US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday 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.
Currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading Washington foreign policy think-tank, Burns will be the first career diplomat to lead the CIA.
Presidents have generally turned to intelligence or military veterans or politicians to lead the largest, best-funded component of the sprawling US intelligence community.
But 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.
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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, politically ambitious 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.
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.
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At Carnegie since 2014, Burns defended the idea that Washington should remain a leader and support multilateralism as Trump radically reshaped the US world role, cancelling treaties, bullying allies, and taking a US-first, go-it-alone stance.
“If Donald Trump had been reelected for a second four years as president, then American democracy would have gone straight into the intensive care unit,” Burns said in an online conference last month.
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