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Anonymous ID: 8fbaa3 March 31, 2024, 6:42 a.m. No.20656609   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6620 >>6671

How America’s top spymaster sees the world and why that is rather disappointing

The CIA head’s vision for the future of America’s ongoing confrontation with Russia is surprisingly shortsighted

 

https://www.rt.com/news/595132-us-cia-burns-russia/

Anonymous ID: 8fbaa3 March 31, 2024, 6:43 a.m. No.20656620   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6671

>>20656609

William J. Burns has published a long piece in Foreign Affairs under the title 'Spycraft and Statecraft. Transforming the CIA for an Age of Competition'. This is an essay likely to be read with great attention, maybe even parsed, not only by an American elite audience, but also abroad, in, say, Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi, for several reasons. Burns is, of course, the head of the CIA as well as an acknowledged heavyweight of US geopolitics – in the state and deep-state versions.

 

Few publications rival Foreign Affairs’ cachet as a US establishment forum and mouthpiece. While Burns’ peg is a plea to appreciate the importance of human intelligence agents, his agenda is much broader: In effect, what he has released is a set of strategic policy recommendations, embedded in a global tour d’horizon. And, last but not least, Burns is, of course, not the sole author. Even if he should have penned every line himself, this is a programmatic declaration from a powerful faction of the American “siloviki,” the men (and women) wielding the still gargantuan hard power of the US empire.

 

By the way, whether he has noticed or not, Burns’ intervention cannot but bring to mind another intelligent spy chief loyally serving a declining empire. Yury Andropov, former head of the KGB (and then, for a brief period, the whole Soviet Union) would have agreed with his CIA counterpart on the importance of “human assets,” especially in an age of technological progress, and he would also have appreciated the expansive sweep of Burns’ vision. Indeed, with Burns putting himself so front-and-center, one cannot help but wonder if he is not also, tentatively, preparing the ground for reaching for the presidency one day. After all, in the US, George Bush senior famously went from head of the CIA to head of it all, too.