Spymasters rarely say much in public, and when they do, it’s usually a tightly scripted affair. That made this weekend’s joint appearance by CIA Director William Burns and Richard Moore, head of the British intelligence agency MI6, both highly unusual and essential viewing – or reading – for global leaders and policymakers. The two intelligence chiefs gave a collective sweep of the world’s global flashpoints, a joint assessment of a moment on the world stage that Burns called “as complicated as I’ve ever seen.”
The venue was a forum hosted by the Financial Times.
We’ve collected key excerpts from what they said – about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the threats posed by China and the so-called “Axis of Authoritarians,” and what they described as an unparalleled intelligence partnership between the U.S. and Great Britain.
Ukraine: Prelude to War
Burns: Going back to the fall of 2021, the two of us together, our services together, were able to provide credible, early, accurate warnings 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 thought this was a bluff on Putin's part.
I think that good intelligence enabled our leaders, our political leadership, to mobilize a very strong coalition to counter Putin's aggression. It helped the Ukrainians to defend themselves.
The two of us together employed, at the direction of our political leaders, a novel approach to declassify some of our secrets in that period as a way of denying Putin the false narratives that I had watched him over so many years employ in the past, and to expose the reality that this was naked aggression on the part of Russia. And so our ability to do that put Putin in the unaccustomed and uncomfortable position of being on the wrong foot.
Support for Ukraine
Moore: It's absolutely critical that we do sustain our support to Ukraine. Particularly in eastern Ukraine, this is warfare where there is a huge amount of suffering on both sides. And Putin is pushing forward in a sort of attritional, pyrrhic campaign of taking village by village as he goes forward. When he takes those, there's nothing left. There is nothing left because everything is utterly destroyed.
But that is the Kremlin way of war. That's what they did in (the Chechen capital) Grozny. It is what they did in Aleppo (in Syria) and it's what they're now doing.
And so it is tough, but it's also important to remember that our Ukrainian friends have an absolute will to fight. And it's important to remember how this started in this phase, with Putin mounting a war of aggression in February 2022, and two and a half years later that has failed. It continues to fail. The Ukrainians will continue to fight. We will continue to help them to fight.
Russia’s threat of nuclear escalation
Burns: 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.
Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive
Moore: The move into Kursk — it’s too early to say how long the Ukrainians will be able to hang on in there — but I think it's typically audacious and bold on the part of the Ukrainians to try and change the game in this way. And I think they have to a degree changed the narrative around this.
Putin’s pushing forward, grinding forward, village by village, and just having a mentality that “I'll just hang on to what I grab — I'm not interested in negotiations, I'll just gradually increase it.” The Ukrainians, by going in and taking Kursk, have really brought the war home to ordinary Russians.
Burns: It's not only been a boost for Ukrainian morale, it has exposed some of the vulnerabilities of Putin's Russia and of his military, much as (Wagner Group leader Yevgeny) Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny a little more than a year ago did as well. It did raise questions on the part of people we could see across the Russian elite, about where this is all headed.
Putin's whole narrative right now is a very cocky, very smug one. It's “time’s on my side, it's 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 and I'll be able to dictate my terms for a settlement.”
And I think what these events have done, the Kursk offensive most recently, is to put a dent in that narrative. And it does raise questions in the Russian elite about what is all this for?
[However] I don't see any evidence today that Putin's grip on power is weakening. He does one thing really well, and that's repress people at home.
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Israel’s War Against Hamas
Burns: At the end of last May, President Biden put on the table a three-phase framework, which would ultimately — if all three phases were realized — get to the release of all hostages in exchange for a very large number of Palestinian prisoners, a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from Gaza, and then the reconstruction of Gaza.
The focus since then has been very much on the first phase: six weeks of ceasefire, the release of a number of Israeli hostages for a large number of Palestinian prisoners, and then a very significant infusion of desperately needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
We're working very hard with the Egyptians and the Qataris, the two mediators right now, to try to refine that framework, add more details to it and put it in a form, a good enough proposal — because in all my years of experience negotiating in the Middle East, perfect is never on the menu — but a good enough proposal that both leaderships will see the value of moving ahead.
I cannot sit here today and say that we're going to succeed. I cannot tell you how close we are 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.
I think we all have to remember what's at stake here. There's a lot at stake of course for Palestinians and Israelis and their future. There's a lot at stake strategically in a region that has no shortage of fragilities or dysfunctions right now, or dangers of escalation.
But above all, what's at stake in human terms (involves) the hostages who are still alive, who are living in hellish conditions and tunnels beneath Gaza, and their families. I also think of countless mothers and fathers in Gaza who are dealing with their own terrible losses, who are dealing with the humanitarian situation, which is getting worse every day as well. So this is not an abstraction for those of us dealing with this. This is not just about brackets in a negotiating text. It's about real human beings.
Moore: Without getting to a ceasefire that gets those hostages home and stops the killing in Gaza, we will continue to be in this very highly fragile place in the Middle East with all the risks that go with that. We have navigated — touch wood again — past another crisis point between Israel and Iran. But as long as we don't get to a ceasefire, that risk is there. And for all the horror of Gaza, a wider conflagration in the Middle East would be vastly worse.
Burns: This started with a barbaric Hamas attack which killed hundreds and hundreds of innocent Israelis. I think what the Israeli military has succeeded in doing is severely degrading Hamas' military capabilities over the last 11 months. The problem with the term that's sometimes used, about “destroying Hamas”, is that while it is of course true that Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization, and you can severely degrade their military capabilities, it’s also a movement and an idea. And in my experience, the only way you kill an idea is with a better idea.
And that's why it's so crucial to offer some sense of hope for the day after, not just in Gaza, but for Palestinians and Israelis.
[The two-state solution] is a very elusive goal. The only thing I would say is, show me what's a better alternative for Palestinians and Israelis to live together in peace and security for both of them, and to do it in a way which is going to contribute to at least some hope for regional stability as well.
China - “our biggest challenge”
Moore: My sense is that Xi Jinping is probably the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao. He has a very tight control over his political system and he has an ambitious agenda both at home and overseas. And that's why we devote so much effort to understanding China, because it is such a hugely important actor on the international stage. It's one that in many cases, contests our interests, contests often our values, and therefore it's really important that we provide our political leaders with the best possible insights into what is often a rather opaque, difficult-to-read country.
It's also important to engage with them. Both Bill and I talk to our Chinese counterparts. It's essential that you get across some of the messaging. We were talking about Ukraine earlier on — we both sat in front of them and talked them through where we would like to see greater Chinese engagement with preventing the passage of dual-use goods (to Russia), for example.
Burns: I've been to China twice over the course of the past year, because keeping those intelligence channels open is really important in even the most adversarial or competitive of relationships, to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, inadvertent collisions. And so for the United States, managing responsibly that big, hugely significant competitive relationship is our biggest challenge. And keeping those intelligence channels open I think is an important part of dealing with it.
The same is true of what people call intelligence diplomacy, what we both do with allies and partner intelligence services across the Indo-Pacific. That is a huge asset for us in dealing with that challenge of the People’s Republic of China. So we invest a lot of time and effort in that.
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The “Axis of Authoritarians”
Moore: We see a lot of pragmatic cooperation between those countries (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea). You can see it, of course, sadly, on the battlefield in Ukraine. You can see North Korean weaponry, you can see Iranian drones, you can see the help that the Chinese have provided through dual-use type material. You see all of that playing out.
The thing that's driving the cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is not based on shared values. It's on a rather darker, more pragmatic basis.
Burns: As troubling as it is, we do have to keep it in perspective, because historically there's a fair amount of mistrust between Russia and China. It's a safe prediction that over time, Russians are going to chafe at being the junior partner of China.
I don't think either of us see direct evidence today of the provision of weapons and munitions from China to Russia for use in the war effort in Ukraine. But we see lots of things just short of that, 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.
The CIA-MI6 collaboration
Moore: We share intelligence across all of the main subjects we work on, and we will share more with each other than we will do with anyone else, because of the high levels of trust that were built up over many, many years. This partnership goes back in one form or another for over a century.
We will look at operational opportunities, and we'll sometimes decide who's better placed to go for that operation. We call it the best-athlete model — whoever is best placed to go after that. And we try and do that in a non-competitive way, which will get the result for both of us.
And we build capability together. We’ve developed the sort of operational technology that we need together. We copied, in many ways, the (CIA), which was the first to go into the world of looking to partner with venture capital, with startup tech and with big tech. We have the National Security Strategic Investment Fund doing the same sort of thing. So across all of those things, we collaborate very closely.
Burns: We learn a lot from one another at this moment on the geopolitical landscape, which is, in 40 years in public service in the United States, as complicated a moment as I've seen. And added to that is the revolution of technology, which is changing the way we live, work, fight, and compete across human society. But it's also transforming the profession of intelligence. And so we learn from one another as we grapple with a lot of those challenges.
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