CIA Director William Burns’ high profile international diplomatic role for the Biden White House is part of a distinct change from past U.S. administrations in how to utilize intelligence and employ one of the country’s top spy chiefs. In addition to leveraging intelligence by strategically declassifying it for actionable purposes, employing the Intelligence Community and Director Burns to achieve diplomatic goals has become one of the Biden administration’s favored tools. Assessing the wisdom of this direction, like most intelligence questions, depends on limited information, dynamic variables, and the test of time. A look at the pattern of such practices shows the evolution as well as the risks and benefits.
The CIA director’s role as firefighter for the crisis du jour – most recently attempting to negotiate a hostage-release deal between Israel and Hamas – is the subject of much debate in and beyond the Agency. It was the CIA’s venture into intelligence diplomacy that accounted for my first and most substantive collaboration with the man who would become today’s CIA director. In 2002, I was chosen to represent the CIA in secret discussions with Libya that were led by Burns, who was then assistant secretary of state for Near East policy, and which he chronicled in his book, “The Back Channel.” The discreet dialogue was intended as a way to find closure for the families of the 270 victims of Muammar Qaddafi’s downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, and as a means for Libya to escape the constraints of its status as a pariah nation.
It is a sensitive political issue under the best of conditions and, at the time, America was only some six months removed from al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack on the U.S. homeland. The White House was understandably concerned with keeping the engagement quiet and securing terms that would justify to the American people a willingness to move past Qaddafi’s horrific terror attack. I was the CIA’s operational chief for the North African region, so I knew the issues, the people, and the players, and I was more politically expendable than a member of the Agency’s more senior and higher-profile executive suite, should the meetings leak to the press.
While the Libyans sent their own senior diplomatic envoys for the negotiations with then Assistant Secretary Burns, back-channel or not, those conversations featured a large room of people from both sides, as well as our third-party facilitator, a rather high-profile Middle East figure who has publicly boasted about his role, but whose name the CIA would not allow me to use in this article. I was there for discreet, one-on-one parallel discussions with Qaddafi’s confidante and intelligence chief, Libyan External Security Organization Director Musa Kusa (who later served as Qaddafi’s foreign minister before defecting to the United Kingdom amid a rebel uprising and Western bombardments in 2011).
So after attending the opening of the first larger group where Kusa and I were introduced to one another, we broke off to begin a journey that would ultimately extend well beyond the issue at hand. The first task was securing Libya’s acceptance of responsibility for the bombing and its provision of compensation for the victims. Qaddafi wanted to get himself out of America’s post-9/11 crosshairs, judging correctly that Libya, along with Iraq, might be next on Washington’s target list. Kusa, who knew the United States well from his time as a student at Michigan State University, had counseled a quid pro quo to his boss that would satisfy American interests and Qaddafi’s pride, and would facilitate the normalization of relations to restore Libya’s international economic engagement.
Burns was supportive as I worked closely with him to synch and underscore the steps he had outlined for the Libyan delegation concerning what the United States required for normalization and the lifting of sanctions. As head of the U.S. delegation, Burns was a generous facilitator, providing support for the private meetings with Kusa, including policy-level context for my one-on-one conversations, and never trying to micromanage the intelligence aspects of the discussions. In turn, I kept Burns fully apprised of my conversations with Kusa to assure there was no room for daylight between the messages Qaddafi was receiving from either Burns’ diplomatic counterparts or from Kusa, assuming he would relay my messages accurately. And when the two sides were at an impasse at the brink of an agreement, I held a private meeting with Kusa in which I assured him that what was now on the table was as good as it would get for Libya and that the United States would indulge no further concessions. He understood, promised to advise Qaddafi accordingly, and the agreement was subsequently finalized.
Expanding the Dialogue: Counterterrorism and WMD
That initial intelligence-diplomacy success would bear yet more fruit. Kusa was interested in continuing our private meetings. With normalization now having been accepted, the dialogue expanded to include counterterrorism cooperation. After all, some of al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders were Libyans who had begun their jihadist careers as members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an organization committed to revolution against Qaddafi and, as such, our mutual enemies. Kusa and I met across the globe in what would be a robust and productive counterterrorism dialogue that facilitated ongoing U.S. efforts. So closely held were these meetings at the time, that another U.S. Intelligence Community agency, unaware of the officially sanctioned contact, happened upon evidence of my meetings with Kusa and had readied a counterintelligence reference until their concerns reached the CIA’s executive suite and were dismissed.
After many months, Kusa and I had established a degree of trust in our relationship. In addition to the resolution of the Pan Am 103 negotiations, our dialogue involved events including my impromptu outreach when U.S. Marines were required to evacuate an American embassy in a troubled African capital where Libya maintained significant influence, and my tense passing of a scripted warning from the White House as U.S. troops prepared to invade Iraq in 2003 that Libya would be “either with us, or against us.”
Kusa and I had each been careful to under-promise and over-deliver and had proved reliable conduits. Kusa led a brutal organization with no small amount of blood on his hands, and the United States had been his main enemy for years. But he was polished and charismatic, sported custom-made Italian suits bought during his European trips, and was eager to exercise his English, which he hadn’t used since his university days in the United States. More importantly, Kusa was comfortable with me in a dialogue free of judgment.
It almost surprised Kusa one day, as we found ourselves laughing over stories from our mutually misspent youths that he caught himself, and observed almost rhetorically, “I guess we have become friends.” Indeed, empathy is a spy’s most critical tool and rapport the grease in developing such relationships, and likewise a valuable trait for diplomats of any ilk, intelligence or otherwise. But empathy is not sympathy, and CIA case officers must concurrently be genuine and likewise mindful not to blur the lines. And so it was over drinks in a busy local bar in the bustling European city where we had just held one such series of meetings that Kusa invited me to visit Libya.
I smiled, thanked him, and politely responded with what I thought was a similar platitude in expressing interest in someday having Kusa host me once the diplomatic conditions allowed. At the moment, I assumed Kusa was feeling particularly high spirited and that his offer was merely a reflection of the typical Arab hospitality I had become accustomed to over my long career in the Middle East. But Kusa corrected me. Referring to me as “Brother Douglas,” he explained this was something more. Qaddafi, he explained, was interested in making a deal with the United States to cease its nascent nuclear program and surrender its weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons. Kusa was not inviting me for a social visit but rather extending an offer that I come with a delegation of our technical experts to achieve exactly that and guaranteeing our access to any site we wished to visit.
This was the historic chapter preceding the events later captured in former CIA Director Tenet’s book, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA” and William Tobey’s further depiction of Kusa’s role in his December 2017 essay for Studies In Intelligence, entitled “The Intersection of Intelligence and Policy: Cooperation in the Libya WMD Disarmament Case.” The negotiations that would follow that indeed resulted in Qaddafi giving up those weapons and beginning the process of dismantling the WMD program, had been enabled by the CIA’s use of intelligence diplomacy during the earlier talks with Qaddafi over Pan Am 103 and then in counterterrorism cooperation.
Disbelief Among CIA Leadership
Still, when I reported Kusa’s offer to superiors at the CIA, rather than being greeted with elation, the Agency leadership’s reaction was shock and disbelief. I was aware of the Agency’s sensitive covert campaign against nuclear proliferator AQ Khan to disrupt his support to Libya’s program, as well as other international pariahs, that had been ongoing for some time. Led by my friend and CIA colleague James “Mad Dog” Lawler, the highly successful initiative would unravel much of Khan’s proliferation network and lead to his arrest in 2004. But so certain was CIA leadership in 2003 that Qaddafi would never consider acknowledging, let alone surrendering, his program, the Agency’s executive suite dismissed my report. Moreover, I was accused of having made it up to promote my own career.
When Kusa pressed me for a response, I had to keep him at arm’s length, offering that the proposal was still being considered. He would ultimately fly to London along with Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and make the same offer to our British counterparts, who believed the proposal genuine, and related as much back to the CIA’s leadership.
A CIA executive would replace me in the subsequent meetings with Kusa to further arrangements for the U.S. team’s travel to Libya, as well as for continued negotiations and ultimately direct engagement with Qaddafi. After being replaced in the dialogue, I was promptly shipped off to a South Asian conflict zone as base chief.
The episode is illustrative not only for what CIA can accomplish diplomatically but also the risk it assumes when going from spectator to participant. Qaddafi’s receptivity to working with the Agency speaks to the respect afforded to the CIA as a reliable and discreet alternative diplomatic partner owing to its low-profile nature, the Agency’s mystique, and the relationships that experienced intelligence officers forge and leverage with friends and foes alike.
Autocrats, despots, and dictators tend to project beliefs from their own optics and systems, in which security services tend to wield disproportionate power and influence over that held by their diplomatic services. Thus they see the CIA as a more well-informed, reliable, and discreet partner when it comes to sensitive matters in which the requirement for public posturing mitigates against their flexibility for compromise. Incredibly enough, Saddam Hussein failed to argue against the White House’s 2002 claim that he was concealing weapons of mass destruction because he believed that the all-but-omniscient CIA already knew that he had no such weapons and that the accusations were just a pretense to invade.
Public Yet Discreet
Now-CIA Director Burns has travelled more and arguably garnered more media attention than any of his predecessors, but despite claims in hyperbolic headlines, he makes no “secret trips” for “secret meetings.” His large U.S. Air Force plane and the required support and security footprints to handle the complicated logistics of VIP meetings precludes secrecy these days. Certainly, the Agency generally doesn’t share the director’s travel details publicly nor comment substantively on the director’s meetings, but his or her involvement most often is leaked by the administration or by foreign counterparts. Still, whereas diplomatic envoys travel with entourages of strap hangers and journalists, and photo ops are a necessity, the CIA director’s travel is discreet, with minimal escorts, no press, and the conversations largely held in confidence.
Neither is such involvement by the CIA director unprecedented. In 1998, then-Director Tenet assumed the diplomatic lead for the United States during the Wye River negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. The CIA’s diplomatic role in this process had actually begun years earlier during the Reagan administration and initially assigned to senior Agency officer and famed Arabist Robert Ames. The experienced and well-respected CIA operations officer had long and productive relationships in the region, perhaps closer still to the Palestinians. Sadly, before seeing his effort come to fruition, Ames perished along with 16 other Americans among the 63 dead in Lebanese Hezbollah’s April 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
Tenet, who chose not to attend the Wye River agreement’s White House signing, was praised for his contributions by both Netanyahu and Arafat, as well as by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who hailed the CIA director for his “critical assistance.” President Bill Clinton observed that Tenet “had an unusual, almost unprecedented, role to play because of the security considerations.”
But that kind of role for the CIA was not without its critics. Former CIA Director and later Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed that “because of the highly-visible role, the agency runs the risk of being caught between the two potentially conflicting parties.” The risk is that the Agency might appear to be taking sides, losing influence with one party or the other, and its officers on the ground could become targets of rejectionist groups. The media quoted another, unnamed former senior U.S. defense official who called the CIA’s involvement “a serious mistake.”
In late 2021, ahead of Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Joe Biden dispatched Burns to Moscow to warn Vladimir Putin of the consequences of such an invasion. Burns also has trekked across the globe to help the administration overcome dustups with China after the February 2023 U.S. downing of a Chinese spy balloon and with Saudi Arabia in 2022 over several issues, both cases in which traditional bilateral communication channels had broken down. In November 2022, Burns delivered a warning to Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin of the price the Kremlin would pay were it to use a tactical nuclear device in Ukraine.
Director Burns has made multiple trips to Kyiv, briefing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on sensitive intelligence concerning Russia and shoring up the Ukrainian leader’s confidence in American support and resolve. Likewise, the CIA and its director appear to be deeply involved in the ongoing negotiations aimed at freeing hostages of Hamas and ending the bloodshed in Gaza. In that case, Burns’ travel included multiple stops throughout the Middle East and Europe in an effort he described to news media as akin to “pushing a very big rock up a very steep hill.”
U.S. statements, media reports, and results – at least what is available publicly – indicate that Burns has produced favorable results on a number of diplomatic issues. The Kremlin’s threats of nuclear apocalypse have appeared to subside for now; Burns’ initial travel to Beijing in May 2023 paved the way for more substantive diplomatic engagement with China at a difficult time, including a meeting the next month between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and a direct summit five months later between Biden and Xi; and Burns’ discussions with a reportedly perturbed Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman facilitated more robust engagements with the U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Blinken, and ultimately a presidential visit from Biden. Burns’ journeys to Ukraine reportedly have paid off on the battlefield, influencing Zelenskyy’s decision-making and how American weapons are used in the conflict.
However, in August 2021, as U.S. forces at Kabul International Airport raced against an approaching deadline for their withdrawal, Director Burns’ purported secret meeting with Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s point person during negotiations with the United States and acting deputy prime minister for economic affairs, failed to extend the deadline for American troops to withdraw from the airport or improve Taliban cooperation on the ground. And unraveling Gaza and the Arab-Israeli conflict more broadly would seem to require much more than intelligence diplomacy alone.
The Risks of Intelligence Diplomacy
Still, for all of its good, intelligence diplomacy carries costs. In the realm of declassifying intelligence to produce action, for example, regardless of the degree of sanitization to protect sources and methods, each declassified item shines a light concerning an issue, organization, or individual against whom the United States is collecting information clandestinely through human or technical sources.
Great care is taken in sanitizing classified information for public disclosure when required by the statutory “duty to warn” requirement or, as is the case for Russia’s war on Ukraine, for disruption, messaging, and political objectives. But for all the effort in striking the right balance to leverage the intelligence while protecting the source, damage does occur. The targets review and adjust their own security postures to identify and neutralize the means of the exposure, be it a technical vulnerability, or human being who, if caught, often pays with their lives. Even if they don’t find the leak or vulnerability, they further harden their defenses, increasing the collection challenges, and naturally putting both existing and future collection at risk.
I also don’t hear much cheering among friends and former colleagues at the State Department over Burns’ prominent current role. While many intellectually appreciate the merit of his service and unique aptitude for the role, they express concern for the impact on the State Department’s credibility and influence with foreign counterparts if senior foreign officials become conditioned to seeing greater value in speaking with a CIA representative than with U.S. ambassadors, assistant secretaries, or even the secretary of state. This dynamic can also erode collaboration and trust between State and CIA officers working together.
And having plied my spycraft across four decades, I have lingering concerns about the impact, such as how the focus on intelligence diplomacy might detract from the CIA’s core missions: stealing secrets (collection), analyzing intelligence, and conducting covert action. These are no small tasks and often entail life-and-death decisions – and results. As such, they require a great deal of attention, resources, and oversight. And when Burns is travelling to put out fires, not only is someone else minding the store, but the machine at CIA pivots to support his efforts. Personnel and time are finite resources at an organization that is arguably smaller than most Americans realize. All this, of course, has a trickle-down effect, which likewise impacts the focus of others from their day jobs.
On a deeper level, a sustained focus on intelligence diplomacy might change the Agency’s culture and direction. The CIA was deliberately stood up to be a neutral entity that would provide unbiased information to policymakers. Unlike many intelligence services around the world, the CIA has no military affiliation, nor do its members sport uniforms or possess military ranks. The logic was to liberate the CIA from the dangers of having to grade its own homework, encouraging an atmosphere in which it could objectively assess intelligence, speak truth to power – or tell it like it is, as some of my analytic colleagues prefer to say – and offer its analysis of the potential consequences of U.S. actions abroad.
Striking the Right Balance
To his credit, Burns has publicly reaffirmed his focus on informing policymaker decision-making rather than in recommending courses of actions. But when the CIA becomes entangled in dicey diplomatic issues, it has more of a stake in the outcome, owing to its responsibility for being a participant and stakeholder rather than a detached observer. While the CIA initially rejected Libya’s approach before ultimately running with it, the episode secured the organization considerable equity given the apparent success. But some analysts now believe that very achievement – persuading Qaddafi to give up his WMD — might have weakened the leader and made him more vulnerable to the uprising that ultimately brought about his demise, or at least that it might have led other tyrants such as Putin to calculate that negotiating away their leverage by cooperating with the CIA and the United States might instead lose them everything, including their lives.
CIA directors have always engaged in sensitive, back-channel diplomatic efforts, albeit not to this extent, and I have personally witnessed the opportunities in which the Agency has made the key difference by leveraging its relationships outside the spotlight of public diplomacy. Like most things in life, I expect that the requirement here might simply be for balance. That requires a reaffirmation of the Agency’s critical tradecraft, both operational and analytic, which includes prioritization of its collection and objective analysis.
The CIA’s role in intelligence diplomacy should be complementary and not come at the cost of its focus and fundamental role. There is recent historical precedent for the risks when the CIA ventures too far out of its lane, as illustrated by the global “war on terror.” Designed as a strategic collector, the CIA instead marginalized itself to some degree as a supporting element to the Department of Defense by aligning itself for more tactical collection in a global war being led by the military. The CIA further reduced itself to yet another branch of the U.S. armed forces with its covert action and kinetic operations.
It took America’s reawakening to the existential threat posed by strategic rivals to demand the intelligence needed, which would only be available through the kind of classic espionage that earned the CIA’s moniker across the intelligence community as “the collector of last resort.” The CIA should take equal care today, in its intelligence diplomacy, that it not risk becoming Foggy Bottom North as merely a more shadowy extension of the Department of State.