For his first three years as the head of the C.I.A., William J. Burns was relentlessly focused on tripling the agency’s resources devoted to understanding China, and on countering Russia and its mysterious partnerships with Iran and North Korea.
But in the last 16 months of his tenure, the diplomat-turned-spy was plunged back into his old life.
Over four decades at the State Department, Mr. Burns came to be regarded as the master of creating “the back channel” — the title of his memoir — the invisible, essential outreach to allies and enemies alike.
As the Israel-Hamas war threatened to pull the Middle East into a larger conflagration, President Biden asked Mr. Burns to swim in that back channel once again, blending his intelligence role with his experience as a Middle East negotiator to help find a way to a cease-fire and the release of hostages held in Gaza.
Soon he was, by his own account, “on the phone every day” with David Barnea, the head of Israel’s foreign spy agency, and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani of Qatar, the link to Hamas, searching for an opening, for some leverage to bring about a truce and maybe a new Middle East.
The distinction between a diplomatic negotiator and an intelligence operative is vague in the region, and Mr. Burns’s arrivals and departures could be stealthy. “It makes it easier to come and go,” he said in his office on the 7th floor of the C.I.A., with its memorabilia of the agency’s operations and successes, and a framed map of the Russian plan to move in on Ukraine.
Mr. Burns is a singular figure in Washington. He has worked for Republicans and Democrats; in the early 2000s, he was George W. Bush’s ambassador in Moscow, where he got to know Vladimir V. Putin, making him the only member of the Biden inner circle who knows the Russian leader well.
Current and former officials said that had Kamala Harris been elected president last November, Mr. Burns was her selection for secretary of state, something he declined, with some diplomatic aversion, to confirm or deny. It would have been a return to the institution that defined his career — and where he met his wife, Lisa Carty, who is now at the U.S. mission to the United Nations. (They sat next to each other in the Foreign Service training institute. Students were seated alphabetically.)
When he arrived at the C.I.A., several veterans there concede that they were suspicious: Why was a career diplomat leading a spy agency?
By the time he packed up on Friday, the deal between Israel and Hamas barely holding together, and new conflicts on the horizon, several said he had won over the agency.
As Mr. Burns and his deputy, David Cohen, left the building for the last time, thousands of C.I.A. employees lined the corridors for a “clap out,” a sign of the respect they had achieved.
A master negotiator faces a critical moment
Mr. Burns’s career has included many tense negotiations, from Israeli-Palestinian conflicts to the Iran nuclear agreement, which he and Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, launched secretly in 2013.
But nothing, he says, matched the urgency of the effort to halt the Israel-Hamas conflict before it spread through the region.
“This probably has been the most complicated negotiations I have been involved in, in the sense it was indirect talks twice removed,” Mr. Burns said.
Mr. Burns and Mr. Barnea negotiated with the Qataris and the Egyptians, who spoke to the Hamas leadership based in Doha. Those Hamas leaders negotiated with the Hamas leaders in Gaza, who were hiding underground and held the remaining 95 or so hostages, some alive and some dead.
“Lots of negotiations are passionate, but here you had this human predicament of hostages and their families, innocent civilians in Gaza suffering terrible conditions for the last 15 months,” Mr. Burns said on Wednesday. “This wasn’t just about texts. It was about real human beings whose lives were in danger.”
Mr. Burns made 19 trips to the region after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to work on the issue of the Gaza war and the hostages. Until this week, the talks loomed as the major unfulfilled mission, or even failure, of his time leading the spy agency.
But under pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the opportunity negotiators were looking for appeared. With a last-minute push by Mr. Burns and the rest of Mr. Biden’s team, negotiators announced on Wednesday that they had reached a deal.
Mr. Biden put Mr. Burns in charge of the hostage negotiations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put Mr. Barnea, Israel’s spy chief, in charge of Israel’s negotiations.
Over the course of negotiations, both Hamas and Israel prevented an agreement at various points.
In the end it was an approach Mr. Burns and the American team developed that carried the day: a multiphase plan to release some hostages in return for prisoners and aid. Some Israeli troops will be pulled back. The thorny issues of governance of Gaza were left for later negotiations.
Mr. Burns and Mr. Biden had pushed this formulation for months. But what changed, Mr. Burns said, is that Hamas’s military commanders were feeling “beleaguered,” and their forces had been degraded. On the other side, the blows Israel landed against Iran and Hezbollah had created political space for an agreement.
“The Israeli political leadership is beginning to see that perfect is not on the menu here, but they have achieved a lot of what they wanted to achieve,” he said.
The question now for the Israelis, Mr. Burns said, is how to turn their tactical victories against Iran and Hezbollah into a strategic win. And Mr. Burns and his colleagues argue that a cease-fire and hostage release is a vital part of that transformation.
Talking to his fellow intelligence chiefs helped in pressing that case. “I think with intelligence work in general, you’re able to be a little bit more discreet than if you’re a diplomat,” Mr. Burns said.
Winning over the spies
There was a degree of wariness among the C.I.A.’s rank and file about Mr. Burns when he arrived at the sprawling Langley campus in early 2021.
Not every senior C.I.A. officer stationed abroad gets along with the ambassador overseeing an embassy — and thus American operations. But in his time in Amman, Jordan, and in Moscow, where the C.I.A. station chiefs interact with the ambassador almost daily, his management style won over analysts, case officers and even the military veterans in the paramilitary arm of the agency.
Rob Richer, the agency’s chief of station in Amman when Mr. Burns was the ambassador, recalled that Mr. Burns “never, ever says something was his idea.”
“He is like a vacuum cleaner in terms of what he sucks in,” he said. “And then he bounces ideas off of the people around him.”
Current C.I.A. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they work undercover, said Mr. Burns earned loyalty when he made two key decisions.
The first was during the fall of Kabul in 2021, when Mr. Burns vowed that the 9,000 commandoes who had worked with the agency would be evacuated, along with 25,000 family members.
The second was when he persuaded Mr. Biden to allow a handful of C.I.A. officers to remain in Ukraine after the president had ordered all American government personnel to leave the country. Their presence, Mr. Burns said, was key to the partnership and the C.I.A.’s success.
The Putin whisperer
By the end of his first year, it was the war in Ukraine that tested Mr. Burns, just as he was beginning to restore morale at an agency after near-constant turmoil during Mr. Trump’s first term.
It played to his strength: All those years in Moscow, as Mr. Putin consolidated power (and interacted with the American ambassador) made him the government’s chief expert on the Russian leader.
Starting with a “mother lode” of new intelligence that arrived in the early fall of 2021, Mr. Burns became convinced that his old nemesis intended to try to take Kyiv, a step toward restoring Peter the Great’s empire. .
Over objections inside the intelligence community, Mr. Burns — along with Mr. Sullivan and Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence — authorized declassification of the material, in hopes of convincing allies who thought Mr. Putin was bluffing.
The depth of the data demonstrated that the C.I.A. had penetrated deeply into Russia’s military, obtaining its plans and later even considerations about deploying nuclear weapons. Satellite photos, accounts from sources who were clearly close to the Kremlin and communications laid out what the Russians were planning.
“What we collected at this agency, but also elsewhere in the intelligence community, was exquisite, that was quite detailed in terms of not just the military buildup in the late fall of ’21, but also the planning for the day after,” Mr. Burns said. Still, he acknowledged, most NATO allies were skeptical. “It was pretty lonely in the late fall of ’21 because we and the Brits were the only two services who were convinced” of the Russian leaders’ intentions.
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 head off war. But he found a Russian leader who had stewed in his grievances over the years and was only more intent on his goal.
Mr. Burns made his case about the damage Mr. Putin would do to his own country if he invaded Ukraine. “I found Putin utterly unapologetic about what we laid out in front of him,” he said.
The warning did nothing to stop the invasion. But Mr. Burns’s early warnings made it easier to rally the allies, and Congress.
Still, Republicans have said that even if that call was accurate, the C.I.A. failed in understanding 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 create a mission center dedicated to China. It would be a place where analysis of China’s economic future, its technical prowess, its intentions toward Taiwan and the C.I.A.’ s operations would come together. But he also poured more money and people — and Mandarin speakers — at the problem; today China-related work accounts for about 20 percent of the agency’s classified budget, officials say.
Mr. Burns attended a weekly meeting with top officials from the China center. The meeting, said one C.I.A. officer who has worked on the China issue for 30 years, was “a great concrete manifestation of his personal commitment when everything else was going on.”
John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the C.I.A., has promised an agency that takes more risk and more aggressive covert action. But he has praised Mr. Burns’s focus on China and pledged to build on his efforts.
Mr. Burns said the agency has made progress recruiting spies. That would mark a significant comeback, 15 years after many of the C.I.A.’s operatives in China were caught, and some executed.
“China is the biggest long-term geopolitical challenge our country faces,” Mr. Burns said. “And it’s the biggest intelligence priority. It is a concerted effort on the part of the agency that is aimed at collecting intelligence. And it is beginning to pay dividends.”
Keeping focus on priorities like China while giving “the overflowing inbox” of immediate crises the attention they need has been the trick of the past four years, he said.
“It is often the hardest thing in government,” Mr. Burns said. “But I think we have managed the balance pretty well.”
