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To mark the 20th anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq, the director of the CIA, William J. Burns, stood in the lobby of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and sought to exorcise the ghost of a troubling prewar intelligence failure. building until now.
Addressing some 100 CIA officials on March 19, Mr. Burns admitted how the agency had blundered in its assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he notes, according to two people present, there are many mistakes to be made. The plaintiffs included the Bush White House and the State Department – where Mr Burns served at the time as a senior official – who said there was an unfounded belief that they could undermine the invasion plan.
In particular, Mr. Burns added, “We have learned the hard lessons.” Intelligence agencies and others gathered about Russia’s plan to attack Ukraine, he said, “is a strong example. It allows us to give a strong warning, firm and confident, to help Ukraine defend itself and help the president create a strong coalition.
The table is a reminder that Mr. Burns, 67, has for decades been a near-miss actor on the American foreign policy stage, having served every Democratic and Republican president since Ronald Reagan, with the exception of Donald J. Trump. But the moment only illustrates how Mr. Burns, a key figure in the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine, has gained influence beyond that of any previous CIA director.
The ascent was impossible for a tall and wise figure with watchful eyes, gray hair and a fine mustache, who could easily be imagined in a John Le Carre novel whispering into the ear of a dignitary at an embassy party that the city had fallen . the rebels and the boat would be waiting in the harbor at midnight.
The impact of his two-year tenure has been as sweeping as it has been subtle. The CIA, demoralized and marginalized during the Trump years by a president who said publicly that he believed Mr. Putin through his own intelligence agency, 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 has helped restore America’s upper hand to Mr. Putin. Although the spy chief is usually relegated to the shadows, the Biden administration has been in the spotlight.
It was Mr. Burns, instead of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who Mr. Biden sent in November 2021 to Moscow, where from the Kremlin phone the director of the CIA spoke to Mr. Putin (who was in Sochi that day) for an hour and warned him not to invade Ukraine. Three months earlier, Mr. Burns had been in Kabul to meet with Taliban leaders and thereby lend legitimacy to the regime as the United States withdrew troops from Afghanistan.
Mr. Burns, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, has also taken three dozen trips abroad during his two years as director, often meeting with agency heads and foreign partners, as usual, but also discussing US policy with foreign leaders in Egypt. , Libya and others. Mr. Biden often asks Mr. Burns to accompany his regular intelligence briefer to the Oval Office for the president’s daily national security briefings, while the president sometimes asks for Mr. Burns’s opinion on policy issues, administration officials said.
Previous CIA directors have played a role in US foreign policy – George Tenet was heavily criticized for setting up intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was an interlocutor in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians – but the position has traditionally been seen as an objective overseer of intelligence gathering separated from policy and political influence.
However, Mr. Burns was the first CIA director who had previously been a career diplomat (for 32 years), and was on a first name basis with many foreign leaders. He speaks Russian, French and Arabic. “He’s one of those people you don’t go with and have to map out, or have to explain why the Turks don’t like the Kurds,” said Eric Traupe, who until last summer was the CIA’s assistant director. for the Near East.
Mr. Burns, Mr. Traupe said, is believed to be an in-house source for the administration, including by Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, how to deal with foreign enemies. It’s “what is he like, how do you negotiate with him?” said Mr. Traupe, who praised Mr. Burns’ ability to so far “not be the center of attention.”
Of course, the lack of drama on Biden’s foreign policy team could also produce “groupthink,” said Douglas London, a former CIA secret service officer who later served as counterterrorism adviser to the Biden campaign and is now an author and professor at Georgetown. University.
As an example, he cited the administration’s failure to predict the rapid collapse of the Afghan military when US forces withdraw from the country in August 2021. Although Mr. Burns has publicly stated that the CIA’s assessment of the Afghan military’s decisions is “on the pessimistic end of the scale,” the director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, admitted after the collapse that “it was said faster than 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, then won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he developed an appetite for international relations. He met his future wife, Lisa Carty, in 1982, when she sat next to him alphabetically during a foreign service orientation. (Ms. Carty is currently an ambassador to 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 U.S. 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 was vice president. In national security discussions, Mr. Biden and Mr. Burns agreed not to aggressively force President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to step down during the Arab Spring in 2011, but they deviated from conducting airstrikes against the Qaddafi regime in Libya and attacking his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. where Osama bin Laden took refuge. In both cases, Mr. Biden called for restraint and Mr. Burns called for action.
As Mr. Burns prepared to retire from government service in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported last month, a mutual friend introduced him to Jeffrey Epstein, the financial consultant who would later be convicted of multiple sex crimes. A spokeswoman for the CIA said that Mr. Burns met twice with Mr. Epstein, both times to discuss private sector opportunities, and did not socialize 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 won the presidency in 2020, transition officials asked Mr. Burns if he wanted to be ambassador to Japan or China, according to two people familiar with the dialogue. But before Mr. Burns could respond, Mr. Biden’s preferred candidate for CIA director, Thomas E. Donilon, a former national security adviser to Obama, decided not to take the job. Mr. Biden then focused on Mr. Burns, who has never aligned himself with a partisan cause and therefore will not face a difficult road to confirmation. He was finally confirmed in the Senate by voice vote.
Mr. Burns inherited the reeling agency from Mr. Trump openly disdains the intelligence community, not to mention the lingering aftershocks of two wars and terrorist attacks on US soil. Mr Trump’s first CIA director, Mike Pompeo, has come into office with a conservative agenda and in an early meeting, according to witnesses, accused senior analysts of “making up your mind” before making an assessment that Russia had tried. helped elect Mr. Trump in 2016.
Mr. Pompeo’s successor, Gina Haspel, a career case officer, made a more conscious effort to insulate the agency from Mr. Trump’s whims, former officials said, but sometimes efforts to court him left some agencies out of line. These include when he praised Mr Trump’s “wisdom” in dealing with North Korea in 2019 and when he stood up and saluted the president during his State of the Union address a year later.
All of that means Mr. Burns has a low bar when he takes office in March 2021. Current and former members of the intelligence community have praised him for a number of internal changes, including working to stabilize the agency, pushing for more diversity in the workforce and establishing a mission center that dedicated to employee welfare.
Externally there have been more tangible successes, particularly intelligence sharing with Ukraine that is widely credited with increasing Kyiv’s ability to anticipate Russian military maneuvers. An additional source of support for Ukraine is the selective declassification of intelligence documents to expose Russian disinformation, which grew out of discussions between Mr. Burns, Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Haines, after Ms. Haines’ office formalized a system to prevent disclosure of sources. and methods in the process.
In contrast, the CIA under Mr. Burns has controlled the origin of the coronavirus. In February, new intelligence prompted the Department of Energy to conclude that the virus was likely accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But the department is doing so with “very 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 conclusions.
In the meantime, Mr. Burns has been called the main enemy of China America, whose influence pervades almost every aspect of the intelligence-gathering agency’s mission, from military capabilities to digital influence to the acquisition of mineral resources. As a result, the director has moved the CIA’s disparate China-related departments to a single mission center. Doing so — along with promoting the agency’s increased efforts to deal with the flood of fentanyl along the U.S.-Mexico border — is in line with Mr. Biden’s political agenda as the president heads into a bruising re-election campaign.
If the president wins a second term, people close to the administration believe that Mr. Burns will be the candidate to replace Mr. Blinken, if Mr. Blinken chooses to resign. Mr. Burns refused to talk about it, nor did his colleagues. Richard Armitage, Mr. Burns’ friend and former superior at the State Department, said simply, “Whatever the president asks, he will do.”
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