"I am not engaging with Mr Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force," Brennan said, referencing Iran's major military and intelligence power broker in the region, who plays a high-profile role in Iraq's fight against the Islamic State.
It also marks a shift in the foreign policy of Egypt, where a new intelligence chief brokered the deal.
Morsi has not only upheld the Camp David peace accords with Israel, under his tutelage Egypt's intelligence services helped broker a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel last December.
America's regulators would do best to rely on the self-interest of, and intelligence from, prime brokers; and to move towards the British approach of abjuring detailed rules and relying on principles.Whatever happens, some hedge funds are bound to go bust.
The fishermen's gambit followed an announcement by the office of the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, that the Egyptian intelligence service, which brokered the initial cease-fire deal announced in Cairo last week, told him the limit had been extended to six nautical miles.
The aging director of central intelligence arranges for "the broker" to be pardoned by the lame-duck president, so that he can serve as "bait".
But those commanders had clashed with Central Intelligence Agency officers who had long paid Mr. Karzai for information and other services and saw him as a crucial broker of intelligence and influence.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the intelligence committee and helped broker the deal, said modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was essential to give intelligence officials the technology tools they need to deter another attack.
The negotiations are taking place at the headquarters of Egypt's general intelligence directorate, which has brokered past ceasefires between Hamas and Israel.
Mr. Burns, addressing the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the Israelis and Palestinians would have to carry out the cease-fire plan created by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, which the United States brokered and then saw broken four months ago.
By then, Germany's intelligence agency had already brokered a meeting in Munich in November 2010 between the Americans and Tayeb Agha, an English-speaking former aide and spokesman for the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, who is believed to remain in hiding in Pakistan.
