Is peace about to break out in Ukraine? Is the war about to expand to encompass the Strait of Hormuz? Is John Ratcliffe being careful to make sure the windows are secure in Moscow?
So many questions, and so far, few hints at the CIA's covert consultations with the Vladimir Putin regime yesterday. The news leaked out yesterday afternoon, as John reported, but as the Washington Post notes, everyone has clammed up about it ever since:
CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Moscow on Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said, for a rare visit by a U.S. spy agency chief as Russia slogs through its fifth year of war in Ukraine.
U.S. officials had not announced Ratcliffe's trip, but publicly available flight tracking data captured the movement of a U.S. government transport plane from Joint Base Andrews on the outskirts of Washington to the Russian capital. The aircraft departed Moscow about eight and a half hours later, tracking data from Flightradar24 shows.
Spokespeople for the CIA, the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Those familiar with Ratcliffe's trip to Russia spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the visit.
It was not immediately clear what the trip's purpose was or whether any other senior U.S. officials were part of the U.S. delegation.
You know, you just can't get a good bowl of borscht west of the Don, tovarisch.
For context, Ratcliffe maintains regular contact with his Russian counterpart, SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin, via telecoms. The choice to meet directly with Naryshkin in Moscow suggests something very important and perhaps imminent came up. The last time a CIA Director flew to Moscow – that we know of, anyway – was in late 2021, when William Burns attempted to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine.
The Putin regime has made sotto voce threats lately to test NATO defenses with limited incursions. Could Ratcliffe have decided to warn Naryshkin of the consequences that would unfold? The Spectator's Owen Matthews suggests that as a possibility, but there are others as well:
Some analysts have speculated that Ratcliffe’s mission was to prevent an imminent provocation against NATO targets in Europe which the CIA had gotten wind of. “It could be to say, ‘We know what you are thinking about doing, and you better not,'” Beth Sanner, a former US deputy director of national intelligence under both Trump and Biden, told the Wall Street Journal.
Other observers have pointed out that it’s Iran, not Ukraine, that is Trump’s current top foreign policy priority. Rising gasoline prices and knock-on consequences in the cost of transportation and food could spell electoral disaster for Trump in November’s midterm elections. Getting the Kremlin to cut off its flow of military supplies and intelligence to Tehran is a missing link in Trump’s attempts to break Iranian resistance to a peace deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran is the only foreign policy issue that Trump can afford to care about right now,” argues Professor Sam Greene of King’s College London.
Whatever the reason, the visit has spooked European leaders, Matthews reports:
Whatever the specific message or messages Ratcliffe actually delivered, Europe’s panicked reaction to the unannounced visit is a sign of a dangerously febrile atmosphere. Alarm is running high for two good reasons. One is a very real uptick in sabotage attacks, including a powerful explosion at the EMCO arms plant in Bulgaria on August 10, an explosion and fire at the KNDS Ammo Italy plant on August 13 and a large-scale power outage on the same day that halted operations at several petrochemical facilities, including ExxonMobil, in the Netherlands. France says it has been targeted by a Russian cyberattack. The Estonian defense company Milrem Robotics was targeted in an arson attack on August 15. An arms cache was found in a German forest and Polish police arrested a Russian national allegedly recruited by Russian intelligence to assassinate a dual US-Ukrainian citizen. And three explosive drones of unknown origin have been found at Leipzig airport, a major logistics hub for both DHL and some Ukrainian airlines.
The other reason for increasing tensions is a steady drum-beat of warnings by US and European intelligence agencies over recent weeks that Russia is preparing some kind of attack on NATO.
This might have made some weird sense in April or July, while the US was distracted by heavy kinetic action against Iran. However, the US has shifted to a siege approach to the IRGC, allowing for restocking of munitions and rebalancing of assets, at least in the European theater. (The Pacific and China are another matter entirely.) NATO and the US have picked up these signals for months and have massive advantages against Putin, who can't even outfight the Ukrainians. Attempting to take on NATO, even as an escalate-to-deescalate strategy, would be suicidal in the sense that the oligarchs in Moscow might have Putin drop out of a window rather than risk utter demolition in a World War III that Russia simply can't fight or win.
Maybe that's the message Ratcliffe intended to deliver. Given the launch of the "economic D-Day" on the IRGC and its trading partners the day before his trip, it seems more likely that Ratcliffe wanted to brief Naryshkin on the new financial warfare and attempt to get Russia to play ball. Whatever the topic, the Kremlin announced that Putin had been updated very quickly afterward:
The Kremlin confirmed on Wednesday that US foreign intelligence chief John Ratcliffe had held a series of high-level talks the previous day in Moscow, but denied reports that he had spoken with President Vladimir Putin.
CIA Director Ratcliffe had "contacts between security services," according to Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Peskov said that President Putin had been "informed without delay" as to the content of the talks, but had not attended the meetings.
He added that he was unsure if the discussions could move US-Russian relations out of their current "profound crisis" and would not confirm if the group had discussed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Whatever Ratcliffe had to say was important enough to get Vlad the Failer immediately briefed, so something is up. The mystery of what that something is, exactly, will likely remain for a while. Neither side profits by airing this out in the short run. Perhaps the best way to root out the topic will be to watch what Russia does on the NATO frontier and/or with its ties to the IRGC. Given all of the bad ways this could go, maybe never finding out is the best possible outcome.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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