U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has nominated William Burns, a highly regarded career diplomat with vast foreign policy experience and service in both Democratic and Republican administrations, as head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). If his nomination is confirmed by the Senate, he will become the first career diplomat to take the post of CIA director.

It was a surprise pick but one likely to win broad approval within and outside the embattled spy agency.

“Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure,” Biden said in announcing the nomination Monday. “He shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical and that the dedicated intelligence professionals serving our nation deserve our gratitude and respect.”

Biden was drawn to Burns because of his diplomatic experience and his perceived ability to restore credibility to the intelligence agency in the post-Trump era, people familiar with the matter said, along with his expertise on Russia. His selection would bypass other contenders with more formal experience in the intelligence field.

While all Biden nominees face an easier path to confirmation in a Democratic-controlled Senate, Burns’ role in the Benghazi investigation could also be revisited.

He testified at a House hearing in 2012 after then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unable to because of a concussion.

“We learned some very hard and painful lessons in Benghazi,” Burns said. “We are already acting on them. We have to do better. We owe it to our colleagues who lost their lives in Benghazi.”

The decision to select Burns to lead the CIA comes after other top contenders faced criticism for their previous support of torture programs. Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who had been under consideration by Biden, was assailed as unacceptable by top Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Intelligence Committee, had criticized Morell as a “torture apologist” for his previous suggestions that “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists was effective and moral.

The CIA director position is not expected to be a formal member of Biden’s Cabinet, which represents a change from the Trump administration, but a return to the status it had in the Obama administration.

Avril Haines, whom Biden nominated as director of national intelligence, will represent the intelligence community on the Cabinet. Haines and Burns have a long-standing relationship and during an appearance last year at Columbia University, she praised Burns for being well known for providing thoughtful feedback during his time in government.

“Everyone always wanted to send their memos to Bill,” Haines told the audience.

The 64-year-old Burns, who is known as Bill, graduated from La Salle University in Philadelphia and earned a doctorate degree at Oxford University in international relations.

He worked in the State Department for 33 years in positions across the foreign service, which he joined in 1982.

He was deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration before retiring in 2014 to take over the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank in Washington.

He also served under five American presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, and 10 secretaries of state in a variety of posts.

Across his decades in the foreign service, he was also the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008 under President George W. Bush and the U.S. ambassador to Jordan from 1998 to 2001 in the Clinton administration.

Burns retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 and holds the highest rank in the service — that of a career diplomat.

He has talked extensively about the damage he believes the Trump administration has inflicted on the United States’ foreign policy. He warned of the dangerous consequences of President Donald Trump not accepting election defeat in a prescient essay last August in the Atlantic.

“If he loses, I doubt that he will suddenly embrace the traditional bipartisan commitment to effective transitions. At best, he’ll be consumed by efforts to rationalize his defeat and paint the election as rigged; at worst, he’ll seek to contest or undermine the result,” Burns wrote.

“Like so many other features of the Trump era, the transition would bear little resemblance to any before, or any of the many I served through as a career diplomat. The costs of confusion, mixed signals, and bureaucratic turmoil could be very high.”

Burns also has a long history at the center of Middle East peace negotiations and worked closely in the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear deal.

Significantly, Burns led the delegation that held secret talks with Iran about the nuclear deal, which culminated in 2015. Under the deal, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., U.N. and EU.

He has limited experience with China, but otherwise has an extensive portfolio of work in key regions around the globe.

Erudite and soft-spoken, Burns had refrained from publicly criticizing the Trump administration until the last couple of years.

He was sharply critical of Trump’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other autocrats and his scorn for traditional allies.

“It’s reflective of his worldview, that the world should be run by big guys, big powers, that might makes right,” Burns said. “There’s also a bit of Putin envy.”

Last year, Burns wrote several scathing judgments of the Trump administration, especially the handling of important foreign policy issues by the State Department under Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo.

Trump and Pompeo spawned tumult in the State Department, where career officers felt ignored, morale plummeted and long-cherished diplomatic norms were jettisoned in pursuit of what was called an “America First” doctrine.

In one essay in the fall for Foreign Affairs magazine, Burns said the department had not been so maligned and mistreated since the McCarthy era. He was particularly incensed by the way Trump attacked U.S. diplomats serving in Ukraine and Pompeo’s refusal to defend them.

Trump also eroded morale at the CIA. He fired several career intelligence experts in favor of loyalists, many of whom had no experience in the field.

Burns has also condemned the killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander and the long-serving head of the Quds Force. Soleimani was seen as a deadly adversary by America and its allies and was killed in a U.S. strike at the Baghdad international airport in January 2020. Burns referred to his killing as a “significant strategic setback” in an interview he gave to The Irish Times.

In an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs in 2019, he said that during his tenure in the U.S. Foreign Service he has “never seen an attack on diplomacy as damaging, to both the State Department as an institution and our international influence, as the one now underway.” In the article, Burns was referring to the “mistreatment” of Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was abruptly removed from her post as the ambassador to Ukraine in 2019.

At the time Democrats alleged that she was removed so that Ukraine could launch investigations into Biden and his son Hunter Biden who was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, in a memo called “Perfect Storm” that Burns addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2002, he mentioned his thoughts on how efforts “to overthrow the regime in Baghdad could unravel if we’re not careful, intersecting to create a ‘perfect storm’ for American interests.”

(SD-Agencies)