During his first three years at the helm of the CIA, William J. Burns was relentlessly focused on tripling the agency’s resources devoted to understanding China, and on countering Russia and its mysterious partnerships with Iran and North Korea.

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

During his four decades at the State Department, Mr. Burns was considered the master of creating a “back channel”—the title of his memoir—an invisible, essential access to allies and enemies alike.

As the war between Israel and Hamas threatened to drag the Middle East into a bigger conflagration, President Biden asked Mr. Burns to swim back into that back channel, combining his intelligence role with his experience as a Middle East negotiator to help find a way to broker a ceasefire and the release of hostages being held in Gaza.

Soon, by his own account, he was “on the phone every day” with David Barne, the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the Hamas liaison, seeking an opening for some leverage to achieve a truce and perhaps a new Middle East. east.

The distinction between a diplomatic negotiator and an intelligence operative is blurred in the region, and Mr Burns’ comings and goings could be classified. “It makes it easy to come and go,” he said in his 7th-floor office at the CIA, which features memorabilia about the agency’s operations and successes and a framed map of Russia’s plan to attack Ukraine.

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

Current and former officials said Kamala Harris was elected president last November, Mr. Burns was her choice for Secretary of State, which he refused, with some diplomatic aversion, to confirm or deny. It would be a return to the institution that defined his career – and where he met his wife, Lisa Carty, who is now in the US mission to the United Nations. (They were sitting next to each other at the Foreign Service Training Institute. The students were seated alphabetically.)

When he arrived at the CIA, several veterans there admit they were suspicious: Why was a career diplomat running a spy agency?

As he packed up on Friday, the deal between Israel and Hamas barely holding together and new clashes on the horizon, few said he had won over the agency.

While Mr. As Burns and his deputy, David Cohen, left the building for the last time, thousands of CIA employees lined the corridors to “clap,” a sign of the respect they had achieved.

The master negotiator faces a critical moment

Mr. Burns’ career has included many tense negotiations, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Iran nuclear deal, which he and Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, brokered in secret in 2013.

But nothing, he says, matched the urgency of the effort to stop the conflict between Israel and Hamas before it spread across the region.

“This was probably the most complex negotiation I’ve been involved in, in the sense that indirect talks have been removed twice,” said Mr. Burns.

Mr Burns and Mr Barnea held talks with the Qataris and Egyptians, who spoke to the Doha-based leadership of Hamas. Those Hamas leaders negotiated with Hamas leaders in Gaza, who were hiding underground and holding the remaining 95 or so hostages, some alive and some dead.

“Many negotiations are passionate, but here you had this human plight of hostages and their families, innocent civilians in Gaza who have been suffering in terrible conditions for the last 15 months,” said Mr. Burns on Wednesday. “This was not just about the texts. These were real human beings whose lives were at risk.”

Mr Burns has made 19 trips to the region since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 to work on the Gaza war and hostage issues. Until this week, the talks loomed as a major unfulfilled mission, or even a failure, during his time leading the spy agency.

But under pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump, the opportunity negotiators had been looking for presented itself. With a last-minute push from Mr. Burns and the rest of Mr. Biden’s team, negotiators announced on Wednesday that they had reached a deal.

Mr. Biden tasked Mr. Burns for hostage negotiations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Mr. Barne, the head of the Israeli intelligence service, to head the Israeli negotiations.

During the negotiations, both Hamas and Israel blocked the deal at various points.

In the end, there was an approach that Mr. Burns and the American team developed and prevailed: a multi-phase plan to free some of the hostages in exchange for prisoners and aid. Some Israeli troops will be withdrawn. The thorny issues of Gaza management were left for later negotiations.

Mr. Burns and Mr. Biden pushed this wording for months. But what has changed, said Mr. Burns, is that Hamas military commanders felt “surrounded” and their forces were degraded. On the other hand, the blows Israel dealt to Iran and Hezbollah created political space for an agreement.

“Israel’s political leadership is starting to see that perfect is not on the menu here, but they have achieved a lot of what they wanted to achieve,” he said.

Now the question is for the Israelis, said Mr. Burns, how to turn your tactical victories against Iran and Hezbollah into a strategic victory. And Mr. Burns and his colleagues argue that the ceasefire and the release of the hostages are a vital part of that transformation.

A conversation with his fellow intelligence chiefs helped push the case. “I think with intelligence work in general you can be a little more discreet than if you were a diplomat,” Mr. Burns.

Victory over spies

There was a degree of wariness among CIA members about Mr. Burns when he arrived at the sprawling Langley campus in early 2021.

Not every senior CIA officer stationed abroad agrees with the ambassador who oversees the embassy — and therefore American operations. But in his time in Amman, Jordan, and Moscow, where CIA station chiefs communicate with the ambassador almost daily, his management style has won over analysts, case officers and even military veterans in the agency’s paramilitary arm.

Rob Richer, head of the agency in Amman while Mr. Burns was the ambassador, he recalled that Mr. Burns “never, ever said anything was his idea.”

“It’s like a vacuum cleaner in terms of what it picks up,” he said. “And then he rejects ideas from the people around him.”

Current CIA officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are working undercover, said Mr. Burns earned loyalty when he made two key decisions.

The first was during the fall of Kabul in 2021, when Mr. Burns promised that 9,000 commandos who worked with the agency would be evacuated, along with 25,000 family members.

The second was when he convinced Mr. Biden to allow several CIA officers to remain in Ukraine after the president ordered all US government personnel to leave the country. Their presence, said Mr. Burns, was instrumental to the partnership and the success of the CIA.

Whisperer to Putin

By the end of his first year, it was the war in Ukraine that Mr. put Burns to the test, just as he was beginning to restore morale to the agency after near-constant turmoil during Mr. Trump.

That worked for him: all those years in Moscow, while Mr. Putin consolidated power (and communicated with the US ambassador), making him the government’s chief expert on the Russian leader.

Starting with a “mother wire” of new intelligence that arrived in the early fall of 2021, Mr. Burns became convinced that his old enemy intended to try to capture Kiev, a step toward rebuilding Peter the Great’s empire. .

Despite objections within the intelligence community, Mr. Burns — along with Mr. Sullivan and Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence — authorized the declassification of the material, hoping to reassure allies who thought Mr. Putin is bluffing.

The depth of the data showed that the CIA had penetrated deep into the Russian military, obtaining its plans and later even its thoughts on deploying nuclear weapons. Satellite photos, reports from sources apparently close to the Kremlin and communications laid out what the Russians were planning.

“What we gathered in this agency and elsewhere in the intelligence community was excellent, it was quite detailed in terms of not only the military build-up in the late fall of ’21, but the planning for the day after,” Mr. .said Burns. Still, he admitted, most NATO allies were skeptical. “It was quite lonely in the late autumn of the 21st because we and the British were the only two services that were convinced” of the intentions of the Russian leaders.

Mr. Biden sent Mr. Burns — instead of a secretary of state or national security adviser — to Moscow on a mission to warn Mr. Putin and try to prevent war. But he found a Russian leader who had stewed in his grievances for years and was only more focused on his goal.

Mr. Burns presented his case about the damage that Mr. Putin did to his own country if he attacked Ukraine. “I found Putin to be completely unapologetic about what we presented to him,” he said.

The warning did nothing to stop the invasion. But Mr. Burns’s early warnings made it easier to rally the allies and Congress.

Still, Republicans said that even if that call was correct, the CIA failed to understand other key developments: how soon the Afghan government might collapse, how Bashar al-Assad would flee Syria and how Hamas was preparing to attack Israel.

The long game: China

One of Mr. Burns’ first acts was the creation of a mission center devoted to China. It would be a place where analyzes of China’s economic future, its technical prowess, its intentions toward Taiwan, and CIA operations would come together. But he also invested more money and people—and Mandarin speakers—on the problem; today, China-related work makes up about 20 percent of the agency’s classified budget, officials say.

Mr Burns attended a weekly meeting with top officials at the China Centre. The meeting, said one CIA officer who has worked on the China issue for 30 years, was “a great concrete manifestation of his personal commitment when everything else was going on.”

John Ratcliffe, Mr Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, has promised an agency that takes more risks and more aggressive covert operations. However, he praised the focus of Mr. Burns to China and promised to build on his efforts.

Mr Burns said the agency had made progress in recruiting spies. It would mark a significant comeback, 15 years after many CIA operatives in China were captured and some executed.

“China is the biggest long-term geopolitical challenge facing our country,” said Mr. Burns. “And that is the highest intelligence priority. It is a joint agency effort focused on intelligence gathering. And it’s starting to pay dividends.”

Keeping the focus on priorities like China while giving the “overflowing inbox” of immediate crises the attention they need has been the trick over the past four years, he said.

“It’s often the most difficult thing in government,” said Mr. Burns. “But I think we’ve struck a pretty good balance.”