CIA Chief Burns’ Descent Into Delusion

Radio Sputnik called me first thing this morning and asked me to comment on the recent speech in Oxfordshire, England by the Director of the CIA, William Burns. I quickly scanned the news item and assumed it was a joke. I did a quick check to verify that this was a hoax or another clever bit of satire by the Babylon Bee. Nope. Burns really is this fatuous. Maybe the real Bill Burns has been abducted by aliens (the outer space kind).

CIA Director William Burns called Russia’s war on Ukraine a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to recruit spies for the intelligence agency.

“Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service,” Burns said in a lecture Saturday to the Ditchley Foundation in the United Kingdom, according to a transcript of his remarks.

I have posted the full video of Burn’s remarks below. If you held out hope that Burns was the lone adult in the Biden Administration, forget about it. Burns, while well-spoken, is a shallow, mendacious twit.

Burns’ claim that the war in Ukraine is a ““once-in-a-generation opportunity” reveals his appalling ignorance on what it takes to recruit a foreigner to commit treason. There was a time during the Cold War when a CIA case officer could pitch a Soviet intelligence or military officer with the image of the United States as a clearly superior alternative to the Soviet Union — the U.S. had a free press, a healthy complex economy, a robust political system and, most importantly of all, freedom (at least that was what the U.S. peddled).

Today the United States stands as the only existing country in the world with a forty-year track record of imperial military mis-adventures and the squandering of trillions of dollars. Instead of making the world safer the United States has sown chaos. The United States has more political prisoners languishing in prison than Russia and freedom of expression, especially for Christians, is attacked with increasing ferocity by a corporate media eager to shill for the U.S. Government. The U.S. intelligence and military organizations are a woke, hot mess. U.S. military leaders are fixated on promoting transgender degeneracy, routinely failing to meet recruitment goals and destroying the foundation of “uniformity” that is an essential trait of successful armies. I defy you to show me a mentally stable Russian intelligence or military officer eager to join this U.S.

Transgender officers

Burns’ detachment from reality is underscored by his celebration of the CIA Telegram advertisement pleading for Russians to call the CIA. It got 2.5 million hits. Nobody on Burns’ team had the balls to tell him that most of those views were from skeptics who could not believe the CIA was this absurd or from people looking for a good laugh.

And here is the Russian response, ruthlessly skewering the CIA message (and I suspect many Americans still believe the KGB is intact and don’t recognize Arnold Schwarzenegger):

Burns’ insistence on the tired meme that Putin is in trouble and Russia is failing makes it almost impossible for any decent CIA analyst to provide an alternative set of facts and analysis that challenges that narrative.

Burns’ Ditchley Lecture should be a wake up call to the Kremlin that the top U.S. officials, like Burns, are really this clueless and genuinely believe that Ukraine is winning and Russia is failing. Iraq had Baghdad Bob. America has Bakhmut Bill. Good grief!!