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Passages

(1,544 posts)
Thu Jan 9, 2025, 11:23 AM Jan 9

The CIA Director Received Cooler Gifts Than the Secretary of State. Here's Why.

Bill Burns was America’s best diplomatic asset in the Biden years. He was also the nation’s spy chief.

by Daniel Boguslaw January 8, 2025

If gifts are anything to go by, the Central Intelligence Agency has been racking up more goodwill across the globe than the State Department over the past year, a major departure from the agency’s cloak-and-dagger reputation for assassinating world leaders and meddling in international affairs. According to the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol, through his travels abroad, CIA director Bill Burns racked up an impressive list of foreign-borne gifts: an $18,000 astrograph, an $11,000 Omega watch, and a ceremonial Saudi war sword.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for his part, received from Austria’s foreign minister “Three Photographs from the Centropa Project & Book: Best of Austropop” (valued at $600) in addition to several acrylic landscape portraits.

(Individuals don’t get to keep diplomatic gifts, incidentally; they stay inside the government and are often put on display in museum exhibits.)

It is of course unfair to judge American statesmen by the gifts they’ve received from foreign dignitaries, but State Department and intelligence officials say that in many ways the gift differential accurately describes the value placed on Burns over Blinken, by American politicians, diplomats, and foreign governments. One outgoing State Department official put it bluntly: “When you want someone to drink champagne, you send Blinken. When you need someone to actually fix shit in Brazil, the Middle East, or Russia, you send Burns.”
https://prospect.org/world/2025-01-08-william-burns-cia-director-cooler-gifts-than-secretary-of-state/

Great tribute.
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