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CIA boss Burns goes diplomatic, a US terror warning to Iran, a UAE death squad, a US spying flap in Spain, Qatar’s targeting Ted Cruz lead this week's roundup

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Diplo-Spook: As pressure mounts on President Biden to stop the carnage in Gaza, he is increasingly turning to CIA Director William Burns. The first career diplomat to ever run the spy agency, Burns is headed to Europe in coming days with a Middle East agenda. He’s expected to meet the head of Israel's Mossad, Egypt’s intelligence chief, and the Qatari prime minister to help broker a ceasefire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas,  The Washington Post reported. (The head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service will also participate, Axios reported.) The upcoming summit in Europe will be, by our count, Burns’ fourth meeting overseas with Mossad chief David Barnea since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and killed 1,200 people. 

CIA chief Bill Burns is on a Middle East diplomacy mission to Europe (Getty)

The White House hopes Burns can repeat his earlier breakthrough when he helped bring about the first (and only) cessation of hostilities in November. A weeklong truce Burns helped facilitate saw the release of 105 hostages and 240 Palestinians from Israeli jails. But there’s been no letup since hostilities resumed on Dec. 1, and the two sides are at an impasse over Israel’s latest proposal. Israel has offered a 60-day pause in fighting in exchange for the phased release of the more than 100 captives, the Post reported. Hamas wanted a permanent cease-fire before it would release the hostages; an Israeli official told Axios that was a non-starter. At a meeting in Warsaw last month, Barnea proposed to Burns that senior Hamas leaders leave the Gaza Strip as part of a broader ceasefire, CNN reported. It’s yet another offer that Hamas rejected. 

Burns’s discussions in Europe are expected to build on his phone conversations with intelligence counterparts, the Post reported. The CIA director earned the trust of the Middle East’s leaders over his 32-year diplomatic career, much of it focused on the region. An Arabic speaker, Burns began his State Department career in Amman and returned years later as U.S. ambassador to Jordan. We paged through Burns’ 2019 memoir, The Back Channel, to see how his career prepared him for this moment. A cable Burns wrote on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2000 jumped out at us: