It was unseemly that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris forced Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to greet them before his mother as he returned home on Thursday. But that executive branch obstacle course did teach us something.

Namely, that Biden and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Harris are determined to squeeze as much political juice out of this prisoner swap as possible.

The swap carries a heavy price via the release of FSB security service assassin Vadim Krasikov. It was telling that Krasikov was the first off the plane who returned to Moscow. It was equally telling that Putin hugged then fist bumped Krasikov’s shoulder. Putin will learn dark lessons from this experience. Still, the overdue freedom of unjustly held American, German, and Russian citizens is manifestly good news. Even as he incentivized Gershkovich’s detention by his prior response to Russian hostage-taking, Biden deserves credit for this swap. It was a deal worth making.

We should be clear-eyed, however, about who was instrumental in securing this agreement. Harris was almost certainly not high up that list. CIA director Bill Burns is at the top of it.

Some in the media and on social media suggest otherwise. The White House has fed the idea that a meeting between Harris and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was instrumental in getting this agreement over the finish line. With the presidential election approaching and most of the media covering Harris with a distinct lack of objectivity, we should expect this narrative to continue.

There’s no question the narrative is being pushed hard. Take national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s claim on Thursday that Harris was a “core member of the team” who “peppered” him with questions about the negotiations. Or consider the many Democratic members of Congress and others who are notably now saluting the “Biden-Harris administration” rather than the “Biden administration” over the prisoner swap.

The problem is that this Harris-to-the-rescue narrative requires a very creative imagination. What ultimately moved the Germans to release Krasikov was almost certainly not Harris’s engagement with Scholz. Nor even Biden’s pressure. Instead, the primary reason that Germany decided to release Krasikov is surely twofold.

First, Berlin was able to secure enough of its own prisoner releases from Russia. Second, Scholz wanted to reach an agreement before the November election. Scholz’s interest in getting a deal done now centers on giving the Biden administration a political victory. Scholz did not want to leave his issue to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Germany is rightly deeply concerned with the prospect of Trump’s return to the presidency. Scholz knows that a returned President Trump might have made significant threats to Berlin in order to secure its release of Krasikov.

In all this, the key person here is obviously Burns.

We know that Burns has met repeatedly with Russian SVR foreign intelligence service director Sergei Naryshkin in pursuit of this agreement. The most recent such meeting took place in Ankara, Turkey last week. Putin himself has also indirectly emphasized Burns’s importance to this effort. In February, Putin told Tucker Carlson that the American and Russian intelligence services “are in contact with one another, they are talking about the matter in question. … There are certain terms being discussed by [intelligence] service channels.”

The centrality of Burns to this negotiation is not really debatable. First, the CIA director is a former ambassador to Moscow who speaks Russian and is respected by Putin as an interlocutor who is respectful of Russian culture and history. This helps Burns to cool the Kremlin’s always-bubbling sense that the West is too dismissive of its power and concerns. Pride is a very important part of Russian culture.

Of course, Burns also matters because he leads the CIA. This is relevant because the Kremlin always insisted, albeit utterly disingenuously, that Gershkovich was a CIA agent. Having Burns negotiate a deal offers the Kremlin domestic propaganda credibility for its false claim that Gerskovich was a spy.

These two factors make Burns someone who the Russians can deal with effectively. There would have been no need for pleasantries between Naryshkin and Burns. They could get to the nuts and bolts of negotiations each time they met. They have done so previously on other matters such as the war in Ukraine and Havana Syndrome, although Burns and his analysts have plainly dropped the ball on this latter concern. And in the release of Russian opposition figures such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and a number of German citizens, some of whom may be BND intelligence services officers or agents, it seems that the CIA director pushed for the best possible deal.

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Germany was always going to cut a deal. Amid insufficient support for NATO and Ukraine, Scholz’s government could not risk a major rupture with Washington by refusing Krasikov’s release. The Germans are notoriously appeasement-minded toward Russia, regardless. Pretending Harris moved the Berlin ball is silly.

Burns deserves the credit for getting the Russians to move the ball with America and Germany.