The head of US intelligence takes on the role of negotiator in the Gaza war

During his first three years as CIA chief, William Burns was relentlessly focused on tripling the agency’s resources devoted to understanding China, and on confronting Russia and its murky partnerships with Iran and North Korea.

But in the last sixteen months of his term, the diplomat-turned-spy plunged back into his old life.

Over his four decades at the State Department, Mr. Burns came to be seen as a master of creating the “back channel” — the title of his memoir — the invisible, essential communication with allies and enemies alike.

As the war between Israel and Hamas threatened to drag the Middle East into an even greater conflagration, President Biden asked Mr. Burns to swim in that back channel again, mixing his intelligence role with his experience as a Middle East negotiator to help find a way to solve the problem. Ceasefire and release of hostages held in Gaza.

He was soon, by his own account, “talking on the phone every day” with David Barnia, the head of Israel’s foreign spy agency, and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the Hamas liaison, looking for an opportunity, some leverage to achieve a truce and perhaps a new Middle East. .

The distinction between diplomatic negotiator and intelligence agent is ambiguous in the region, and Mr. Burns’ arrival and departure may be secret. “It makes it easier to come and go,” he said in his seventh-floor CIA office, with his memorabilia of the agency’s operations and successes, and a framed map of the Russian plan to move in Ukraine.

Mr. Burns is a unique figure in Washington. He has worked for Republicans and Democrats. In the early 2000s, he was George W. Bush’s ambassador to Moscow, where he got to know Vladimir Putin, making him the only member of Biden’s inner circle who knows the Russian leader well.

Had Kamala Harris been elected president last November, current and former officials said, Mr. Burns would have been her choice for secretary of state, something he has declined to confirm or deny, with some diplomatic reluctance. It would have been a return to the institution that defined his career — where he met his wife, Lisa Carty, who now works at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. (They sat next to each other at the Foreign Service Training Institute. The students were seated in alphabetical order.)

When he arrived at the CIA, many veterans there admitted they were skeptical: Why was a career diplomat leading a spy agency?

By the time he packed his bags on Friday, the agreement between Israel and Hamas was barely holding together, new conflicts were looming, and many said he had won the proxy.

As Mr. Burns and his deputy, David Cohen, left the building for the final time, thousands of CIA employees lined the hallways to “clause,” a sign of the respect they had achieved.

The lead negotiator faces a critical moment

Mr. Burns’ career has included many tense negotiations, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts to the Iran nuclear deal, which he and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, secretly launched in 2013.

But he says nothing matches the urgency of efforts to stop the conflict between Israel and Hamas before it spreads across the region.

“These were probably the most complex negotiations I’ve been involved in, in the sense that they were indirect talks that were removed twice,” Burns said.

Mr. Burns and Mr. Barnea negotiated with the Qataris and Egyptians, who spoke to the Hamas leadership based in Doha. These Hamas leaders negotiated with Hamas leaders in Gaza, who were hiding underground and held approximately 95 hostages, some alive and some dead.

“A lot of the negotiations have been passionate, but here there was this humanitarian dilemma of hostages and their families, and innocent civilians in Gaza who have been suffering in terrible conditions for the last 15 months,” Burns said on Wednesday. “It wasn’t just about scripts. It was about real human beings whose lives were in danger.

Mr. Burns made 19 trips to the region after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, to work on the Gaza war and hostage issues. Until this week, the talks loomed as the major unfinished business, or even failure, during his time leading the spy agency.

But under pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the opportunity negotiators had been looking for emerged. Under last-minute pressure from Mr. Burns and the rest of the Biden team, negotiators announced on Wednesday that they had reached an agreement.

Mr. Biden put Mr. Burns in charge of the hostage negotiations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put Mr. Barnea, the Israeli intelligence chief, in charge of the Israeli negotiations.

During the negotiations, Hamas and Israel prevented an agreement at various points.

In the end, it was the approach developed by Mr. Burns and the American team that decided the matter: a multi-stage plan to release some hostages in exchange for prisoners and aid. Some Israeli forces will be withdrawn. The thorny issues of governance in Gaza were left for subsequent negotiations.

Mr. Burns and Mr. Biden have pushed this formula for months. But what changed, Burns said, was that Hamas’ military leaders felt “besieged” and that their forces had deteriorated. On the other hand, Israel’s strikes on Iran and Hezbollah created political space to reach an agreement.

He said: “The Israeli political leadership began to see that perfection is not on the menu here, but they achieved much of what they wanted to achieve.”

Burns said that the question now before the Israelis is how to turn their tactical victories against Iran and Hezbollah into a strategic victory. Mr. Burns and his colleagues see the ceasefire and hostage release as a vital part of this transformation.

Speaking with fellow intelligence chiefs helped press the issue. “I think with intelligence work in general, you can be a little more conservative than if you were a diplomat,” Burns said.

Victory over the spies

There was a degree of caution among CIA insiders about Mr. Burns when he arrived at the sprawling Langley campus in early 2021.

Not every senior CIA officer stationed abroad agrees with the ambassador overseeing an embassy and, by extension, U.S. operations. But during his time in Amman, Jordan, and in Moscow, where CIA station chiefs interacted with the ambassador almost daily, his management style succeeded in attracting analysts, case officers, and even military veterans to the agency’s paramilitary arm.

Mr. Burns “never said something was his idea,” recalls Rob Richer, head of the agency’s office in Amman when Mr. Burns was ambassador.

“It’s like a vacuum cleaner in terms of what it absorbs,” he said. “Then he bounces ideas off the people around him.”

Current CIA officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they worked secretly, said Mr. Burns gained loyalty when he made two key decisions.

The first was during the fall of Kabul in 2021, when Mr Burns pledged to evacuate 9,000 commandos who worked with the agency, along with 25,000 of their family members.

The second was when he convinced Biden to allow a handful of CIA officers to remain in Ukraine after the president ordered all US government employees to leave the country. Their presence was key to the partnership and the CIA’s success, Mr. Burns said.

Putin the Whisperer

By the end of his first year, it was the war in Ukraine that tested Mr. Burns, just as he began to restore morale at the agency after the near-constant turmoil during Mr. Trump’s first term.

That played to his advantage: All those years he spent in Moscow, where Putin consolidated power (and interacted with the American ambassador) made him the government’s top expert on the Russian leader.

Starting with the “origin” of new intelligence arriving in the early fall of 2021, Mr. Burns becomes convinced that his old adversary intends to attempt to seize Kiev, a step toward restoring the empire of Peter the Great. .

Over objections within the intelligence community, Burns — along with Mr. Sullivan and Director of National Intelligence Avril D. Heinz — declassified the material, hoping to convince allies who thought Putin was bluffing.

The depth of the data showed that the CIA had penetrated deeply into the Russian military, obtaining its plans and even later its considerations regarding the deployment of nuclear weapons. Satellite images and accounts from sources who were clearly close to the Kremlin and communications make clear what the Russians were planning.

“What we gathered in this agency, but also elsewhere in the intelligence community, was remarkable, and it was quite detailed in terms of not only the military buildup in the late fall of ’21, but also the planning for the next day.” Burns said. However, he acknowledged that most NATO allies are skeptical. “It was very lonely in the late fall of ’21 because we and the British were the only two bodies who were convinced” of the intentions of the Russian leaders.

Mr. Biden sent Mr. Burns — rather than the secretary of state or the national security adviser — to Moscow on a mission to warn Mr. Putin and try to avoid war. But he found a Russian leader who had harbored his own grievances over the years and was more determined in his goal.

Mr. Burns has made his case for the damage Mr. Putin would do to his country if he invaded Ukraine. “I found Putin to be completely unapologetic about what we put him through,” he said.

The warning did nothing to stop the invasion. But Mr. Burns’ early warnings made it easier to rally allies and Congress.

However, Republicans said that even if that call was accurate, the CIA failed to understand other key events: how quickly the Afghan government could collapse, how Bashar al-Assad would flee Syria, and how Hamas was preparing to attack Israel.

The long game: China

One of Mr. Burns’s first acts was to establish a missionary center dedicated to China. It will be a place where analysis of China’s economic future, its technological prowess, its intentions toward Taiwan, and CIA operations come together. But it also poured more money and people — and Mandarin speakers — into the problem; Officials say China-related work today represents about 20 percent of the agency’s classified budget.

Mr. Burns attended a weekly meeting with senior officials from the China Centre. One CIA officer who worked on the China case for 30 years said the meeting was “a great tangible demonstration of his personal commitment when everything else was going on.”

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, promised an agency that would take more risks and conduct more aggressive covert work. But he praised Burns’ focus on China and pledged to build on his efforts.

Mr Burns said the agency had made progress in recruiting spies. This would represent a major comeback, 15 years after many CIA agents were arrested in China, and some were executed.

“China represents the greatest long-term geopolitical challenge our country faces,” Burns said. “It’s the top intelligence priority. It’s a concerted effort by the agency aimed at gathering intelligence. And it’s starting to pay off.”

He added that staying focused on priorities like China while giving the “overflowing inbox” of immediate crises the attention they need has been the trick in the past four years.

“That’s often the hardest thing in government,” Mr. Burns said. “But I think we managed the balance well.”