Washington, D.C. — Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) convened an open hearing for Ambassador William Burns, the nominee to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The open hearing will be a WebEx Hybrid followed by a closed hearing immediately following the open session.

Vice-Chairman Rubio’s opening remarks, as prepared, can be found below.

Vice-Chairman Rubio: Ambassador Burns, I join the Chairman in congratulating you and your family on your nomination and welcoming you to the Committee today.

As you know, the role of the CIA Director is without parallel in the American government. If confirmed, you will sit at the nexus of the Agency’s intelligence collection, analysis, covert action, counterintelligence, and liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services. Responsibility for any of those mission sets would be an enormous undertaking, let alone all of them.

The CIA Director manages today’s CIA officers and cultivates tomorrow’s CIA workforce. This entails ensuring that the specialized skills and expertise needed to solve today’s unique intelligence challenges are resident at the CIA, but also looking ahead a decade and thinking about the next critical skill set. I’d appreciate your insights into how this might best be accomplished from the perspective of the Agency’s director.

On the subject of workforce management, I want to mention that the Committee is highly invested in ensuring that CIA officers injured in the field are afforded access to the healthcare and benefits that they need — particularly when it comes to injury claims consistent with the symptoms of traumatic brain injury.

If confirmed, I ask for your commitment to work with the Committee to find the appropriate legislative and policy changes to ensure that the CIA’s commitment to the health and care of its officers is never in doubt and that we are applying the necessary resources to determine who and what is behind the “directed energy” or “diplomatic attacks” that personnel from several agencies of government have suffered.

Let me be clear: the U.S. Government must forcefully respond to any actor responsible for injuring Americans serving our nation abroad.

Today, the United States faces a litany of diverse national security challenges that include military and economic near-peer competitors in China, long-standing hostility from authoritarian regimes in Russia, Iran, and North Korea, a global pandemic moving into Year Two, violent extremism, and state and non-state cyber actors who infiltrate and plunder government and private-sector computer networks alike with what seems like impunity.

But no challenge we face rivals the holistic threat posed by China and, more specifically, the Chinese Communist Party. As we look to shift our emphasis from counter-terrorism to threats from ascendant authoritarian nation-states, the threat from China is the most existential to the United States.

We cannot just be orderly caretakers of America’s decline, as many of our adversaries wish. We must confront and frustrate the ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party to upend norms, amend boundaries, and replace the liberal democratic order with their bleak view of order. This will involve strengthening and expanding alliances but also stiffening our resolve.

This is not the same system of crises that past CIA leaders were called upon to defend against. The threats today are sudden, unpredictable — and with greater frequency — occurring in a grey space that embraces the objectives of conflict without quite crossing the line into outright warfare.

It is plain to me that the world has changed how it chooses to engage the United States. I would like to hear from you today whether the CIA needs to change how it engages the world. I hope that throughout our open and closed sessions today, you’ll take the opportunity to explain not only your understanding of the CIA’s unique role in the American government but also your vision for how that role needs to evolve in the coming years so that the Agency is positioned to defend against those emerging national security threats that have not yet materialized.

There is no disputing the speed and unrivalled capability that the CIA can bring to bear in responding to a fully-realized national security threat. You only need to look at the early days of our involvement in Afghanistan after September 11th to see that.

What I’m driving at, however, is an intelligence apparatus oriented toward technological advances and global interconnectivity that will underwrite the next generation of threats to this nation’s security.

Artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics, biotechnology, disinformation, deep fakes, and social network manipulation: America’s adversaries have used, and will use, these instruments and other new technologies to close the capabilities gap that has advantaged us as a nation for decades.

The refashioning of the national security threat picture by these technological and methodological advances calls into question whether the traditional constructs of espionage need to be refashioned along with it.

I would welcome your thoughts on this subject, both today and going forward, and add that this is precisely the kind of undertaking that has benefitted the CIA’s partnership with the Committee.

I hope–and expect – that you will look at this Committee as a partner for the CIA’s work as our nation’s first line of defence. The relationship between the CIA and this Committee is premised on oversight, but it is most effective and constructive when we are candid, open, and talking to one another.

Ambassador Burns, as the Chairman indicated, you have a lengthy and distinguished service career to the nation. I thank you for your willingness to resume that service, and I look forward to your testimony.

Source: Press Release
Date: FEB 24 2021
rubio.senate.gov