July 2 (UPI) — The director of the CIA delivered a wide-ranging speech in Britain on Saturday in which he said the spy agency will not waste the chance to recruit Russians disaffected by President Vladimir Putin‘s war in Ukraine and called China the “biggest geopolitical and intelligence rival” of the United States.
William Burns made his remarks in a lecture to Ditchley — a privately funded British charity created to support the Transatlantic Alliance between the United States and Europe. The speech also highlighted challenges from climate change and recent wildfires to pandemics like COVID-19.
Burns began his speech by noting he was still early in his career as the Cold War was ending and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.
“It was a world of uncontested American primacy,” Burns said, adding that the moment of U.S. dominance after the Cold War “was never going to be a permanent condition.”
Burns said he once outlined the challenges the United States would face in the decades ahead in a memo to the administration of former President Bill Clinton.
“While, for the first time in 50 years, we do not face a global military adversary, it is certainly conceivable that a return to authoritarianism in Russia or an aggressively hostile China could revive such a global threat,” Burns wrote in the 1992 memo.
Burns said that, since then, the international political system has titled “schizophrenically” toward “fragmentation” which poses risks for democracies and free markets amid growing global threats from climate change to health epidemics.
“It is a world in which the United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block – a world in which humanity faces both peril and promise,” Burns said.
Burns said U.S. success moving forward will depend on its ability to respond to technological advances, such as developments in artificial intelligence, and to the climate crisis and global pandemics.
He added that the U.S. will need to navigate challenges posed by “a rising and ambitious China” and that Russia “constantly reminds” officials that “declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones.”
During the past two decades that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been in power, Burns said he has learned that it is a “mistake” to underestimate Putin’s “fixation” on controlling Ukraine.
Putin, Burns said, believes it’s impossible for Russia to be a great superpower without controlling Ukraine which he does not consider to be a real country. Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991.
“Putin’s war has already been a strategic failure for Russia — its military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions blunted by a NATO which has only grown bigger and stronger,” Burns said.
The spy boss said the recent rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group of mercenaries, served as a “scathing indictment” of the Kremlin’s rationale for invading Ukraine.
“The impact of those words and those actions will play out for some time, a vivid reminder of the corrosive effect of Putin’s war on his own society and his own regime,” Burns said.
He added that “disaffection with the war” is growing among 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. We’re not letting it go to waste,” Burns said.
“We recently used social media — our first video post to Telegram, in fact — to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business.”
While Burns said Russia’s aggression poses a “formidable test,” it’s China that is the “only country” with the intent and means to reshape the international order.
Burns called China’s transformation over the past half-century “extraordinary” as he took issue, not with the country’s geopolitical rise, but with “the actions which accompany it.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has been using his power to rewrite the exact international systems that enabled China’s transformation, Burns said.
“We’re also in the midst of the most profound transformation of espionage tradecraft since the Cold War,” Burns said.
“In an era of smart cities and ubiquitous technical surveillance, spying is a formidable challenge. For a CIA officer working overseas in a hostile country, meeting sources who are risking their own safety to provide us information, constant surveillance is a very risky business.
“But the same technology that sometimes works against us — whether it’s mining big data to expose patterns in our activities or massive camera networks — can also be made to work for us, and against our rivals.”
Earlier this year, Gen. Michael A. Minihan, the head of Air Mobility Command, said in a memo that troops should begin preparing for a war with China which he said could happen by 2025.
