The critical work of CIA Director William Burns

OPINION:

In the spring of 2010, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta met in Moscow with his counterpart, former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, who at the time was serving as director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR.

A few months later, after the FBI arrested 10 Russian deep undercover intelligence operatives, the two men negotiated in just a few days the largest spy swap since the end of the Cold War.

Current CIA Director William Burns, then serving as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, was on the hook to deal with the spy swap’s policy fallout. Having previously served as ambassador to Russia, Mr. Burns smoothly guided interagency coordination and witnessed firsthand how Mr. Panetta expertly leveraged his past interaction with Mr. Fradkov.

Mr. Burns, who also served as deputy secretary of state and ambassador to Jordan, among other posts, understands that in both diplomacy and espionage, personal relationships fuel the U.S. national security mission.

CIA officers and diplomats learn to appreciate cross-cultural differences. They study foreign languages and develop an aptitude for seeing the world through the eyes of their foreign interlocutors.

U.S. government relationships with foreign states and even non-state actors can resemble a Venn diagram, with shaded spaces of shared interests, unshaded space where our interests will never intersect, and a gray area where there are opportunities to find common ground and sometimes negotiate official agreements.

But while diplomats and intelligence officers share some tactics, they have separate and distinct missions and their paths will often diverge.

Diplomats are responsible for carrying out policy. The intelligence community’s mandate is to recruit spies, steal secrets and deliver analysis to the president without any predisposed ideological or political bias.

Mr. Burns, a career diplomat-turned-spymaster, must ensure that the agency he runs collects and analyzes sensitive source reporting on the most wickedly complex national security threats, including transnational terrorism, Iran, North Korea, Russia and China.

Mr. Burn’s peripatetic work schedule has featured high-level meetings with not only his foreign intelligence officer counterparts but also heads of state.

As CIA director, he has visited Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Greece. He traveled to Afghanistan in April 2021 and returned a few months later to meet with Taliban senior leader Abdul Ghani Baradar.

In November 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly phoned into the meeting Mr. Burns held in Moscow with senior Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov. A year later, Mr. Burns met with Mr. Fradkov’s successor as Russian spy chief, SVR Director Sergey Naryshkin.

Mr. Burns has made numerous trips to Kyiv, including to meet with his intelligence counterparts and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And this past June, with U.S. relations with China at a low point following the spy balloon incident, Mr. Burns turned up in Beijing for meetings with his intelligence counterparts.

The Biden administration might reveal Mr. Burns’ travel destinations, but it has taken great pains to conceal the substance of his meetings, hoping to preserve a vitally important covert communications channel.

The CIA director’s first priority when he travels overseas is to engage the deployed agency officers and their families, to walk the ground with them, appreciate their challenges, and share ideas about how to make their mission more effective.

But the director also reports to the president in a clandestine channel immune from public scrutiny. He enjoys a high degree of trust and reliability with foreign allies and adversaries alike.

President Biden has rightly recognized Mr. Burns’ important national security role by elevating him recently to a full position in the Cabinet, underscoring the critical importance of the work he and the agency do.

Mr. Burns’ high-value counsel to the president and his team, especially Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, is critical for making informed foreign policy decisions.

We do not have diplomatic relations with the Taliban, but we need to talk to them. Russia is waging the most barbaric war on European soil since World War II, but we must find ways to engage with the Kremlin even though the U.S.-Russian relationship is at its worst since the dark days of the Cold War.

There are always areas of mutual concern — counterterrorism and weapons proliferation chief among them — on which we need to engage our adversaries.

And even our closest allies appreciate the opportunity to have a senior-level conversation walled off from public scrutiny, especially when it is with the first career diplomat ever to lead the CIA.

• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @DanielHoffmanDC.