During his first three years as CIA director, William J. Burns focused on tripling the agency’s efforts to understand China, and on countering Russia and its mysterious alliances with Iran and North Korea.

But in the last 16 months of his reign, the diplomat-turned-spy returned to his old life.

During his four decades at the State Department, Mr. Burns became known as a master of creating a “back lane” – the title of his memoir – an invisible, essential means of access to allies and adversaries.

When the Israel-Hamas war threatened to bring the Middle East into a serious crisis, President Biden asked Mr. Burns to take a back seat, combining his intellectual skills and experience as a negotiator in the Middle East to help find a solution. a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza.

Soon, “on the phone every day” with David Barnea, the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani of Qatar, who is connected to Hamas, seeking an opening, because. other ways to bring about unity and possibly a new Middle East.

The distinction between diplomatic liaison and intelligence officer is not clear in the region, and the comings and goings of Mr. Burns can be somewhat arbitrary. “It makes it easier to come and go,” he said in his office on the 7th floor of the CIA, with memorabilia of the agency’s work and successes, and a map made of Russia’s policy toward Ukraine.

Mr. Burns is one man in Washington. He has worked for Republicans and Democrats; In the early 2000s, he was George W. Bush’s ambassador to Moscow, where he got to know Vladimir V. Putin, making him the only member of Biden’s inner circle who knows the Russian leader well.

Current and former officials have said that Kamala Harris was elected president last November, Mr. Burns was then appointed secretary of state, which he denied, and the governor hated, to confirm or deny. It would be a return to the organization that defined his work – and where he met his wife, Lisa Carty, who is now at the US mission to the United Nations. (They sat next to each other in the Foreign Service training institute. The students were seated in alphabetical order.)

When he arrived at the CIA, several veterans there admitted to being skeptical: Why is a career diplomat leading the spy agency?

As of Friday, the agreement between Israel and Hamas has not been reached, and new conflicts are on the horizon, several said to have won the organization.

When Mr. Burns and his deputy, David Cohen, left the building for the last time, thousands of CIA employees lined the corridors to “clap their hands,” a sign of the honor they had earned.

A professional negotiator faces a difficult time

Mr. Burns’ work has included a wide range of discussions, from the conflict between Israel and Palestine to the Iran nuclear deal, which he and Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden, launched in secret in 2013.

But nothing compares to the urgency of efforts to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas before it spreads to the region.

“This has probably been one of the most difficult negotiations I’ve ever been in, in the sense that direct negotiations were canceled twice,” Mr Burns said.

Mr. Burns and Mr. Barnea held talks with the Qataris and Egyptians, who spoke with the Hamas leadership in Doha. The Hamas leaders negotiated with Hamas leaders in Gaza, who secretly hid and kept the remaining 95 captives, some alive and some dead.

“A lot of the conversation is about passion, but here you have the problem of hostages and their families, innocent civilians in Gaza suffering a lot for the last 15 months,” Mr. Burns said on Wednesday. “This was not just about scriptures. It was about real people whose lives were in danger.”

Mr. Burns made 19 trips to the area after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to work on the issue of the Gaza war and hostages. Until this week, the negotiations were seen as a major unfulfilled, or failed, mission in time to lead the spy agency.

But under pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, an opportunity to negotiate with them appeared. With a final push by Mr. Burns and the rest of Mr. Biden’s team, negotiators announced Wednesday that they had reached a deal.

Mr. Biden appointed Mr. Burns to oversee the hostage negotiations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Mr. Barnea, the Israeli spy chief, to oversee Israel’s negotiations.

During the negotiations, both Hamas and Israel blocked the deal in various areas.

In the end it was the plan that Mr. Burns and the American team developed that carried the day: a multiphase plan to free some captives in return for prisoners and aid. Some Israeli soldiers have been withdrawn. The dire issues of the Gaza regime were left for future negotiations.

Mr. Burns and Mr. Biden have been pushing this for months. But what changed, Mr. Burns said, was that the Hamas military commanders considered themselves “dirty,” and their soldiers were despised. On the other hand, the blows Israel faced with Iran and Hezbollah created a political environment for cooperation.

“The political leadership in Israel has begun to see that nothing is perfect here, but they have achieved most of what they wanted to achieve,” he said.

The question now for Israel, Mr. Burns said, is how to turn its tactical success against Iran and Hezbollah into a victory. And Mr. Burns and his colleagues argue that the end of fire and the emancipation of slavery are the most important part of this revolution.

Talking to fellow intelligence officials helped to resolve the matter. “I think it’s a lot of intelligence work, you can be a lot smarter than if you’re an ambassador,” Burns said.

Defeat the spies

There was little caution between the CIA position and the files on Mr. Burns when he arrived at the Langley campus in early 2021.

Not every CIA officer abroad agrees with the ambassador in charge of the embassy – and therefore the American mission. But in his time in Amman, Jordan, and Moscow, where CIA station chiefs are in almost daily contact with the ambassador, his management is winning over experts, prosecutors and military personnel.

Rob Richer, the agency’s station chief in Amman when Mr. Burns was ambassador, recalled that Mr. Burns “never said something was his idea.”

He said: “He is like a cleaner for the things he absorbs.” “Then he takes the ideas away from the people around him.”

Current CIA officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they work undercover, said Mr. Burns gained credibility when he made two key decisions.

The first was during the fall of Kabul in 2021, when Burns vowed that 9,000 commandoes who worked with the organization would be removed, along with 25,000 members.

The second is when he persuaded Mr. Biden to allow a few CIA officers to remain in Ukraine after the President ordered all American government employees to leave the country. Their presence, Burns said, was critical to the CIA’s cooperation and success.

Putin’s spokesman

At the end of his first year, it was the war in Ukraine that tested Mr. Burns, as he began to restore character to the organization after the chaos that was established during Mr. Burns’s first term. Trump.

It played to his strengths: All those years in Moscow, when Mr. Putin consolidating power (and having a relationship with the American ambassador), made him the chief diplomat of the Russian leader.

Starting with the “mother lode” of new intelligence that arrived at the beginning of 2021, Mr. Burns confirmed that his old enemies wanted to try to take Kyiv, a step to restore the empire of Peter the Great.

Over objections from within the intelligence community, Mr. Burns – along with Mr. Sullivan and Avril D. Haines, the director of the national intelligence agency – allowed the tampering to happen, trying to convince allies who thought Mr. Putin was bluffing.

A deeper dive into the data revealed that the CIA had deeply infiltrated the Russian military, obtaining plans and later plans to install nuclear weapons. Satellite images, reports from sources close to the Kremlin and communications revealed what the Russians were planning.

“The information that we gathered at this agency, and elsewhere in the intelligence community, was very good, it was detailed not only to build the army at the end of ’21, but also to prepare for tomorrow,” said Mr. said Burns. However, he admitted, many NATO allies were skeptical. “The end of ’21 was lonely because we and the Brits were the only two who were sure” about the intentions of the Russian leaders.

Mr. Biden sent Mr. Burns — not the secretary of state or national security adviser — to Moscow on a mission to warn Mr. Putin and try to end the war. But he found a Russian leader who kept his grievances for many years and only wanted to achieve his goal.

Mr. Burns said that he would destroy his country if they attacked Ukraine. “I found Mr. Putin did not forgive what we put in front of him,” he said.

The warning did nothing to stop the attack. But the early warnings of Mr. Burns made it easier to gather allies, and Congress.

However, the Republicans said that although the call was correct, the CIA failed to understand some important events: how the Afghan government could fall, how Bashar al-Assad will escape from Syria and how Hamas is preparing to attack Israel.

Long game: China

One of Mr. Burns’ first acts was to establish a mission center dedicated to China. It would be a place where analysis of China’s economic future, its technological capabilities, its intentions in Taiwan and the activities of the CIA would come together. But he also poured a lot of money and people – and Mandarin speakers – into the problem; today China-related work takes up about 20 percent of the organization’s budget, officials say.

Mr Burns attended a weekly meeting with officials in the Chinese capital. The meeting, said a CIA officer who has worked in China for 30 years, “was a great demonstration of his commitment when everything else was going on.”

John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s choice to head the CIA, has promised an agency that is vulnerable to covert action. But he praised Burns’s focus on China and promised to continue his efforts.

Mr. Burns said the agency has made progress in recruiting spies. This would mark a major comeback, 15 years after many CIA operatives in China were captured, and some killed.

“China is the biggest political problem facing our country,” Burns said. “And that’s the most important part of intelligence. It’s a cooperative effort that aims to gather intelligence. And it’s starting to pay off.”

Focusing on priorities like China and providing “flood boxes” for the problems they need is the trick of the past four years, he said.

“It’s usually a very difficult thing in government,” Burns said. “But I think we managed to do it well.”