Joe Biden announced Monday, January 11, 2021 that he had chosen the former number two in American diplomacy William Burns, one of the architects of dialogue with Iran as the future president Democrat wants to revive, to take the head of the largest intelligence agency in the United States. With Avril Haines, appointed to become national intelligence coordinator, this 64-year-old former career diplomat who served under both Democratic and Republican presidencies will have the heavy task of turning the page on Donald Trump’s administration. The outgoing president has indeed constantly despised, even contradicted, his intelligence agencies, by denying or minimizing for example Russian interference in the 2016 election which brought him to the White House. And he was also accused of wanting to politicize these institutions by appointing faithful to their head.
If his appointment is confirmed by the Senate, William Burns will become the first career diplomat to head the CIA, a powerful American counter-intelligence agency with 21,000 employees. He is neither a politician, nor a soldier, nor a man of the intelligence seraglio, like most of his predecessors. “Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage in keeping our people and our country safe,” Joe Biden said in a statement. “He shares my deep conviction that intelligence must be apolitical,” added the president-elect who is due to take office on January 20.
William Burns is to succeed Gina Haspel, director of the CIA since 2018, who herself had replaced Mike Pompeo, one of the most loyal Trumpists, when the Republican president appointed him secretary of state. A diplomat for 33 years, notably as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, William Burns retired from the diplomatic corps in 2014 before chairing the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, a think tank on international relations.
“The world has changed”
He is the second Deputy Secretary of State to former Democratic President Barack Obama to be integrated into Joe Biden’s national security team, after Antony Blinken, appointed to head US diplomacy. The name of William Burns had also circulated to become Secretary of State. Under Barack Obama, he was at the origin of the rapprochement with Iran, by conducting secret negotiations in 2011 and 2012 in Oman with this enemy country despite the absence of diplomatic relations with the United States. These discussions then made it possible to open official ones between Tehran and the great powers (United States, China, Russia, Germany, France, United Kingdom), which resulted in the 2015 agreement supposed to prevent the Islamic Republic to acquire nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump slammed the door in 2018 on this agreement, which he deemed insufficient, and has since reinstated and tightened all US sanctions against Iran. Joe Biden has pledged to return to the agreement, and to lift the sanctions, on condition that Tehran reverts to the restrictions on its nuclear program, from which he has started to withdraw in retaliation for the “maximum pressure” exerted by Washington.
“The Trump administration’s maximum pressure strategy was pretty insane,” Bill Burns said at a conference in October before the US presidential election, hailing the “reasonable” stance of the then Democratic candidate. But he warned that a return to the agreement was “much easier said than done” because of “the damage done in recent years”. More broadly, the diplomat had warned against “the illusion” of being able “simply, with a wave of a magic wand, to restore America’s relations and influence as we saw them in 2016”, “because the world has changed ”.
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