Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe paid an unannounced visit to Moscow yesterday, spending eight hours in the Russian capital before returning to the US. Though he visited the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that they had met – though Ratcliffe certainly spoke to his counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, and other top Russian security officials.
The list of topics urgent enough to prompt the first personal visit of a US cabinet-level official to the Kremlin in six months is short. Ratcliffe could have been responding to reports of a planned Russian escalation against Nato, trying to enlist the Kremlin’s help for Donald Trump’s stalling campaign against Iran or discussing a draconian sanctions bill that could devastate the Russian economy that lies locked and loaded in Congress pending its final reading.
Europe’s panicked reaction to Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit is a sign of a dangerously febrile atmosphere
But the true mystery that made the flying visit unusual – and also, for many observers, alarming – was that Ratcliffe was clearly in Moscow to communicate something too sensitive or too urgent to be discussed during his regular phone calls with Naryshkin. The last CIA director to make an urgent trip to the Kremlin was William Burns in November 2021. He came bearing a message for Putin not to invade Ukraine.
