Biden picks career diplomat William Burns as CIA chief

WASHINGTON: US President-elect Joe Biden announced William Burns as his pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, tapping a retired veteran diplomat who helped lead secret talks with Iran.

Burns, along with Biden’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, will be tasked with rebuilding the US spy community’s reputation after it was heavily politicized under outgoing President Donald Trump.

Burns will be the first career diplomat to lead the CIA. He is currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading Washington foreign policy think-tank.

Presidents have generally turned to intelligence and military veterans or politicians to lead the CIA which, alongside the NSA, is one of the largest, best-funded components of the sprawling US intelligence community.

Burns has deep experience in security and intelligence matters after spending over three decades in the US foreign service, including a stint as ambassador to Russia from 2005-2008. “Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure,” Biden said in a statement.

Burns will replace Gina Haspel, an agency veteran who became the first female CIA director after Trump moved Mike Pompeo to be secretary of state. One of Trump’s most trusted aides, Pompeo was accused of catering to his boss’s whims and allowing intelligence material to be twisted to serve Trump’s policy desires while he led the agency.

Haspel, in the position since 2018, has been more low-key and disciplined, intelligence experts say, and even openly fell out of favour with the president in his final months in office when Trump rejected intelligence that Russia was again meddling in the election to help him.

Haspel’s long tenure in the agency included taking part in the torture of Al-Qaeda suspects after the September 1, 2001 attacks, now clearly an illegal activity that is one of the darker blemishes on the CIA’s reputation.

Burns served in the US diplomatic corps for 33 years, in jobs that took him around the world, including important roles in the Middle East in addition to his Russia posting.

He was central in the back-channel negotiations by the previous administration of Barack Obama that set the stage for the 2015 deal to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities — a deal that Trump summarily quit in 2018, with the support of Pompeo but not everyone in US intelligence circles.