Attacker detonated himself after he was stopped from entering the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing in Kabul.

The Atlantic has hired Griff Witte as a managing editor to lead its growing politics and accountability team. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes in an announcement, shared below, that Witte’s “experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.”

Witte is currently the senior politics and democracy editor for The Washington Post, and in his 23 years at the paper has reported from across the United States and in more than 30 countries, including as bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad, Jerusalem, London and Berlin.

The Atlantic has announced a number of new writers at the start of the year: Caity Weaver as a staff writer, who will begin with The Atlantic next month and comes from The New York Times Magazine; staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, both recently of the Post (see their first report, “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” from Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday); and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner.

Below is the announcement from Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

We’re very happy to let you know that Griff Witte is joining The Atlantic as a managing editor. Griff, who is currently the senior editor at The Washington Post in charge of political and democracy coverage, will be leading our growing politics and accountability team. As many of you know already, Griff is a journalistic force, who has led his 50-person team at The Post with energy, creativity, smarts and ambition. His experience on the democracy beat, in particular, will help us in our coverage of the various challenges to the American way of governance.  

Griff comes to us after a storied, 23-year run at The Post, where he spent much of his time as a foreign correspondent. As a stalwart of the foreign desk, he covered insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, wars in Gaza, the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the return of autocracy in central Europe, and the dawn of the Brexit era in Britain. His reports on refugees crossing into Europe, and on hate-preachers radicalizing followers in Britain, were recognized, respectively, by the National Press Foundation and the Overseas Press Club. In between international postings, Griff served as the newspaper's deputy foreign editor and guided prize-winning coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his new role for us, Griff will help build and lead our coverage of politics and democracy, with a special focus on government accountability and investigations. In addition to his own impressive track record of reporting stories on these broad beats, Griff has earned the admiration of his reporters for his ability to edit the sort of complicated, scoop-driven, and otherwise revelatory stories that will be critical to our mission as we try to cover and explain the actions of the Trump Administration. Griff is highly collaborative and fearless, qualities that will serve The Atlantic well in the months and years ahead.

Griff’s decision to join The Atlantic represents an intergenerational homecoming, of sorts. His father, the legendary artist Michael Witte, illustrated covers and made other art for The Atlantic in the 1980s (and if we’re lucky, we'll get him drawing for us again).

Witte will report to deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum and work closely with deputy editor Juliet Lapidos and other editorial leaders.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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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.”

Years ago, at a writers’ conference, I happened to sit across from a famous novelist at lunch. At the time, I was working on a novel about Moroccan immigrants and desperate for affirmation that the draft I had completed held worth, that I hadn’t been wasting my time. But as soon as I started talking about it, the writer leaned across the table and told me, with the weariness of a seasoned professional, “The novel of immigration doesn’t work. The narrative just isn’t interesting.”

I sat there, staring at my salad, holding back tears. The contempt for what was, to my mind, an essential part of the human condition was hard to swallow. For a long time afterward, I became furious every time I thought about this summary dismissal. But in my better moments, I think that perhaps what this writer meant was that the novel of exile and immigration sometimes relies on predictable tropes: the shock of arrival, the inescapable feeling of alienation, climactic scenes in which the protagonist witnesses or experiences discrimination, and then, after a series of trials, a moment of realization that signals a successful, if uneasy, integration.

The challenge (and, frankly, the pleasure) of writing about exile or immigration is to find, as with any other novel, new ways of exploring the familiar. In Someone Like Us, for example, Dinaw Mengestu cleverly flips the trope of arrival on its head, sending an American expat on a disorienting journey back to the United States. Jennine Capó Crucet’s inventive Say Hello to My Little Friend uses a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium as a stand-in for Cuban refugees, trapped in a place too small for their ambitions. All of this is in service of bringing alive “the overriding sensation,” as Edward Said once put it, “of being out of place.”

In her impressive debut, Good Girl, the poet Aria Aber turns to the bildungsroman, a form that allows her to narrate the immigrant’s dream of social ascent while also wrestling with the shame that comes with this ambition. Set in Berlin about 15 years ago, the story follows Nila, a teenage girl who aspires to be a photographer. At heart, the novel is about the allure of freedom and the estrangement from others that is the cost of both exile and artistic creation. If the immigrant is an outsider, even an “alien,” then so is the artist: Many of us make art not because we feel well adjusted and content with our life, but because we are weird or curious or different.

Good Girl opens with Nila returning home after graduating from boarding school. Home is a dingy apartment in Gropiussdat, a “nightmare of brutalist concrete” in a poor borough of Berlin, where her family settled after leaving Afghanistan. She pursues a philosophy and art-history degree at Humboldt Universität, she says, “not because I wanted to study, but because I wanted the free U-Bahn pass.” At the bar one night, she meets Marlowe Woods, an American writer who is something of a local celebrity, having published a well-received novel and secured an advance for his second book. He has a square jaw, a dimpled chin, and piercing blue eyes. The red flags are apparent from the start—he is nearly 20 years her senior and carries speed on him at all times. Nila’s attraction to him is immediate and intense, unimpeded by the appearance of a girlfriend. Nila tells Marlowe that she is Greek, banters with him, makes him laugh. The first part of the novel is taken up by her pursuit of Marlowe’s attention, which persists despite his initial indifference to her.

[Read: This is not your typical campus novel]

Eventually, the two of them begin a sexual relationship that is largely built on drugs and degradation, a spiral that is so harrowing and so meticulously chronicled that it is almost difficult to read. For Nila, Marlowe’s allure isn’t merely physical or chemical; it stems from the fact that he is everything she isn’t, and everything she strives to be. He is an American, so unburdened by history that he can say of a famous bombing in Germany, “Well, it was ten years ago. I’m sorry, how am I to remember that someone died?” More important, he is a working artist, perhaps the only one Nila knows. She takes pictures wherever she goes but is too stifled by shame to seize the freedom that art promises its practitioners—and that it also requires of them.

Why shame? Because back in Kabul, Nila’s parents were doctors. Karim and Anahita owned a handsome house and had live-in help, but after the Soviet invasion in 1979, they fled the country, using fake papers. Documents and identification loom large in Good Girl, determining the fates of multiple characters. Because they left Afghanistan under assumed names, Nila’s parents can’t recover copies of their medical licenses, making it impossible for them to achieve the middle-class life they left behind. Anahita works as a nurse in a retirement home (“she was just a maid for old people”), and Karim drives a taxi, just like his brothers—all of them refugees from both Afghanistan and the middle class.

Karim and Anahita view this fall from the petite bourgeoisie as a failure and try to hide it any way they can. If Karim has to drive a cab, it will be at night, when no one he knows can see him. And if Anahita has to visit the food bank, it will be in a thrifted fur coat. Nila grows up with this inherited shame, coupled with the surveillance and control that attends her conservative Muslim upbringing.

Nila’s shame about being Afghan in a world that dehumanizes Muslims is palpable on every page. She carries within her the weight of a country she has never known and a language in which she isn’t fully fluent, making her a stranger even to herself. It is not a coincidence that we discover her real name only after six chapters: Nilab Haddadi. Crushed by the pressure to be a “good girl,” she rebels with drugs and booze. But her relationship with Marlowe, though ostensibly transgressive, only mirrors the one she has with her parents. The question is whether she will manage to break away from it and find the true freedom she seeks for herself.

“I am going to be a photographer,” Nila announces early in the novel. But to make art, she will have to face the chaos and confusion she has been running away from all her life. She can neither travel back through time to restore her parents to their country and social class nor change the fact that she is both German and not quite German. Art comes from the acceptance and celebration of all that is broken within us. The act of taking a photograph—framing the subject, selecting the appropriate aperture, pressing the shutter button—is really the only form of control available to Nila.

[Read: How to belong in America]

All of this is revealed slowly. Aber writes with the masterful precision of an archivist. Each scene is carefully documented, and the narrative maintains its forward momentum even when it is out of chronological order. There is a deep naivete to Nila—after all, she is only 18—and this inexperience is reflected in the cycle she finds herself trapped in: Nila and Marlowe meet up, do ecstasy or cocaine or meth or ketamine, have sex, and have a fight—not always in that order. This repetitiveness can wear on the reader, but Aber manages to redeem it through the impeccable rhythm of her prose and her inspired choice of detail.

Exile, migration, displacement: These will splinter even the most solid self. But out of the shards, it is possible to make art, as Nila finally realizes—and as Aber has done in this touching novel.

Senior foreign ministry officials of two countries hold highest-level talks since group's takeover of Kabul in 2021.