Washington Is Too Complicated to Run a Grand Conspiracy

Asked about conspiracy theories that imagine a hidden hand pulling the strings, William J. Burns, the former CIA director and career American diplomat, laughed off the premise.

"You give us more credit than we deserve," Burns said. Washington is a complicated place to operate, particularly these days, and not capable of pulling off careful conspiracies.

Burns spent almost four decades at the State Department and the CIA. He said he had prided himself "on being an apolitical public servant" who "served six presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats," with colleagues who checked their politics "at the door when they came" to work.

In his account, the job required private candor, not party loyalty. Honesty meant telling elected leaders, behind closed doors, "about the second and third order consequences" of a choice they were about to make, even when they did not want to hear it.

That habit is what separates open governments from closed ones, in his telling. He pointed to autocratic regimes like China that tend to stamp out that candor, producing a closed loop where leaders hear no correction. That kind of loop, he said, helped lead Russian President Vladimir Putin to a disastrous decision to invade Ukraine.

Delivering such warnings is genuinely hard. Walking into the Oval Office to say a prized new idea is neither so new nor so great takes trust built over time, and a refusal to bend to the prevailing wisdom.

At the CIA, the practice meant passing along analysts' judgments without filtering them, even when he disagreed. Burns said a system where people are "punished or driven out for trying to speak truth to power" will make more bad choices than good ones.