George Will

The man with the most interesting job in government receives a daily diet of information so potentially abundant, and often alarming, that it must challenge his phlegmatic disposition. William J. Burns, 67, the first career diplomat to serve as CIA director, is calm in the eye of the unending storm of international crises, which involves what he called, at a July conference in England, “problems without passports,” including pandemics. Hostile potential uses of biotechnology, including engineered viruses, are, Burns thinks, “among the scariest things.”

Malign actors surely noticed the enormous self-inflicted costs – monetary and cultural – that U.S. policies imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. Cyber vulnerabilities suggest that destruction on a scale that used to be assigned to fleets of bombers can now be done with computer clicks: In 1995, a rogue trader for Barings Bank inadvertently destroyed the 233-year old institution. Imagine what can be done intentionally to physical (electric grids, communications systems, hospitals, etc.) as well as financial infrastructure.

Oxford-educated and seasoned by foreign-policy immersion that began in the Reagan administration, Burns served as the ambassador to Moscow (2005-2008), where he got to know Vladimir Putin. In November 2021, when the U.S. intelligence community clearly saw Russia’s preparations for invading Ukraine, Burns went to Moscow and spoke with Putin. The CIA director was alarmed when he went, and more so when he left Moscow convinced of Putin’s “tragic and brutish fixation” on Ukraine, a fixation unaltered by “the clarity of our understanding of what he was planning.”

Putin’s invasion has been, Burns says, a strategic blunder with Russia’s “military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions blunted by a NATO which has only grown bigger and stronger.”

Putin thought his window of opportunity regarding Ukraine was closing. Chinese President Xi Jinping, contemplating what he might think is an opening regarding the seizure of Taiwan, is surely watching what Burns calls Ukraine’s “breathtaking determination and resolve” – and the possible weakening of U.S. support for Ukraine.

On the CIA’s leafy Northern Virginia campus, the agency has a large cadre of analysts debating whether, for example, the world has passed “peak China” – the apogee of China’s might. Or whether there is any historical precedent for a rapid military buildup comparable to China’s that has not been followed by war. A perennial intelligence problem is to decide how a nation’s intentions can be inferred from the capabilities it develops. Today, the agency’s remit extends to helping the Commerce Department understand the security implications of globalization’s thick web of supply chains. We are, Burns says, in a “plastic moment,” when much is in flux.

Intelligence successes often are secret because they concern crises prevented, and/or because publicity would reveal espionage sources and methods. Known successes – e.g., Navy codebreakers turned the tide of the Pacific war in the battle of Midway during World War II – are fewer than the known failures (Pearl Harbor, Bay of Pigs, Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction). About the CIA’s limited ability to explain itself, Burns is laconic: “It comes with the territory.”

Cambridge University historian Calder Walton, in his new book “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West,” says there was a time when “the CIA was so bereft of intelligence on China that it resorted to buying fish and chips in Hong Kong, to read the newspapers from the mainland they were wrapped in.” In many ways, technology – “smart cities,” facial recognition, people using smartphones – can make societies more transparent and more porous to outside influences.

We are, Burns says, in a “profound transformation of espionage tradecraft”: “We recently used social media – our first video post to Telegram, in fact – to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week.” There are and always will be, however, “secrets we need a human to collect, and clandestine operations that only a human can execute”:

“That requires intensive training, an intensive team effort to support operations, and immense creativity and appetite for risk. It still, however, remains central to our mission.”

This is good to know. It would be a loss to literature were the intelligence-gathering wonders wrought by technology to totally supplant the derring-do that made Eric Ambler and John le Carré possible.