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CIA chief Bill Burns said Saturday he hoped to have a “more detailed” hostage and ceasefire proposal to put before Israel and Hamas negotiators in the coming days, but stressed that its success would come down to “political will” on their part.
He spoke at an unprecedented joint public event with Richard Moore of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, known as MI6, at the FT Weekend Festival. The pair stressed the importance of the two countries’ intelligence partnership at a time when the global order is under threat, particularly from Russian aggression. They also endorsed Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, with Moore saying that it changed the narrative, and Burns that it was a significant tactical achievement.
Speaking on the ongoing negotiations to secure a ceasefire-and-hostage deal in Gaza, Burns said that the US was working very hard with regional mediators to get both Israel and the militant group Hamas to agree on a peace plan. However, he said that despite all the work that needs to be done, an end to the war in Gaza is “ultimately a question of political will.”
Currently, Burns said, the US is working with mediators in Egypt and Qatar to refine a framework proposed by Biden in May and “put it in a form, a good enough proposal” that both the Israeli and Hamas leaderships will see the value in moving ahead with it.
He stressed that in his experience with Middle East negotiations, “perfect is never on the menu,” adding that he could not say for sure that “we’re going to succeed in that,” nor how close the US and mediators might be to a deal right now.
“It is a fact that if you look at the written text, 90% of the paragraphs have been agreed to. But in any negotiation I’ve been involved in, the last 10% is the last 10% for a reason, because it’s the hardest part to do,” he said.
A lot is at stake for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as strategically in the region, Burns said. But above all, what’s at stake is “in human terms,” he said, pointing to the hostages held in “hellish conditions” in Gaza and the suffering of Gaza residents amid a worsening humanitarian crisis.
Biden first announced the framework for a peace plan between Israel and Hamas on May 31 – to which he said Israel had agreed. The three-phase proposal paired the release of hostages with a “full and complete ceasefire.” The plan envisioned the withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops eastward from Gaza.
Since then, both sides have pointed to what they see as glaring holes in the framework, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that Israel’s forces will never leave the stretch along the Egypt-Gaza border known as the Philadelphi Corridor.
The hostage release efforts gained new urgency earlier this month with the discovery of the bodies of six hostages in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah, including the Israeli-American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Both Burns and Moore highlighted the significance of the partnership between the US and the UK, particularly in the face of Russian aggression. Burns cited the run-up to the war in Ukraine, launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022, as one of the best examples.
“Going back to the fall of 2021, the two of us together, our services together, were able to provide credible, early, accurate warning of the invasion that was coming, which was not a small thing at the time, because almost all of the other services around the world, our intelligence counterparts, thought this was a bluff on Putin’s part,” the CIA chief said.
“I think that good intelligence enabled our leaders, our political leaderships, to mobilize a very strong coalition to counter Putin’s aggression.”
Burns said that this helped the Ukrainians to defend themselves. He also spoke of a “novel approach” to declassify some secrets in that period as a way of denying Putin the chance to peddle false narratives. This put Putin in the “unaccustomed and uncomfortable position of being on the wrong foot,” Burns said.
Speaking on the threat from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Moore said there was a lot of “pragmatic cooperation” between these countries.
“You can see it, of course, sadly, on the battlefield in Ukraine. You can see North Korea, North Korean weaponry. You can see Iranian drones. You can see the sort of help that the Chinese have provided through sort of dual-use type material. You see all of that playing out in our world.”
Adding to this, Burns said that there has not yet been any “direct evidence” of China providing weapons and munitions to Russia for use in Ukraine. However, he said: “We see lots of things just short of that, as Richard said, in terms of dual-use items, the kind of things that have enabled Putin over the course of the last 18 months or so to significantly rebuild his defense industrial base and that poses a real danger.”
Asked about concerns over potential Russian escalation in response to the West’s supply of weapons to Ukraine, Burns said: “I think there was a moment in the fall of 2022 when there was a genuine risk of the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons. I have never thought, however, and this is the view of my agency, that we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that. Putin’s a bully and he is going to continue to saber-rattle from time to time.”
US President Joe Biden had sent him to speak with “one of our Russian counterparts, Sergei Naryshkin, at the end of 2022 to make very clear what the consequences of that kind of escalation would be,” Burns added.
Speaking on Ukraine’s surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk border region, Burns said that said that such developments help to counter Putin’s “cocky and smug attitude.”
According to Burns, Putin’s approach to the war in Ukraine has been that it is “only a matter of time before the Ukrainians are going to be ground down, and all of their supporters in the West are going to be worn down,” allowing the Russian president then to dictate terms for a settlement.
Developments such as Ukraine’s Kursk offensive help to “put a dent” in that narrative and raise questions among the Russian elite about “where all this is headed,” Burns said. The offensive last month saw Ukrainian forces storm into Kursk in a cross-border incursion that caught even American officials by surprise.
Burns described the Kursk offensive as a “significant tactical achievement” that has served to boost Ukrainian morale as well as expose some of the vulnerabilities of Putin’s Russia and his military. Last year’s short-lived insurrection carried out by former Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin also helped to dent this narrative, Burns said.
The CIA chief does not, however, see Putin’s grip on power weakening. “He does one thing really well, and that’s repress people at home.”
Both men expressed a continued need to focus their attention on China, with Moore warning that President Xi Jinping is likely China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and has an “ambitious agenda at home and also overseas.”
“He has a very tight control over his political system, and he has an ambitious agenda at home and also overseas. And that is why we devote so much effort into understanding China, because it’s such a hugely important actor on the international stage,” Moore said.
The MI6 chief added that China’s agenda is one that in most cases “contests our interests, contests often our values.”
The conversation with Moore and Burns was preceded by a jointly-penned editorial in the Financial Times newspaper in which they stressed the international world order was “under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War.”
In the editorial, Moore and Burns expressed their admiration for Ukraine’s resilience since the Russian invasion while warning of Russia’s continued bids to attack civilian infrastructure across Europe. “We continue to work together to disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe being waged by Russian intelligence,” they wrote.
This story has been updated.