William Burns: Well, it’s something we obviously worked very hard at. I’m proud of the record of CIA and the wider U.S. intelligence community in providing credible, accurate, early warning on Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine. I mean that was why the President sent me to Moscow in November of '21, months before the war, to lay out in what was kind of an unusual step on what we knew about his plans and what the consequences would be. So we work very hard as an agency with all our partners in the intelligence community to put ourselves in a stronger position as we can to advise the President and policymakers if that day ever comes of what we see being planned.

Mary Louise Kelly: I’m going to push you on this because about a decade ago China rolled up a lot of CIA operations in China. A dozen or more CIA sources were arrested or worse executed. Have you rebuilt?

William Burns: Yeah. We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods.

from https://www.cia.gov/static/598a62b34629a8120fb16d68e440aa15/Director_Burns_Aspen_Security_Forum_Transcript_07202023.pdf

so i’m guessing the drums of war have been beating for a while now huh? looking forward to this conflict spurring race hate. daily reminder to run cardio.