William Burns Is Biden’s Pick To Lead CIA

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William Burns, shown here during a 2019 event, is President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the CIA.

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Noam Galai/Getty Images for National Committee on American Foreign Policy

William Burns, shown here during a 2019 event, is President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the CIA.

Noam Galai/Getty Images for National Committee on American Foreign Policy

Updated at 8:05 a.m. ET

President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate veteran diplomat William Burns to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Burns, 64, is a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and Jordan. He was deputy secretary of state during the Obama years, but he left the State Department in 2014 to run the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank.

Biden said Burns «shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect.»

Burns’ notable achievements includes using back channels to launch international negotiations with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. He left the government as the U.S. and other countries were working toward an agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was finalized less than a year after his retirement.

In 2019, Burns wrote a scathing critique of what he called the Trump administration’s «diplomatic malpractice,» saying it had badly mistreated Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. diplomat in Ukraine whose removal from her post became a central topic in the president’s impeachment and Senate trial.

«I’ve never seen an attack on diplomacy as damaging, to both the State Department as an institution and our international influence, as the one now underway,» he wrote.

Burns told NPR in late 2019, «In my experience, what animates American foreign policy at our best has been a sense of enlightened self-interest — in other words, the view that our self-interest as a country, which we always are going to put first, is best served by making common cause.»