Keeping America Safe: CIA Director Burns reflects

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🗓️ 14 January 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

On a shelf in his office at CIA headquarters, Director Bill Burns keeps a tiny scaled model of a house. It's the house in Kabul, Afghanistan, where Al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2022.

When NPR went out to interview him last week, Burns pointed to the exact balcony on which Zawahiri was standing. There was pride in his voice. The CIA had never stopped looking for the guy even more than two decades after 9/11.

But it was also a reminder of challenges, of adversaries that will outlast any single CIA director.

Now, as Burns wraps up four years running the Central Intelligence Agency, the challenges have multiplied and intensified.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Shortly after he took over, as CIA director, I sat down with Bill Burns in his office
0:06.3	at CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia and asked him this question.
0:10.5	What keeps you awake at night?
0:12.0	Oh, one thing I've learned, especially in this job over the last four months, that there's
0:16.9	a certain amount of interrupted sleep that comes with the job or comes with the territory.
0:21.8	You know, the honest answer is people.
0:24.7	When I caught up with him last week, same office, four years later, I wanted to know if the answer to that question had changed.
0:32.6	You know, I have a lot of colleagues who are doing really hard jobs in really hard places right now. And I can't make
0:37.6	risk go away. It hasn't. And every morning I walk by our memorial wall, you know, in the lobby of
0:44.2	headquarters with 140 stars on the wall, which are a vivid reminder of the sacrifices that
0:51.0	CIA officers make. And so that's something that is bound to keep me up at night.
0:56.4	In the time Burns has served as chief of the Central Intelligence Agency,
1:00.8	the threats to his colleagues and to the country have increased, intensified.
1:06.1	Russia invaded Ukraine.
1:07.9	Hamas attacked Israel.
1:09.6	Israel responded.
1:10.7	And the conflict has since destabilized
1:12.9	large parts of the Middle East. China continues to challenge the U.S. in a myriad of ways,
1:18.9	and a 42-year-old man, inspired by ISIS committed an act of domestic terrorism in New Orleans.
1:25.8	Consider this. Bill Burns is finishing up his tenure as CIA
1:29.7	director, but the threats to America continue. Coming up, he reflects on the challenges he's
1:35.4	navigated and what might await his successor.
	...

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