From Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter: Burns’s 2008 warning came in two forms—a memo circulated widely within the Bush administration and a more pungently written email he sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (an email she shared with Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley). The email said that if, at...
Category: William Burns
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CIA Thought Putin Would Quickly Conquer Ukraine
U.S. intelligence reports at the time predicted that Kyiv would fall quickly, perhaps in a week or two at the most. The predictions spurred the Biden administration to secretly withdraw some key U.S. intelligence assets from Ukraine, including covert former special operations personnel on contract with the CIA, the current and former officials said. Their account...
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CIA Chief Says Ukraine War ‘Unsettles’ China
Director of the CIA, William Burns, tells Edward Luce, the FT’s chief US commentator, how China’s President Xi Jinping has been ‘unsettled’ by the war in Ukraine. Burns also warns FT conference delegates that it would be a mistake to underestimate Ukraine’s intelligence capabilities and that Vladimir Putin remains determined to press on with the...
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Western Intelligence Services Differ on Whether Putin Will Invade Ukraine
In one camp, officials in Washington, London and within Ukraine’s national security establishment are convinced that a Russian strike is imminent. But Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not persuaded that the intelligence Western nations have shown him backs up their dire assessments. Somewhere in the middle, U.S. allies including France, Germany and Norway think Russia...
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The CIA Debated Kidnapping or Killing Julian Assange
This more than solid scoop comes from the very reliable Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News. While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault...
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