Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, left, shakes hands with CIA director William Burns in Kyiv, Ukraine, December 21, 2024.
If gifts are anything to go by, the Central Intelligence Agency has been racking up more goodwill across the globe than the State Department over the past year, a major departure from the agency’s cloak-and-dagger reputation for assassinating world leaders and meddling in international affairs. According to the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol, through his travels abroad, CIA director Bill Burns racked up an impressive list of foreign-borne gifts: an $18,000 astrograph, an $11,000 Omega watch, and a ceremonial Saudi war sword.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for his part, received from Austria’s foreign minister “Three Photographs from the Centropa Project & Book: Best of Austropop” (valued at $600) in addition to several acrylic landscape portraits.
(Individuals don’t get to keep diplomatic gifts, incidentally; they stay inside the government and are often put on display in museum exhibits.)
It is of course unfair to judge American statesmen by the gifts they’ve received from foreign dignitaries, but State Department and intelligence officials say that in many ways the gift differential accurately describes the value placed on Burns over Blinken, by American politicians, diplomats, and foreign governments. One outgoing State Department official put it bluntly: “When you want someone to drink champagne, you send Blinken. When you need someone to actually fix shit in Brazil, the Middle East, or Russia, you send Burns.”
Reporting over the past four years bears this out. In 2023, Burns was sent to Beijing to work a back channel with China and smooth over relations, assuring the government that the Chinese spy balloon incident had “blown over.” As the State Department broadcast its unflinching support for Ukraine in press conferences, it was Burns who was quietly tasked to take secret meetings with Ukrainian officials to offer strategic support, while also demanding greater transparency given their reluctance to share intelligence with the Americans funding their defense.
And when national security adviser Jake Sullivan upended a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by clumsily bringing up the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, leading MBS to scream at him, it was left to Burns, an Arabic speaker, to fly back and clean up his mess.
These are just a handful of examples that get at something hard to remember in our current era of realpolitik and pitchfork populism. As one former CIA officer described Burns, “Being good at your job isn’t about how long you’ve served in Washington. It’s about being good at your job. And sometimes, rarely, a public servant or a diplomat can genuinely become something more than a mere puppet for the sitting administration or party: an actor who prioritizes duty to his country.”
The overreliance on Burns is by all accounts not due to his eagerness to oversee major decisions, but rather the ineptitude of Biden’s foreign-policy team.
But while CIA employees are generally in agreement that Burns has overseen agency operations skillfully and to their liking, he has rubbed some members of the intelligence community the wrong way with his outsized diplomatic role, which is usually left to State. “Burns is without doubt the best and smartest living American diplomat. But if you recall, diplomats are supposed to work out of the State Department, not Langley,” a former intelligence officer said.
After being passed over for secretary of state early on in the Biden transition, the last-minute withdrawal of Thomas Donilon secured Burns a spot as CIA director. Given this awkward placement, Burns has been forced over the past four years in his role as spy chief to conduct diplomacy at a level that Blinken, Sullivan, and National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk seem incapable of doing.
This overreliance on Burns is by all accounts not due to Burns’s eagerness to oversee major decisions, but rather the ineptitude of Biden’s foreign-policy team. (Former CIA assistant director Eric Traupe has even said publicly that Sullivan and Blinken have relied on Burns for diplomatic advice.)
Burns served as a diplomat for 32 years. He is fluent in Russian, Arabic, and French. He is the son of Army major general William F. Burns, a former deputy secretary of state for arms control, and the first U.S. special envoy to denuclearization with former Soviet states, under the Nunn-Lugar Act. Burns the younger holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford, and sailed through the Senate Intelligence Committee with unanimous approval, because even the GOP fringe respects his ability to effectively negotiate on behalf of the United States.
Blinken has no such experience. A former journalist, his time spent on the National Security Council was overwhelmed with speechwriting. His time serving Biden as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was focused on advocating and shaping the then-senator’s support for the war in Iraq. His grandest strategic contribution was helping to formulate the widely condemned plan to partition Iraq into three separate ethnic regions after the U.S. invasion failed spectacularly.
Ultimately, Blinken will go down as a yes-man to an unpopular president and a genocidal war. It’s hard to imagine that Burns would have inhabited the same legacy. While by no means a firebrand, Burns’s careful and studied attention to reality, and not political inclinations of Washington, might have headed off the atrocities in Gaza, the ever-expanding conflict in the Middle East, and the inevitability of war in Ukraine.
Perhaps the best articulation of Burns’s strategic foresight comes in a leaked memo from 2008, entitled “NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES.” The memo, written at the tail end of the Bush presidency, warned that Ukraine joining NATO would not be tolerated by Russia, and could destabilize not just Ukraine, but also Western Europe.
“Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit … Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat.” Burns wrote. “NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.”
Underscoring this point is another leaked 2008 memo, written by Burns, and sent to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players … I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
Despite Burns being forced to watch his diplomatic guidance ignored across three administrations, he has maintained his pledge to serve his country, regardless of the administration. On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was Burns who flew to Moscow and patiently negotiated with Putin over adherence to clandestine rules for a war he had sought early in his career to avoid. After the war began, it once again fell to Burns to address what he described as “a genuine risk of … the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.”
Last year, at the same time that Antony Blinken took the stage in Ukraine to play “Rockin’ in the Free World”—an homage to both his ignorance of Neil Young and his childhood dream of becoming a musician—it was Burns who secretly transited the Middle East, quietly, steadfastly, desperately in search of peace for the region.
At least he got a cool sword for his efforts.
