The heads of the United States’ CIA and the UK’s foreign intelligence service, known as MI6, spoke at length about the key security issues plaguing the world in an unprecedented joint public appearance in London on Saturday, in a wide-ranging discussion that covered Russian aggression, the threat from China and the war in Gaza.
The event – a discussion at the FT Weekend Festival chaired by the newspaper’s editor Roula Khalaf – marked the first time the two men – Richard Moore of MI6 and CIA chief Bill Burns – have appeared on a public stage together.
The two men spoke of the significance of the partnership between the US and the UK, particularly in the face of Russian aggression. Burns cited the run-up to the war in Ukraine, launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022, as one of the best examples.
“Going back to the fall of 2021, the two of us together, our services together, were able to provide credible, early, accurate warning 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, our intelligence counterparts, thought this was a bluff on Putin’s part,” the CIA chief said.
“I think that good intelligence enabled our leaders, our political leaderships, to mobilize a very strong coalition to counter Putin’s aggression.”
Burns said that this helped the Ukrainians to defend themselves. He also spoke of a “novel approach” to declassify some secrets in that period as a way of denying Putin the chance to peddle false narratives. This put Putin in the “unaccustomed and uncomfortable position of being on the wrong foot,” Burns said.
Speaking on the threat from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Moore said there was a lot of “pragmatic cooperation” between these countries.
“You can see it, of course, sadly, on the battlefield in Ukraine. You can see North Korea, North Korean weaponry. You can see Iranian drones. You can see the sort of help that the Chinese have provided through sort of dual-use type material. You see all of that playing out in our world.”
Adding to this, Burns said that there has not yet been any “direct evidence” of China providing weapons and munitions to Russia for use in Ukraine. However, he said: “We see lots of things just short of that, as Richard said, 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.”
Asked about concerns over potential Russian escalation in response to the West’s supply of weapons to Ukraine, Burns said: “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, 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.”
US President Joe Biden had sent him to speak with “one of our Russian counterparts, Sergei Naryshkin, at the end of 2022 to make very clear what the consequences of that kind of escalation would be,” Burns added.
Denting Kremlin’s narrative
Speaking on Ukraine’s surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk border region, Burns said that said that such developments help to counter Putin’s “cocky and smug attitude.”
According to Burns, Putin’s approach to the war in Ukraine has been that it is “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,” allowing the Russian president then to dictate terms for a settlement.
Developments such as Ukraine’s Kursk offensive help to “put a dent” in that narrative and raise questions among the Russian elite about “where all this is headed,” Burns said. The offensive last month saw Ukrainian forces storm into Kursk in a cross-border incursion that caught even American officials by surprise.
Burns described the Kursk offensive as a “significant tactical achievement” that has served to boost Ukrainian morale as well as expose some of the vulnerabilities of Putin’s Russia and his military. Last year’s short-lived insurrection carried out by former Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin also helped to dent this narrative, Burns said.
The CIA chief does not, however, see Putin’s grip on power weakening. “He does one thing really well, and that’s repress people at home.”
Gaza ceasefire efforts
Speaking on the negotiations to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, Burns said that the US was “working very hard” with mediators Egypt and Qatar to refine a framework proposed by Biden in May and put it “in a good enough proposal” that both the Israeli and Hamas leaderships will see the value in moving ahead with it.
He stressed that in his experience with Middle East negotiations, “perfect is never on the menu,” adding that he could not say for sure that “we’re going to succeed in that,” nor how close the US and mediators might be to a deal right now.
A lot is at stake for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as strategically in the region, Burns said. But above all, what’s at stake is “in human terms,” he said, pointing to the hostages taken by Hamas-led militants who are still alive and living in “hellish conditions,” as well as the “countless mothers and fathers in Gaza who are dealing with their own terrible losses” and the worsening humanitarian situation in the strip.
Biden first announced the framework for a peace plan between Israel and Hamas on May 31 – to which he said Israel had agreed. The three-phase proposal paired the release of hostages with a “full and complete ceasefire.” The plan envisioned the withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops eastward from Gaza.
Since then, both sides have pointed to what they see as glaring holes in the framework, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that Israel’s forces will never leave the stretch along the Egypt-Gaza border known as the Philadelphi Corridor.
The hostage release efforts gained new urgency earlier this month with the discovery of the bodies of six hostages in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah, including the Israeli-American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
The conversation with Moore and Burns was preceded by a jointly-penned editorial in the Financial Times newspaper in which they stressed the international world order was “under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.