We're here at the Kennedy Centre where the Weekend FT Festival
is taking place in Washington DC.
I've just spoken with Williams Burns, the CIA director,
about the prospects of Putin's nuclear escalation, how China
views the war in Ukraine, the future of CIA
in the era of ubiquitous surveillance and a lot more.
A number of my colleagues were at the Munich Security Forum
Conference a week before he actually invaded,
so mid-February, and they were saying
there was a lot of scepticism from Europeans
that they thought well America is exaggerating again.
So you took quite a risk in saying this is going to happen.
What made you so confident over and above your meeting with him
in November.
Why were you so confident?
I mean, I think in many ways, it was the detail and precision
of what we were seeing in terms of Russian planning
combined with what I was trying to describe before,
which was Vladimir Putin's absolute conviction
that the window was closing for him to use force
to try to shape Ukraine's orientation and his conviction
that Ukrainian resistance would be weak and indecisive
in some ways.
And when the president has done that quite selectively,
I think it's helped to deny Putin something that I watched
over many years him do quite adeptly, which
was to create false narratives to disarm what has been
a useful weapon for him before.
It's been hard to open a newspaper
this week in this town without hearing about much
more specific American data provided to the Ukrainians
enabling them to target Russian generals,
12 of whom are now dead, the Moskva, of course,
the biggest naval sinking in 40 years.
I know the president and the White House
have said that this is irresponsible and dangerous,
because it escalates America's perceived
involvement in this war and pushes closer
to Putin's red line.
Could I ask you to comment on these stories?
There have been quite a few.
It is irresponsible.
It's very risky.
It's dangerous when people talk too much,
whether it's leaking in private or talking
in public about specific intelligence issues.
I mean, both the White House and the Department of Defence have
spoken to this publicly.
So I don't have anything to add to that.
I mean, the only thing, though, that I would say
is that it's a big mistake to underestimate
the significant intelligence capabilities
that the Ukrainians themselves have.
This is their country, they have a lot more information
than we do and a lot more intelligence
than we in the United States and amongst our allies do.
It was a profound mistake.
It was Putin's biggest mistake in planning for this invasion
and then in launching it to underestimate Ukrainians,
and I think it's equally a mistake for any of us
to underestimate what they bring to the table in intelligence
terms in defending their own country.
One of the things that, of course, is on everybody's mind
is the escalatory risk of this situation.
We've not seen a nuclear leader talk this often arguably
at any time at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I mean, what I would stress at the start
is we don't see as an intelligence community
practical evidence at this point of Russian planning
for deployment or even potential use
of tactical nuclear weapons.
But given the kind of sabre-rattling
that you described we've heard from the Russian leadership,
we can't take lightly those possibilities.
And so we stay very sharply focused as an intelligence
service, as I know our counterparts
in allied countries do, on those possibilities.
At a moment when, as I said before,
the stakes are very high for Putin's Russia,
and those risks I think in this second phase of the conflict
are serious and shouldn't be underestimated.
But again, we don't see practical evidence
of preparations for that at this stage as well.
What lessons do you think China is drawing from the Ukraine
situation for Taiwan, and what reappraisal, if any,
do you think they're undergoing about Putin and his ability
to calculate rationally based on good information.
I think what the experience, the bitter experience
in many ways of Putin's Russia in Ukraine over the last 10
or 11 weeks has done is demonstrate
that that friendship actually does have some limits.
Because I think it strikes us anyway
that Xi Jinping is a little bit unsettled
by the reputational damage that can come
to China by association with the brutishness of Russia's
aggression against Ukrainians unsettled certainly
by the economic uncertainty that's
been produced by the war.
Clearly, the Chinese leadership is
trying to look carefully at what lessons
they should draw from Ukraine about their own ambitions
in Taiwan.
I don't for a minute think that it's
eroded Xi's determination over time
to gain control over Taiwan, but I
think it's something that's affecting
their calculation about how and when they
go about doing that as well.
I suspect that they've been surprised
by Russian military performance.
I suspect they've been struck by the ways in which Ukrainians
through a kind of whole of society effort have resisted.
I think there have been struck by the way in which,
particularly the Transatlantic Alliance
has come together to impose economic costs on Russia
as a result of that aggression.
So I think these are things that they're weighing very carefully
right now.
I know you're not going to be able to answer,
because you put people in danger about how
you recruit Chinese assets in this environment.
I know you can't.
I know, I know how Daniel Craig would do it,
but I suspect that's not, that's not amongst your options.
My wife and daughters constantly remind me
I'm no Daniel Craig, so yeah.
In spite of everything that's going on
and that we've mostly been discussing today,
the big challenge is still China.
Is that correct?
It is.
I mean, as I said before and I profoundly believe this
and, more importantly, I believe the president believes this,
that the biggest geopolitical challenge
we face over the long-term as a country is Xi Jinping's China.
That's not to suggest that we should in any way
underestimate the challenge posed by Putin's Russia.
For example.
I mean, he demonstrates in a very disturbing way
that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising
ones, but I think there's no question in my mind
that over the long-term it's China that's the biggest
geopolitical challenge.
Director, thanks for your time.