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][3]
The endorsement
Kiriakou has known Burns for thirty years and describes him as the rare appointment he was straightforwardly happy about. Burns had ably served presidents of both parties; he was the Obama administration’s point man in the negotiations with Iran for the JCPOA; and he devoted his professional career to human rights and the Arab-Israeli peace process. “He’s the real deal, and he is apolitical to a fault — there’s not a political bone in the man’s body.”[4][5][6]
The résumé is the argument: essentially every high-level position at the State Department from Deputy Secretary on down, Ambassador to Russia, Ambassador to Jordan, Special Peace Envoy. Kiriakou frames the appointment on two tests. If you want someone unafflicted by the stink of torture, Guantánamo or the secret prisons, Burns is the man. And if you want someone with the political weight inside the bureaucracy to actually reform an agency Kiriakou considers in dire need of reform, Burns is the one who could do it.[5][7][8][9]
Against that stands the appointment made the same week. “What was a mystery to me is that Joe Biden could pick somebody as able as Bill Burns and somebody as disastrous as Avril Haines in the same week. I just don’t understand it — it suggests a bit of schizophrenia within the administration.”[10][9]
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][11]
He draws the two men as a study in contrast. Blinken is bright and Harvard-educated, but every job of his adult life since college was with Joe Biden — junior legislative aide, legislative director, staff director at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, National Security Advisor to the Vice President, Deputy Secretary of State, Secretary of State — so that, in Kiriakou’s phrase, “he’s never really lived in the real world.” Burns, by contrast, is “the consummate diplomat,” respected across party lines at State, the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House. The tell, for Kiriakou, is that in extraordinarily sensitive Hamas-Israel negotiations the United States did not send its Secretary of State — it sent its CIA director to conduct the diplomacy.[12][13][14][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.[11]
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.[15]