President-elect Joe Biden has made a good choice with his nomination of William “Bill” Burns as CIA director. Although not an intelligence professional, Burns has a distinguished public service record under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
A career State Department foreign service officer, Burns has previously worked closely with the CIA. The 64-year-old’s 1998-2001 posting as ambassador to Jordan and his 2005-2008 tenure as ambassador to Russia stand out here.
After all, the CIA’s Amman and Moscow stations are linchpins of its priority global operations. Between 2011 and 2014, Burns was the deputy secretary of state and thus afforded access to some of the most closely guarded CIA reporting. The diplomat won’t be entering the agency’s Langley, Virginia headquarters, blind. That said, Burns’s selection over a former CIA veteran like Mike Morell does give us two hints at Biden’s aspirations for the CIA’s next four years.
First, Biden wants an easy Senate confirmation process. Burns’s bipartisan credentials and his distance from the CIA’s Bush administration era interrogation program should offer easy confirmation (although some Republicans might judge Burns skeptically for his work in establishing the 2015 JCPOA Iran nuclear accord). Second, that Biden is leaning toward using the CIA more in its core espionage role of an intelligence collector and appraiser, rather than as a coercive actor. This would bear distinction from the Trump administration, which has authorized a number of aggressive CIA-led covert action programs related to China, Iran, and North Korea.
Burns’s experience in Moscow will certainly be welcomed by the CIA’s Russia hands. The Russians tend to be unpleasant in terms of their operational character to U.S. diplomats and CIA officers operating on Russian soil (and for that matter, elsewhere around the world). Burns will have learned from the Obama administration’s delusional “reset.” Interestingly, Burns’s tenure in Moscow coincided with then-British ambassador to Russia, Sir Tony Brenton. Brenton was then, and still remains, a Vladimir Putin sympathizer. Burns will also benefit from Biden’s freedom from President Trump’s delusion that Putin wants to be an American partner. If confirmed, Burns will face early challenges in the aftermath of forthcoming revelations of Russian attacks on U.S. government personnel.
While Burns’s personality falls more in the CIA analyst rather than operations officer tradition, he has at least one quality that will earn good favor with the latter group — his somewhat acerbic sense of humor. This is unusually valued in an environment where lives are regularly at risk, successes go undeclared, and failures can make front-page news.
The best example of Burns’s humor comes via his 2006 cable to Washington (published in 2010 by Wikileaks) as he attended the wedding of the son of a powerful strongman in the southern Russian province of Dagestan. Once a restive warzone, Dagestan had been pacified by Putin’s employment of loyal strongmen like Gadzhi Makhachev, force, and bribery. But Burns’s reporting on the 2006 wedding of Gadzhi’s son (now a powerful Dagestan parliamentarian belonging to Putin’s party) was truly special. Weaving amusing anecdotes with political analysis, Burns takes us inside a truly astonishing three-day wedding.
The food was abundant: “The cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room.” Burns also notes how the wedding party was shuttled around in Gadzhi’s rare Silver Phantom Rolls Royce. Burns recalls that “Gadzhi gave us a lift in the Rolls once in Moscow, but the legroom was somewhat constricted by the presence of a Kalashnikov carbine at our feet.” (Gadzhi was driving a Mercedes when he was killed in a 2013 Moscow traffic accident and is now remembered on an extensive memorial website). Interspersed between the stories of dancing children, flying $100 bills, and extravagant fireworks, other high-confidence assessments also appear. A recognition of Russia’s cultural affection for Vokda, for example.
Burns describes how “The 120 toasts [Gadzhi] estimated he drank would have killed anyone, hardened drinker or not, but Gadzhi had his Afghan waiter Khan following him around to pour his drinks from a special vodka bottle containing water. Still, he was much the worse for wear by evening’s end. At one point we caught up with him dancing with two scantily clad Russian women who looked far from home.” Then comes the “entrance of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, looking shorter and less muscular than in his photos, and with a somewhat cock-eyed expression on his face.” This is not a description Kadyrov will have enjoyed. Putin’s strongman in Chechnya, and a not-very-deniable cutout for some of Putin’s more sensitive assassinations, Kadyrov is both dangerous and deeply sensitive to personal criticism.
Burns continues, “after Ramzan sped off, the dinner and drinking – especially the latter – continued. A [local] FSB colonel sitting next to us, dead drunk, was highly insulted that we would not allow him to add ‘cognac’ to our wine. ‘It’s practically the same thing,’ he insisted, until a Russian FSB general sitting opposite told him to drop it. We were inclined to cut the Colonel some slack, though: he is head of the unit to combat terrorism in Dagestan, and Gadzhi told us that extremists have sooner or later assassinated everyone who has joined that unit.”
This exceptional use of access to intimate Russian power circles is to Burns’s credit. Gadzhi and the others Burns (and presumably also the CIA’s Moscow station chief) spoke to would not have been so forthcoming had Burns not charmed them. This cable, then, would make any CIA operations officer proud. Put simply, Biden’s pick would appear to have what it takes to be a successful CIA director.
