Bill Burns is a career U.S. diplomat named Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2021. John Kiriakou says he wrote a very positive op-ed when Burns was named CIA director: “Finally, an adult in the room.”[1][2]
The de facto Secretary of State
Kiriakou says the only anomaly of Burns’s CIA tenure was that he became the Biden administration’s de facto Secretary of State. Tony Blinken — a “very nice guy,” in Kiriakou’s telling, who moved to the State Department from the same Senate Foreign Relations Committee desk Kiriakou himself later held — was not, in Kiriakou’s assessment, equipped to be Secretary of State; Burns was. As a result, Burns was the one who flew around the world to conduct sensitive and difficult diplomacy.[2][3]
Drawn into CIA culture
Despite his diplomatic strengths, Kiriakou says Burns was “sucked right into” the CIA’s culture of drone warfare, international renditions, and spying on Americans.[3]
A road not taken: Daryl Blocker
Discussing potential CIA directors, Kiriakou has separately named Daryl Blocker — a career CIA officer who specialized in African affairs — as a candidate who would have been the agency’s first African-American director. Kiriakou says Blocker had no involvement in the torture program and did not even know of its existence, having spent years posted in Africa.[4]