Thursday, February 04, 2021
Top diplomat with experience
Biden nominates Burns as head of the CIA
Even before his inauguration, US President Biden announced that he would put the former Vice Secretary of State Burns at the head of the secret service. Now the official nomination follows. Burns stands for topics that are high on Biden's foreign policy agenda: Russia and Iran.
The new US President Joe Biden has formally nominated former career diplomat William Burns as head of the CIA's foreign intelligence service. Burns had been vice secretary of state under former President Barack Obama. The White House has now announced that Burns' nomination has been sent to the Senate. The Congress Chamber controlled by Biden's Democrats has to vote on the personnel.
Even before his inauguration on January 20, Biden announced that he would use Burns as head of the CIA. Back in January he said: "Bill Burns is a model diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage," said Biden. "He shares my basic conviction that a secret service must be apolitical."
Burns has the experience and skill to pool efforts from across government and around the world to ensure that the CIA is able to protect the American people, "whether it be cyberattacks from Moscow, the challenge through China or the threat of terrorists and other non-state actors, "it said.
Burns negotiated nuclear deal
Burns, who received his PhD from Oxford University, among others, can look back on a 33-year career in the diplomatic service. Before his time as Deputy Foreign Minister, he was the US Ambassador to Jordan and between 2005 and 2008 he represented the US as Ambassador to Russia. In 2014 he retired from the civil service and took over the leadership of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace in Washington. Under Obama, Burns was also involved in the secret talks with Iran that paved the way for the 2015 international nuclear deal, which limited Iran's ability to build an atomic bomb.
Should the Senate confirm Burns' appointment, he would succeed Haspel, who in 2018 became the first woman in the history of the CIA to head the powerful US foreign intelligence service. At that time she replaced Mike Pompeo, who held the post of US Secretary of State under ex-President Donald Trump. Since the change of power on January 20, David Cohen has been acting on a provisional basis. According to Biden's team, Burns would be the first career diplomat to hold the post of CIA chief.
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