually makes it thankless. “People here don’t expect to get public praise or acknowledgment,” Burns said. Nevertheless, the cease-fire he helped devise is the high note on which he might end his long career in public service.
The deal was hard-fought and hammered out in secret, and its future remains uncertain. In that respect, it was typical intelligence work.
“I’ll miss that,” Burns said. “There’s no substitute for that kind of satisfaction.”
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