CIA director and Putin have a phone chat

A phone conversation between President Putin and the director of the CIA played a key role in lowering concerns in Washington about the Russian leader’s reported threat to order troops into Ukraine. Sent to Moscow by President Biden as his special envoy, William Burns, the Russian-speaking US spy chief, spoke to Putin about the build-up of troops, tanks and other armoured vehicles on the Ukraine border. Although the detailed contents of the one-to-one phone call remain secret, the involvement of Burns, a former ambassador to Moscow, has underlined the growing diplomatic role being played by the CIA chief. In August Biden sent Burns to Kabul to meet Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar to discuss final arrangements for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by the August 31 deadline and to remind the new rulers of their commitment to sever links with al-Qaeda. Burns is the first member of the US diplomatic service to be appointed CIA director and his use as a special envoy in foreign policy crises reflects a subtle change in emphasis at America’s primary intelligence agency. Successive CIA directors, like their counterparts in MI6, have by tradition enjoyed unique access to world leaders. But Biden chose an outsider to head up the CIA with a career background in diplomacy in order to exploit that historic access at times of greatest urgency, sources said. Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, warned in Washington this week that Moscow would be making a serious mistake if it mounted aggressive action against Ukraine, following claims by the defence ministry in Kyiv that about 90,000 Russian troops were stationed near the border. However, Biden had already turned to Burns to challenge Putin. Burns is a “crisis-tested” diplomat who served as ambassador in Moscow from 2005 to 2008 during his 33-year career, and knows Russia and the Moscow leadership better than anyone. He is said to be an expert in seeing the world through Putin’s eyes. Although his trip to Moscow was in his role as the head of the CIA, an agency that focuses on clandestine operations, his experience as a highly-respected ambassador provided the perfect combination for his phone call with Putin, himself a former KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years. One of the CIA’s principal functions is to ensure that the US is not caught by surprise. The agency was formed in 1947 as a result of the worst wartime surprise in America’s history, the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese in 1941. The US has been surprised on many occasions since Pearl Harbour such as the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attack in 2001. However, with Burns at the helm of the CIA, Biden appears to be determined to prioritise diplomacy over intelligence as a way of putting maximum leverage on adversaries. Thus, a single phone call with Putin might have given the Biden administration a better understanding of Putin’s intentions towards Ukraine than an assessment of the latest satellite images of the Russian border troop build-up. In recent years the CIA has become significantly more involved in paramilitary, counter-terrorist operations. CIA paramilitary officers in a mission codenamed Jawbreaker were in Afghanistan working with anti-Taliban allies and hunting for al-Qaeda 11 days before the arrival of the first US and British special forces. As the war on terror continued, there were concerns that the CIA’s focus on counter-terrorism would weaken intelligence-gathering capabilities in relation to Russia and China. That perceived imbalance has now changed, and Burns has put Russia and China at the top of his priorities.