The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
CIA chief details Russia spy video in CT visit
The CIA is using a video on social media in Russia to persuade spies unhappy with Putin to turn against their home country, William J. Burns, the CIA director, told a Connecticut audience Friday night.
The CIA video, in fact, has “been very productive,” Burns told the World Affairs Council of Connecticut at Goodwin University in East Hartford.
“It has, if nothing else, thoroughly pissed off my Russian counterpart,” Burns quipped.
That was a lighter moment, and not the only one, in a 35-minute, live conversation between Burns and Norah O’Donnell, the CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor, for the 100th anniversary of the World Affairs Council chapter. Burns’ overall message: Now is not the time for the United States to pull back from foreign engagement in the Middle East, Ukraine, China and other hot spots.
Three years after President Joe Biden appointed him as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, one year after Biden promoted him to full cabinet status, Burns told an extraordinarily well prepared O’Donnell about failed talks for a 6-week ceasefire in Gaza that he led. He described multinational efforts to halt shipments of material used to make fentanyl from China; Russian attempts to disrupt U.S. elections; Chinese readiness to invade Taiwan; and evidence that China is preparing to attack U.S. infrastructure, though without giving details.
“We’re no longer today the only big kid on the geopolitical block,” Burns said. “That puts a premium on diplomacy in working with allies and partners. The same is true of intelligence, too.”
He added that this nation is well positioned globally, perhaps a rebuke against a certain former president seeking re-election to the White House, whose name did not come up. “For all of our challenges at home, that’s what makes me optimistic about the United States and what’s possible in the world, and the good that we can do as well,” Burns said.
The timing could hardly have worked out better. Burns made headlines in Washington D.C. Thursday by saying Ukraine could fall to Russia in 2024 if Congress failed to adopt a $61 billion aid package — which the GOP-led U.S. House of Representatives did on Saturday despite opposition from most Republicans. Less heralded was the U.S. Senate vote, also Saturday, to renew the socalled Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a controversial spying authority that Burns called crucial in, for example, stopping the international fentanyl trade.
And of course, the Middle East crisis remains so explosive that one question from the audience asked Burns whether it would lead to World War III, especially after the failed Iranian attacks on Israel and the breakdown of ceasefire talks.
“There’s always a risk of expanding conflict in the Middle East,” Burns said — not exactly the “absolutely not” response we hoped to hear. But as a former U.S. ambassador to Jordan and to Russia (“Most of my gray hair came from dealing with President Putin”) he has too much history to wave off existential threats.
Burns, 68, is the first-ever CIA director to rise from a diplomatic career. And, as World Affairs Council CEO Megan Torrey noted in her introduction, he’s also a former college basketball player — at Oxford University in England.
“It’s wonderful to be in the basketball capital of the world,” Burns said in response to Torrey’s prompt, after noting that his vertical leap is not what it once was.
In another light moment, he recalled a recent conversation with Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky, a comedian by profession. “He told me I was entitled to a free upgrade on the train from Poland to Kiev on my 10th visit.”
Quickly his remarks turned serious. “The Ukrainians are not running out of courage and tenacity, they’re running out of ammunition and we’re running out of time to help them,” Burns said on the eve of the House vote. (The Senate is expected to take up the package Tuesday.)
“With that supplemental assistance Ukraine can hold its own on the battlefield through 2024 and continue to inflict damage on Russia,” he said, referring to 16 Russian ships Ukraine has sunk in the Black Sea in the last six months alone.
And U.S. assistance sends a strong message to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who’s doing little to hide his global ambitions.
Burns’ call for foreign engagement would hardly generate controversy at the World Affairs Council, which was founded in 1924 as the Foreign Policy Association of Hartford to push back on the then-rising isolationist fervor that followed World War I.
The council, one of two in the state (a smaller chapter is based in Fairfield County) is among 90 nationwide. It is chaired by Peter G. Kelly, the Hartford lawyer and former international lobbyist who is credited with co-writing the Russian constitution after the Soviet union fell — at a time when the world hoped to see free and non-corrupt markets take root there.
In this election year, Russia is once again the source of fake news sites and bots designed to disrupt U.S. elections. O’Donnell and Burns drew some laughs when she asked him, “Have you seen foreign actors indicate a preference for either candidate?”
“The CIA is a resolutely apolitical institution,” he responded, before saying the Russians are trying to magnify and exploit already deep divisions in U.S. politics. That the nation still faces a naive, anti-engagement faction, mostly on the far-right, was lost on no one Friday night. The nonpartisan World Affairs Council holds dozens of public events each year (full disclosure, I’ve moderated a few of them) including an annual Global Security Conference and a Model United Nations for hundreds of high school students.
The council has long been a part of the business and political fabric of Connecticut but has seen oldline corporate support decline, as with many nonprofits, President Arthur House said, in favor of a broader membership base.
“If we knew more about the world, we are confident that this world would be a better place,” Torrey said in her introduction.
Whether that edict holds true in the Middle East remains to be seen but Burns, more in his role as a diplomat than as head spy, has been the key U.S, point person in talks for a ceasefire.
Burns criticized Hamas, the terrorist group that attacked Israel last Oct. 7, and runs Gaza, for rejecting a ceasefire deal with humanitarian aid earlier this month in which Israel would have released some 900 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 40 of the 130 hostages from Israel still unaccounted-for. But he sees both sides.
“For many Israelis, Oct. 7 is yesterday and so the feeling of insecurity that came from that brutal attack is still very real,” he said. “But you know, I look at the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza and I also see something that’s very real and that calls out for desperate attention.”