Bill Burns
Former CIA director and career diplomat who built the secret back channel that produced the Iran nuclear deal.
Last refreshed: 5 April 2026
Could the man who built the Iran back channel find one now that war is underway?
Latest on Bill Burns
- Who is Bill Burns and what did he do with Iran?
- William Burns is a former US diplomat who served as CIA Director 2021-2025. He built the secret back channel to Iran that produced the 2015 nuclear deal, first meeting Iranian officials covertly in 2008 and leading the Oman talks in 2013 with Jake Sullivan.Source: Wikipedia, Foreign Policy
- What has Bill Burns said about the Iran war in 2026?
- Burns described it as "a war of choice" in which no imminent threat to the US existed. He warned it had given Putin a lifeline and that intelligence assessments did not support the administration's claims of an imminent Iranian threat.Source: hvylya.net interview, NewsChannel5, 2026
- Could back-channel diplomacy end the Iran war the same way it built the nuclear deal?
- Burns himself has not publicly offered to serve as an intermediary. The back channel he built in 2008-2013 required years of patient secret contact; the current conflict's pace and the IRGC's dominance over Iranian diplomacy make a similar approach significantly harder.Source: Burns interview, April 2026
Background
William J. Burns served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2021 to 2025, appointed by President Biden as the first career diplomat ever to lead the agency. He spent 33 years in the US Foreign Service, rising to Deputy Secretary of State — only the second career diplomat in history to hold that post — and served as US Ambassador to both Jordan and Russia. Burns is fluent in Arabic, Russian, and French, and holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
His most consequential single act of diplomacy was constructing the secret back channel to Iran that produced the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. Burns first met covertly with Iranian officials in 2008 under President George W. Bush's authority — a remarkable cross-partisan act — and in 2013 led the classified bilateral talks in Oman with Jake Sullivan that produced the interim agreement and ultimately the JCPOA. His memoir, The Back Channel (Random House, 2019), details this history and his broader argument for the indispensability of professional diplomacy.
In April 2026, now serving as Senior Adviser for Global Affairs at Evercore, Burns described the US-Israeli campaign as "a war of choice" in which he believed no imminent threat to the United States existed — and which the intelligence community assessed the same way. He warned that the war had "handed Putin a lifeline" by diverting US attention and resources from Ukraine. His assessment of Iranian intentions — that the regime was consolidating, not collapsing, around the IRGC — ran counter to White House public messaging.
