President-elect Joe Biden’s choice of William J. Burns as CIA director means he intends for American intelligence to serve American diplomacy in a way unseen since the Dulles brothers led those forces in the 1950s. That’s an urgent and monumental mission.
Burns has served 33 years as a diplomat at home and abroad. No CIA director has had that breadth and depth of experience in foreign affairs. His selection is being hailed by red-blooded veterans of the CIA’s clandestine service and the antiwar women of Code Pink alike.
In the past, America’s top spies and diplomats have gone to war with one another more bitterly than with the nation’s foes, fighting “a battle royal” over the command and control of foreign policy, in the words of George P. Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. You most probably won’t see that vicious infighting for the next four years.
Burns has a bond of brotherhood with Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, who succeeded him as deputy secretary of state six years ago. Together, they are going to have to work as the cold warriors Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles did when they ran the CIA and the State Department under President Dwight D. Eisenhower — except instead of fighting the war on international communism, they will have to fight the very dictators Trump has mimicked and admired.
And they will have a far harder task: to rebuild American statecraft out of the rubble Trump leaves behind, much in the way the United States worked to make democracies out of Germany and Japan after World War II.
If that sounds a little dramatic, look around at what Trump has wrought.
As Burns wrote in May in the Atlantic: “The catastrophically sad result after nearly four years of his leadership is that government agencies are adrift; career experts are ignored or maligned on everything, including their weather forecasts and their intelligence assessments; corruption is as rampant as oversight is repressed; and the whims of a clinically self-absorbed president overpower good governance.”
Things have gone downhill speedily since.
When the CIA was created in 1947, its central role was to inform and support the work of the White House and the State Department as they set out to defend the ideals of democracy in a war-torn world. The job was to know the world. But the Cold War warped that mission. The CIA soon set out to change the world.
Political coups and paramilitary missions, both silent and noisy, made the CIA’s kingmakers a paramount force. It was relatively easy to overthrow Iran, or put the king of Jordan on the payroll or run guns to the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Red Army. The man who first set the CIA’s clandestine service on the road to secret wars — George Kennan, the most respected diplomat of his era — later called it “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
Then the war on terror made the CIA a killing force, the warden of secret prisons, the flight controller of lethal drones, a military role far beyond its charter. The harder work of stealing secrets through espionage and understanding their meaning through analysis went by the wayside, most tragically when the CIA made the case for war in Iraq with terrifying reports of weapons of mass destruction wielded by Saddam Hussein. The weapons weren’t there.
The mission of gathering and analyzing intelligence, and presenting it unvarnished to the president, was and remains the CIA’s most vital service. Burns will surely work to renew and strengthen it. That would serve to protect and defend the United States at home and abroad. The next president is likely to listen closely when the CIA gives a warning — unlike, say, President George W. Bush in August 2001, when presented with the headline in his daily brief that read: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
Burns comes from an old school — the school of public service — disparaged and partly dismantled under Trump. His father led the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He entered the Foreign Service as American diplomats and spies were held hostage in Tehran 40 years ago.
He has been a voracious consumer of the CIA’s intelligence — as assistant secretary of state for the Middle East and the ambassador to Russia under Bush, then as undersecretary for political affairs and deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama — and, notably, as the man who began the secret negotiations that led to Iran’s agreement to give up its nuclear program, a deal abrogated by Trump.
“He’s worked well with us on any number of sensitive programs,” Douglas London, a longtime CIA station chief and, at his retirement in 2018, chief of counterterrorism for South and Southwest Asia, told Foreign Policy in a text message on Monday.
The dwindling of America’s diplomatic corps — almost two-thirds of career ambassadors have departed — and the career-ending damage inflicted on distinguished envoys like Marie Yovanovitch, dismissed over Trump’s impeachable conduct toward Ukraine, are part and parcel of the president’s vicious attacks on American intelligence and his refusal to read the daily briefs it offers to the White House. The president saw the CIA and the State Department as useful only if they served his personal and political whims.
Trump has so weakened America that it will take a generation to repair our strengths. That work will require a recognition that intelligence and diplomacy, not military might, are the real source of American power abroad. We cannot shoot our way out of the mess we are in.
America faces a new threat, one in which Trump had neither the will nor courage to defend the nation against. China has stolen the security files on 22 million Americans, including thousands of people in the intelligence community, in a bid to extend its surveillance state into this country. Russia, after monkey-wrenching the 2016 election to help Trump win power, has used cyberespionage to worm its way deep into the most crucial nodes of the U.S. government.
The new struggle we are engaged in is political warfare — an information war in which the battle space is the human mind. To fight that war, America will have to mobilize as it did in the Cold War, with a single-minded dedication. And to help win it, Burns must revive the core mission of the CIA: to understand the world, to look over the horizon and see the dangers that lie ahead.
