The U.S. Spy Chief on a Long-Shot Diplomatic Mission

CIA Director William Burns faces uphill battle in secret negotiations aimed at getting Israel, Hamas to agree on Gaza cease-fire

By Warren P. Strobel

And Summer Said

Updated

WASHINGTON—In early March, the on-again, off-again talks to stop the fighting in Gaza were threatening to unravel yet again.

Arab delegates from Qatar and Egypt, which serve as intermediaries for Hamas, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of having no real interest in peace. Hamas lashed back at pressure to compromise, painting the Egyptians as lackeys for Israel, according to people familiar with the secret negotiations.

CIA Director William Burns, the chief U.S. mediator, tried to soothe tempers and nudge the sides back to negotiating an agreement that would lead to a cease-fire and the release of hostages and prisoners before the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. The talks broke up without a deal.

Months later, he and his fellow mediators are still trying.

President Biden on Friday announced what he said was a new three-stage cease-fire proposal by Israel that would lead to a permanent halt in the conflict. “It’s time for this war to end,” he said.

Multiple rounds of negotiations and roughly a dozen trips by the Central Intelligence Agency chief to the Middle East and Europe have yet to yield a lasting cease-fire, amid suspicions that neither Hamas’s military chief, Yahya Sinwar, nor Netanyahu really wants one.

For Burns, 68, it may be the toughest assignment of a four-decade career of high-stakes, back-channel diplomacy. He recently likened the effort to “pushing a very big rock up a very steep hill.”

Even the logistics of the negotiations are hellish. Neither Israel nor Washington deals directly with Hamas, considering it a terrorist group. Qatar shares each cease-fire proposal with Hamas’s political wing, and it is in turn transmitted to Sinwar, thought to be hiding in the group’s labyrinth of tunnelsunder the Gaza Strip. Responses can take days.

The stakes go beyond the death and human suffering in Gaza and Israel, current and former U.S. and Middle East officials said.

Burns’s work on a cease-fire and hostage release is key to unlocking other U.S. diplomatic efforts in the region, said Avner Golov, a former senior director at Israel’s National Security Council and now vice president of MIND Israel, a security-focused nonprofit based in Tel Aviv. Those include U.S. hopes for a historic agreement that would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Over the course of his career as a senior diplomat and spy chief, Burns has held tough talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin before his Ukraine invasion, covert nuclear negotiations with Iran, and discussions on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who in one nighttime encounter in the desert sported what Burns later described as “yellow pajamas with dead African dictators on them.”

Under Biden, Burns has been personally involved in the three top security crises—Afghanistan, Ukraine and now Gaza—said Aaron David Miller, a longtime friend who worked with Burns at the State Department. But the Gaza talks, at least for the moment, are “mission impossible,” he added.

Publicly, Burns has acknowledged the peculiarity of his intensive role in the Gaza talks. His day job, after all, is running a multibillion-dollar, global spy agency tasked with tracking China, Russia, terrorism and much else.

His involvement was cemented in October, when Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the U.S. agreed to form a secret cell to negotiate the release of hostages seized by Hamas during its Oct. 7 assault on Israel. It quickly became an “intelligence diplomacy” channel. Burns’s counterparts are David Barnea, head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency; Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel; and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani.

The group, sometimes dubbed the Quad, scored a victory in late November, when it secured a week-long cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that saw the release of more than 100 hostages held by Hamas and 240 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

The cease-fire evaporated as fighting renewed. Six months of efforts to revive and expand that deal have foundered largely over Hamas’s demand for a guaranteed end to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, and Israel’s insistence that a cease-fire occur in stages.

In recent public appearances, Burns said Israel had shown significant flexibility in cease-fire proposals. He put the onus on Hamas for rejecting them. The militant group’s position “is a pretty significant obstacle right now,” he told the Connecticut World Affairs Council on April 19.

As Gaza mediator, Burns combines the roles of presidential envoy, referee and therapist, according to participants in the Gaza talks and U.S. officials who have worked closely with him.

The CIA chief never shouts or threatens, those who have seen him in action say.

“That’s not his style,” said a former senior CIA official. “He can have hard conversations but leave people with their dignity.”

In late January, Burns, Barnea, Kamel and the Qatari prime minister were meeting in Paris in a new attempt to revive the talks when another mini-crisis erupted.

Netanyahu was caught on a microphone calling Qatar’s mediating role “problematic” because it allows Hamas’s political leadership to reside in Doha. Qatar called the reported remarks “irresponsible and destructive,” and Burns had to smooth things over, people with knowledge of the talks said.

Burns has decades of experience with Middle East history, resentments and personalities, dating from his first posting in 1983 as a junior officer at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan. His Qatari and Egyptian counterparts sometimes call him “Burns of Arabia,” and he is known to use bits of his rusty Arabic in the negotiations.

In the Gaza talks, he retains the trust of both the Arabs and Israelis, officials say.

Burns travels without fanfare, and the CIA doesn’t officially confirm his trips. Touching down in foreign capitals, he is accompanied by three or four aides and a security detail. He often meets with members of the local CIA station, sometimes personally handing out awards for service, those who know him say.

In March, Burns and the U.S. negotiating team began to more forcefully intervene with American-drafted compromise cease-fire proposals, those familiar with the talks said. There have been at least five such U.S. proposals, they said.

In early April, following an errant Israeli missile strike that killed seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen, Israel came under intense pressure from the White House.

Not long after, a new cease-fire plan was tabled in Cairo that included flexibility from Israel on key points, Burns said on April 19. Hamas again balked, which the CIA chief called “a deep disappointment.”

Then in early May, as Burns shuttled between Middle East capitals for nearly a week, it looked as if Hamas and Israel finally had a deal in sight, after Israel made concessions agreeing to a period of “sustainable calm”—rather than a vaguer “humanitarian pause”—and allowing Palestinians to return to north Gaza.

Then Hamas backtracked and renewed its demand for a permanent end to Israel’s military offensive, mediators said. On May 5, Hamas rockets hit the three-way border crossing between Gaza, Egypt and Israel at Kerem Shalom, killing Israeli soldiers. Burns flew to Qatar to try to keep the talks from collapsing.

Arab negotiators raced to introduce a modified proposal that incorporated Hamas demands. On May 6, Hamas announced that it accepted what was essentially its own proposal, catching Israel and the Americans by surprise. Israel rejected the Hamas proposition, and the talks broke up yet again.

Burns says he will keep going. “I cannot honestly say that I’m certain that we’re going to succeed, but it’s not going to be for lack of trying,” he said in Dallas in mid-April. “And I do know that the alternatives are worse.”

Dov Lieber contributed to this article.