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Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

Two Americans held by the Taliban were exchanged for an Afghan imprisoned in the US on narco-terrorism charges.

Taliban government in Afghanistan says US nationals released in exchange for Afghan serving life sentence in California.

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Bill Burns has spent much of his nearly four-decade career in government arguing about words. As he was packing up his office this week at CIA headquarters, the language of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which he had toiled over for the past 15 months, was at the top of his mind. If the parties agreed to the deal, as he was cautiously confident they would, Israeli hostages in Gaza would go free and Palestinians would receive vital humanitarian aid.

“In many ways, this [negotiation] was the hardest” of his long career, Burns told me in one of two recent conversations—harder even than the secret talks with Iran that he helped lead and that eventually produced the 2015 agreement placing restrictions on the country’s nuclear program. For starters, Hamas’s military leaders were hiding in Gaza, making communications with them cumbersome. The parties debated for months over the presence of Israeli military forces on the Gaza side of the border with Egypt, a stretch through which Israel said Hamas was smuggling weapons. “And this had such an intensely human dimension to it,” Burns said, speaking of the Israeli hostages as well as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes have been turned to rubble in Israel’s campaign against Hamas. Burns told me that he had worked to ensure that these people were not mere “brackets in text” of an official peace plan.

Words matter, but looking back on his time as the head of the world’s most important spy agency, Burns also had numbers on his mind. By his own count, he had made 84 trips overseas during his four years as director of the CIA. Even for a peripatetic former diplomat, that’s a busy travel schedule. For the chief of an intelligence agency, it’s extraordinary.

[William J. Burns: The blob meets the heartland]

Burns has brought an unusual synthesis of diplomacy and spycraft to the role of CIA chief.  You can tell the story of sequential crises that beset the Biden administration by his itinerary. Burns went to Moscow in November 2021 to tell President Vladimir Putin that the United States knew he was preparing to invade Ukraine. More than once, President Joe Biden has tasked Burns with delivering forceful messages to the Kremlin, because Burns knows the country, and its leader, better than anyone else in the Cabinet. On his tenth trip to Ukraine—one of 14 in total—President Volodymyr Zelensky joked that Burns now qualified for a free upgrade on the train from Poland, which shuttles world leaders and VIPs across the border because air travel is too dangerous.

Burns made 19 trips to participate in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the majority of them to the Middle East, working with his colleagues from Israel, Qatar, and Egypt.

In May 2023 he went to Beijing, the highest-level visit by a Biden-administration official since the U.S. military had shot down a Chinese spy balloon that floated across the continental United States three months earlier. He went back last year to meet his counterpart, the minister of state security, and open a channel of communication between rival powers that seem at times to be drifting toward military confrontation.  

The Biden administration is stocked with former generals, diplomats, and strategists. And yet Burns often got the hardest assignments, the ones with big potential rewards but that were more likely to end in disappointment, or at least ambiguity. This is not the CIA director’s traditional portfolio. But in Burns—a 33-year veteran of the Foreign Service, only the second career diplomat to become deputy secretary of state, a former ambassador to Russia and Jordan—Biden got a spymaster with an unusual set of skills. So he used him.

Burns seemed as surprised as anyone when Biden chose him for the job. “Honestly, when the president called me, I almost fell off my chair,” Burns told me. He would be the first career diplomat to serve as CIA director, but that was hardly disqualifying. Plenty of his predecessors had never worked in intelligence but were reasonably successful in the role: Leon Panetta and Mike Pompeo come to mind. Burns had been considered for the top job in the State Department; he had retired from the Foreign Service in 2014. But the more he thought about running the CIA, the more it made sense.

“Diplomats and intelligence officers, in all those years I spent overseas, worked together more closely than any other two parts of the U.S. government,” Burns said. Intelligence and espionage are built on human relationships, establishing trust, and maintaining credibility. So is diplomacy. Most of Burns’s travel was devoted to CIA business, visiting stations overseas and meeting with personnel. But a sizable portion of the 1 million miles that Burns says he logged on the road as director was in the service of building new relationships with world leaders and using the ones he had already established. Thirty-plus years in diplomacy tend to fatten the Rolodex, and as several of his close aides told me, “Bill knows everybody.”  

Under Burns’s watch, the CIA’s record wasn’t spotless. Critics, including some recently retired intelligence officers, have said that a top-heavy bureaucracy has at times produced sclerotic analysis that lacks depth and timeliness. Although the CIA and other agencies accurately forecast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they overestimated the invading military’s ability to swiftly conquer the country. Among CIA employees, Burns is widely admired and, early in his term, earned plaudits for ensuring that officers afflicted by the so-called Havana syndrome received adequate medical care, which they hadn’t had under his predecessor. But some of those victims were deeply disappointed that Burns, who’d initially suspected that Russia was to blame for the malady, ultimately sided with analysts who said it was not the handiwork of a foreign power.  

Still, he will be remembered as a successful director, and not just for how he did the basic job of leading the CIA. He also opened doors with other leaders, cleared up miscommunications, and delivered hard messages to difficult people. The White House found this arrangement especially helpful, not least because it’s sometimes easier to send a spy to do a diplomat’s business.

Burns went to Afghanistan in August 2021, shortly after the fall of Kabul, to meet the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Sending a senior diplomat, perhaps the secretary of state, might have signaled that the Biden administration was conferring official recognition on the militant group, which had seized the capital days earlier and ordered the Americans to leave the country. This was one of several instances where the Biden administration took advantage of Burns’s diplomatic acumen without actually employing him as a diplomat.  

Burns was also there to do CIA business. The United States was racing to evacuate its citizens and Afghan allies, including those who had worked with the military and the agency, amid the collapse of the Afghan government. Burns had been to Afghanistan four months earlier, when the government was just barely holding on against the Taliban, and he knew that once the United States withdrew, it would have little influence over the country’s new rulers. In April, he had warned members of Congress that a pullout would pose “significant risk” to U.S. interests, and that intelligence agencies would have a harder time monitoring terrorist groups that might reemerge in America’s absence. Intelligence analysts, including at the CIA, said the government could collapse quickly, within months or even a few weeks of a U.S. withdrawal. But no intelligence agency accurately foresaw how rapidly it would dissolve, or that the country’s leader would flee.

Burns’s talks with the Taliban helped provide the necessary “top cover to get our people out of Afghanistan,” a CIA paramilitary officer who has worked closely with the director told me. He credited Burns with helping to marshal the bureaucracy back in Washington, so that the agency’s Afghan partners and their families could obtain U.S. visas and get seats on military aircraft. Biden has called the withdrawal from Afghanistan “one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history.” It was also a chaotic and dangerous mess in which the CIA, working alongside elite U.S. troops and Afghan forces, had to secretly evacuate U.S. citizens, Afghans, and other foreign nationals using an agency compound known as Eagle Base—hardly the orderly departure that administration officials wanted.

The U.S. withdrawal marked a violent end to the longest war in the nation’s history. Thirteen troops were among the more than 180 people who died in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. As disastrous as it was, the fall of Kabul gave Burns the chance to demonstrate his commitment to the CIA’s people and its mission.

[George Packer: Biden’s betrayal of Afghans will live in infamy]

The paramilitary officer called Burns’s efforts in Washington and support of operations on the ground “morally courageous.” Embracing the agency’s employees and demonstrating solidarity with them made Burns a popular and successful leader despite his outsider status. His predecessors who failed to endear themselves in this way (Porter Goss and David Petraeus come to mind) found their time at Langley rocky and brief.  

Three months after Burns’s trip to Kabul, the president again sent Burns on a sensitive mission that required the finesse of a diplomat and the discretion of a spy. Burns went to Moscow with a message for Putin, who had retreated to the seaside resort of Sochi amid a spike in coronavirus infections in the capital. From a phone in the Kremlin, Burns listened to the Russian leader recite his usual bill of grievances—an expansionist NATO threatened Russian security; Zelensky was the illegitimate leader of a non-country.

Burns, the administration’s de facto Putin whisperer, had heard it all before and understood that the Russian leader’s paranoid obsession with Ukraine was real and unshakable. But this time he had a message of his own: If you invade, you will pay an enormous price. Burns left a letter from Biden affirming that there would be consequences.

In the run-up to the February 2022 invasion, Burns and Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, helped coordinate an unusual process of declassifying intelligence about Russian military activities and intentions, in order to preempt the false narratives that Burns knew Putin would try to spin—including that Russia was attacking Ukraine in self-defense.

Once the war began, some administration officials believed that Kyiv might fall within three days, a judgment that proved to deeply misunderstand Ukraine’s will to fight. U.S. officials thought that Zelenksy might have to govern in exile, if he could make it out of the capital alive. CIA officers, who had spent years helping Ukraine build its own modern intelligence system, wanted to stay at their posts. Burns backed them up, and persuaded the White House. The CIA is the only U.S. government organization whose personnel were on the ground in Ukraine before the war and never left. Agency officers there have played central roles in the United States’ assistance to Ukraine.

Russia stumbled in the first year of the war. For a time Ukraine seemed poised to repel the invasion. But as Burns leaves office, Putin is gaining ground, slowly and at extraordinary cost. At least 700,000 Russian troops have died or been wounded since the invasion, more than 10 times the Soviet casualties during a decade of war in Afghanistan, Burns said.

Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day. But to do that, Putin would have to be willing to negotiate. And Burns doesn’t think he is. “He’s put all his chips on the table,” Burns said. “He believed then, and he believes to this day, that he cannot afford to lose. So it’s a huge mistake for anybody to underestimate that.”  

When two countries are at odds, their leaders often find it easier for the spies to talk, and not the diplomats or the heads of state. Wars have arguably been averted that way. “Even in the worst of the Cold War with the Soviets, when I was a young diplomat, you did have all sorts of channels” to communicate frankly, Burns said, including through intelligence agencies. “I think some of those now have been reestablished or created with the Chinese.”

China has been Burns’s long-term strategic focus as CIA director, even as he has spent time on Ukraine—and in it—and shuttling around the Middle East. And paying more attention to China has meant paying more attention to technology. From the beginning of his tenure, Burns put special emphasis on both how the agency used technology and the areas where China and other adversaries could pull ahead of the United States, such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. “I do believe this is one of those plastic moments that come along two or three times a century, where there’s some fundamental changes on the international landscape,” Burns told me. “In this case, it is the reality that we’re no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block.”

In the fall of 2021, the CIA established a new China Mission Center, to focus exclusively on gathering intelligence about the country and countering its pervasive spying on the United States. The center is the only one of its kind at the CIA, devoted to a single country. China-related work now consumes about 20 percent of the agency’s budget, a threefold increase from the start of his tenure, Burns said.

[William J. Burns: The United States needs a new foreign policy]

China’s advances in technology—many of them thanks to years of hacking and stealing intellectual property from U.S. companies—have allowed Beijing to create a virtual surveillance state. Those conditions have complicated the CIA’s efforts to recruit spies inside the country and keep their work for the United States a secret. In the past decade, the agency lost most of its agents in the country after they were discovered by Chinese authorities.

While the United States tries to spy on one of the hardest targets, Burns has also tried to reopen a dialogue with Beijing, including via his counterpart, Chen Yixin, the security minister. (The head of the China Mission Center, a career CIA officer fluent in Mandarin, accompanied Burns on one of his trips to Beijing.)

Burns is accustomed to having conversations that his political bosses can’t. But he said he was mindful that, as the head of an intelligence agency, he was not the one making foreign policy. “My job is to support policy makers, not become one.” But, he noted, if the president asked for his opinion, “I’ll tell him.”

And he did. One longtime aide who has known Burns since his time at the State Department reminded me that he and Biden “go way back,” and that the two men have shared a bond over their Irish Catholic upbringing. In Burns’s 2019 memoir—called, unsurprisingly, The Back Channel—he calls Biden “bighearted” and “a significant and thoughtful voice at the table” when Biden was the vice president and Burns was No. 2 at the State Department.

Burns stayed in his lane as Biden’s CIA director. But the president handed him one hard diplomatic problem after another, leading many observers to wonder when Biden would make things official and nominate Burns for secretary of state. That probably would have happened in a second Biden term or a Kamala Harris administration. But Burns will have to settle for the unique hybrid position he created: Call him the diplomatic spy.

The model may or may not be replicable. Or even advisable. Diplomats are expected to operate with a degree of transparency that doesn’t apply to spies. Reporters do not travel with the CIA director as they do with the secretary of state. In many of the Middle Eastern countries Burns knows well, intelligence chiefs conduct foreign relations not just out of a need for secrecy, but because they maintain their own power centers, even independently of the governments they serve. Burns saw diplomats and spies work closely together throughout his career, but he said their jobs shouldn’t be confused. “Having experience on the other side of the table helped,” he told me, “but I’ve been very careful to immerse myself in this agency and move away from my old world.”

On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas finally reached the cease-fire agreement that Burns and his foreign colleagues had helped design. He was reluctant to celebrate the achievement, at least outwardly. There were no champagne corks popping or high fives, he told me. Burns has seen deals fall apart before, and this one has entered only its first phase.

By its nature, intelligence work is secret, which usually makes it thankless. “People here don’t expect to get public praise or acknowledgment,” Burns said. Nevertheless, the cease-fire he helped devise is the high note on which he might end his long career in public service.

The deal was hard-fought and hammered out in secret, and its future remains uncertain. In that respect, it was typical intelligence work.

“I’ll miss that,” Burns said. “There’s no substitute for that kind of satisfaction.”

While some analysts say Pakistan need not worry, others warn that Indian influence in Afghanistan could strain ties.