William "Bill" Burns, the diplomatic CIA chief

William "Bill" Burns had 33 years' experiene as a diplomat before he was appointed CIA director and is widely acknowledged to have a unique and invaluable background for acting as a special envoy in world crises. All the leaders in the Middle East, as well as their intelligence chiefs, know him personally.So great expectations were weighing on his shoulders when he arrived in Qatar on Thursday as part of a mission to contain the war between Israel and Hamas and to free the hostages still being held in underground bunkers and tunnels in Gaza. His trip to Qatar which is in the forefront of negotiations with Hamas over the hostages follows visits to Israel to speak to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his intelligence counterpart, the head of Mossad, and also to Egypt to confer with President Sisi. The first career diplomat to serve as the director of the CIA, Burns came to the job on March 19, 2021, with a determination, as he put it, to provide intelligence “with honesty and integrity”, an indirect finger-pointing at the outgoing president, Donald Trump, who notoriously lambasted the American intelligence agencies for what he described as their “naive” assessments of global challenges. The 67-year-old spy chief, with his full head of white hair and dapper grey moustache, was described by the New York Times as someone you could imagine “in a John Le Carre novel whispering into a dignitary’s ear at an embassy party that the city is falling to the rebels and a boat would be waiting in the harbour at midnight”. Burns, married with two daughters, is a Le Carre fan and was amused when he read the description. A former British spy chief once said that the head of an intelligence service needed to know what it was like to stand on a street corner at night waiting to meet with an agent. But Burns’ greatest attribute comes from his years in diplomacy, getting to know and decode the minds of world leaders. President Biden has used him as his secret back channel to warn President Putin against invading Ukraine, sent him to Beijing to consult with Chinese spy chiefs when other communications were cut off, and to Kabul for a face-to-face encounter with the leader of the Taliban after the militants seized the Afghan capital. He regularly travels to Ukraine, normally on secret missions, unlike the trips made by Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, who has a more public role to play. As ambassador to Moscow from 2005 to 2008, Burns became one of America’s most experienced Kremlinologists. But his career also embraced the Middle East. His first posting as ambassador was to Jordan in 1998 and a later appointment at the state department put him charge of the Middle East region. Burns wrote in a memoir appropriately called The Back Channel that diplomacy “is by nature an unheroic, quiet endeavour, less swaggering than unrelenting, often unfolding in back channels out of sight and out of mind”. His style of quiet diplomacy as spy chief is in stark contrast to some of his more politically-animated predecessors such as Mike Pompeo under the Trump administration and John Brennan in President Obama’s first term. It’s why Biden is trusting him to use his decades of experience and knowledge to help get the hostages released and prepare for a future in the region after the war between Israel and Hamas has ended.