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CIA Director Suddenly In Moscow As NATO Prepares For Russian Attack

CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a rare, unannounced trip to Moscow for meetings with Russian officials, raising questions about what the Trump administration is discussing behind closed doors. The mysterious visit comes as U.S.-brokered efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine remain stalled and tensions between Washington and Moscow continue to run high. David Shuster breaks it down on Rebel HQ.

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CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s unannounced trip to Moscow on Tuesday was for contact between the US and Russian security services, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

A US Air Force C-17A Globemaster III, identified by flight trackers as RCH4555, flew from Joint Base Andrews to Riga on Sunday evening before continuing on Tuesday to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. Later that day, a motorcade with US diplomatic plates was spotted in central Moscow.

CBS News first reported that Ratcliffe was in Moscow for meetings, citing sources familiar with the situation. It was also not clear whether the visit – which ultimately lasted roughly eight hours – involved any other senior US officials.

Asked by the Washington Post on Wednesday about the purpose of Ratcliffe’s trip, Peskov said it was for “contacts between security services” and declined to give further details. Separately, Peskov told TASS that “contacts with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin were not planned.”

Media reports have floated several possible subjects of the secretive talks, including detainee negotiations, the Ukraine peace process, the Iran conflict, and broader questions of strategic stability.

The last publicly disclosed contact between Ratcliffe and top Russian officials took place in March 2025, when the CIA director spoke by phone with Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) chief Sergey Naryshkin. At the time, the SVR said Russia and the US agreed to maintain dialogue in order to “promote international stability and security, as well as to reduce tensions in relations between Moscow and Washington.”

Ratcliffe’s visit was the first known trip to Moscow by a CIA director since William Burns traveled there in November 2021, several months before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. The last publicly known face-to-face meeting between the heads of the CIA and Russia’s SVR before Ratcliffe’s trip was in Ankara in November 2022, when Burns met Naryshkin to discuss nuclear escalation risks and detained US citizens.

https://www.rt.com/russia/644658-kremlin-reveals-cia-visit-moscow/

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Scott Ritter: The CIA never comes to Russia in peace

Ratcliffe’s Moscow visit may be framed as routine, but it came from an agency still deeply involved in killing Russians and guiding Ukraine

BY Scott Ritter

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow last week.

What we know: Ratcliffe met with Sergey Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. This has been confirmed by Naryshkin himself, who described the meeting as “routine.” We also know that the US spy chief did not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The meeting took place, there is nothing unusual in this,” Naryshkin stated afterwards. “In the practice of special services, meetings of managers, personal meetings or online are part of our work. So, the meeting with John Ratcliffe is a working format.”

Naryshkin refused to state what issues were discussed, explaining that they were within the competence of the intelligence services. “And the competence of the intelligence services is such a rather delicate and special thing,” the Russian spy chief said.

What we don’t know: literally anything else.

Rumors abound about additional attendees, as well as the agenda – or lack thereof – that was pursued by Ratcliffe during a meeting which appeared to be anything but routine. But the fact is, any meeting between Ratcliffe and Naryshkin, given the nature of the times we live in, could never be described as “routine.”

A quick reminder: John Ratcliffe’s CIA is currently at war with Russia. Literally.

Ratcliffe assumed his current position on January 23, 2025. Prior to this, he did a short stint as national intelligence director during the last year of Trump’s first term in office. He was a Texas congressman for a few years, as well as a small-town mayor and acting US attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.

He is a politician, not a spy.

But he is fully cognizant of the CIA’s secret war against Russia, having been fully briefed while serving as DNI. As a member of Congress, Ratcliffe was a leading policy maker on national security issues serving as a member of the House Intelligence and Homeland Security committees.

Any effort to portray him as some sort of “innocent abroad”fails on the face of the facts.

The CIA has always been at war with Russia. During the Cold War, Moscow Station (the name of the CIA’s operation center based out of the US Embassy) was literally the front line of the spy-versus-spy antics taking place between the US and the Soviet Union.

The CIA headed up Operation Cyclone, a massive paramilitary-driven effort to create a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The goal of Operation Cyclone was to kill Russians.

I worked with people who were directly or indirectly affiliated with Operation Cyclone. ‘Kill more Russians’ was literally their mantra.

There was a time when the CIA hired genuine Russia-area experts. The analysts who populated the Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA) in the Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War were some of the best experts on the Soviet Union imaginable.

I know because I worked with them. From 1988-1990, I received two classified commendations from the director of the CIA for my analytical work involving the Soviet Union. I was considered by the CIA leadership to be a top-notch Soviet analyst.

In 1992 the CIA actively recruited me for an analytical position within the predecessor to SOVA, the Slavic and Eurasian Office. I was brought in for a high-level interview, after which I was informed that the CIA would be passing on my application. When I asked why, I was told that I was too married to old school thinking about Russia – in short, I was a ‘Sovietologist’.

The CIA was looking for people who could imagine Russia ‘differently’. What this meant was divorcing oneself from the mindset that Russia (i.e., the Soviet Union) was a peer-level opponent worthy of respect (my view), and instead adopting a stance that Russia was a defeated foe that needed to be kept down by any means necessary.

In the 1990s, the CIA’s task was to use Boris Yeltsin as an agent of influence to weaken Russia and facilitate foreign control over its resources. The CIA actively infiltrated every aspect of the Russian economy and used ‘soft power’ resources funded by the likes of the National Endowment for Democracy and overseen by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to hijack Russian democratic institutions and Russian social life, especially through media-related activities.

The CIA also was very active in working to break Russia up into more manageable fiefdoms, each ruled over by a CIA-controlled lackey. The Russian-Chechen conflict was a primary example of this activity.

When Boris Yeltsin stepped aside in favor of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president on New Year’s Eve 1999, the CIA immediately made it its task to undermine Putin and replace him with someone from the Yeltsin camp willing and able to do the CIA’s bidding.

Putin’s resistance and resilience as a Russian leader operating independent of CIA control helped shape a new generation of Russophobes in the United States. The first generation were the ‘new Russian’ thinkers that replaced the old school ‘Sovietologists’ at the end of the Cold War. To them, Russia was a playground for which to launch experiments on economic and political domination with absolutely zero regard to the price being paid by the people of Russia.

This generation of Russophobes simply detested Russia and the Russian people, failing to attribute any normative human value to their lives. Millions of Russians lost their lives as a result, and tens of millions of others suffered greatly.

Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, falls into this category. So, too, does Fiona Hill. And Beth Sanner. People whose educational background and Russian experience pre-dates Putin, people who know the truth about Russia but opted instead to embrace the hegemonic policies of superpower singularity and work to weaken and destroy Russia.

But Putin’s stubborn hold on power, despite concerted efforts by the CIA to oust him (think Navalny), led to the birth of a new generation of Russophobes, so-called ‘experts’ whose only claim to relevance is their undying hatred of Putin and everything Russian.

It is this generation that has gravitated to the upper levels of the CIA’s analytical community, and who openly hate all things Russia. People like Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Julia Gurganus.

It is this openly Russophobic CIA that John Ratcliffe oversees.

His relationship with Julia Gurganus is both instructive and illustrative of the sickness that pervades the CIA when it comes to Russia. Gurganus was the National Intelligence Officer for Russia back in 2016-17, at the height of the Obama-era Russiagate scandal that tried to make the case of collusion between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton.

Gurganus helped manufacture the intelligence that underpinned this false allegation. She was a vociferous critic of Trump, so much so that the CIA quietly exiled her to a think tank position during Trump’s first term in office.

When Trump was reelected, Ratcliffe oversaw the whitewashing of Gurganus’ role in falsely accusing Trump of collusion, leading to the elevation of Gurganus as the senior CIA briefer onboard Air Force One as Trump flew to Alaska to meet with Putin in August 2025. That’s right – Ratcliffe purposefully cleansed Gurganus of her anti-Trump credentials so she could personally brief the president before his meeting with Putin.

Tulsi Gabbard, in her role as DNI, exposed Gurganus as an anti-Trump operative and had her security clearances revoked, but not before the damage was done.

There was a time when the CIA’s Directorate of Operations Russia House was home to living legends. People like Milton Beardon, who helped run Operation Cyclone and was chief of the Soviet/East European Division at the time the Soviet Union fell. Gardner Hathaway and Berton Gerber, who ran some of the most successful CIA spying operations from Moscow Station in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

And Murat Natirboff, another legendary Russian hand who led the Moscow Station during the Nicholas Daniloff affairs in the 1980s. Natirboff is instructional in this regard. His father was an officer in the Russian White Army which fought the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Natirboff hated the communists. But he loved Russia. He was held in very high regard by the Soviet officers of the KGB which faced off against him during his tour in Moscow.

I can personally attest to Murat’s feelings toward Russia – I met him after he left Moscow in 1988, where we spoke about my experiences in Votkinsk as an INF Treaty weapons inspector.

The CIA no longer employs people of this caliber in its operational work regarding Russia. Gone are the days of the Russian romantics – people who took the time to learn about their enemies to bring to life Sun Tzu’s classic observation: “If you know your enemy as yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.”

The present-day Directorate of Operations is overrun with paramilitary operatives, men (and women) who cut their teeth during the heyday of the post-9/11 ‘Global War on Terror’, where they oversaw secret wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran.

They take their cue from veterans like Tom Sylvester, a former Navy SEAL who worked in the CIA’s Special Activities Branch as a Ground Branch operative. Tom headed the CIA’s efforts in Ukraine post-2022, when the Special Military Operation began. His job was literally to kill Russians.

People like ‘Santa Claus’, the nickname of the CIA’s Kiev Station Chief who sent Ground Branch to Ukraine post-2014 to train the Ukrainian intelligence special operations forces on how best to kill Russians.

Veterans of the CIA’s drone assassination programs now advise the Ukrainian drone operators on how to kill Russians and destroy Russian infrastructure.

In December 2025, the CIA helped direct Ukrainian drones toward a residence in Valdai where Putin was staying.

Yes – John Ratcliffe’s CIA tried to kill the Russian president. The CIA denies Putin was the target, but the data from the guidance chips extracted from Ukrainian drone debris appears to suggest otherwise.

Today, the CIA is knee-deep in the business of killing Russians. They continue to guide Ukraine’s expanded drone warfare campaign targeting Russia. And Russians.

This is John Ratcliffe. This is the organization he leads. So, when people reflect on the recent visit by Ratcliffe to Russia, never lose sight of his primary mission.

https://www.rt.com/news/644973-cia-never-comes-in-peace/

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Who really benefits from the CIA chief’s Moscow trip?

Ratcliffe’s hush-hush visit may be less about Moscow than helping turn Baltic alarm and Brussels money into new business for US arms makers

BY Rachel Marsden

Speculation abounds over the reason for CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent trip to Moscow. Which probably could have been an email. Or a social media post. Just like everything else this administration does.

Oooh, don’t tell me! He went to demand that Russian President Vladimir Putin not help Iran! Or he went to ask whether they’re still up for more speed dating to talk peace in Ukraine! Or maybe just to talk about swapping prisoners. Which happens fairly regularly. And doesn’t require a personal visit. Or maybe Ratcliffe just had a jonesing for that ice cream at the GUM mall in Red Square. Who really knows.

So I’d like to personally take the opportunity to add to the theories, which can only really be evaluated sometime down the road in hindsight.

The thing that strikes me the most about this trip is the sudden secrecy. Specifically from an administration with a penchant for blabbing about everything. If Trump wanted to tell Putin or Russian intelligence something, he’d do it himself on Truth Social Instead, he was uncharacteristically vague, calling the trip semi-routine. When is this guy tight-lipped about anything? It’s so far out of character for the American President that one is almost obligated to look for a motive for the secrecy.

So with that in mind, it seems reasonable to ask whether there is any financial or political constituency that stands to benefit from the message being sent by this unusually secretive trip.

Well, it turns out that it just happened to take place at the same time as the European Union was meeting to set its new 7-year budget, and Eastern European Baltic nations were making a massive push for cash from Brussels.

You know what they say: if you have a pet that starts in with some nasty habits, like chewing the furniture to get your attention, then you really have to nip that in the bud real quick. Otherwise, there’s a risk that, next thing you know, your other pets will learn from it and start gnawing on the couch or the table legs, too.

So here you have Europe, that’s been sitting there while Kiev says 'gimme money', and 'I deserve it because I’m defending all of Europe for you. Oh, and even better, actually, defending DEMOCRACY for you lazy bums'. And instead of whacking it on the nose and going, 'NO, BAD! Brussels just goes, 'Wanna treat?'

So now, what do you know, here comes Latvia, who’s been watching this whole charade, seeing that Ukraine goes from begging to getting tossed a bone every single time, and now they too are like, 'Woof, woof, I’m defending all of Europe for you. Where’s my money? 7 BILLION EUROS, specifically'.

And it’s not like Latvia is even bothering to come up with its own twist on Ukraine’s pitch. It’s not like they’re saying, 'Ukraine’s pitch to Brussels is, ‘Look, we’re being invaded. You’d better give us what we want because we’re the only thing standing between Putin showing up in Europe with a neck pillow for an Interrail tour of Europe.’ So we, Latvia, need to come up with something else. Especially since we aren’t actually being invaded – we just need some emotional-support money'.

No, instead, they’re just basically saying the exact same sort of thing minus the existential threat – that Latvia is the bouncer at the Baltic door keeping Putin on the other side of the velvet rope.

Surely it can’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that Latvia’s economy could use the kind of economic boost that can only come from having Brussels dump a ton of cash into its defense industry, right? Because everything’s going so well for Latvia economically, ever since this conflict in Ukraine went hot in 2022 and Riga cut itself off from Russian trade: from just over €2 billion a year back then, to just €193 million last year – an almost 90% reduction in the value of trade between the two countries, according to Latvia’s own foreign affairs ministry.

And now energy prices are going back up again, too – an 83% spike in gas prices since the beginning of this year in Latvia, and 24% over just the past month. An established trend since the EU cut everyone off from Russian fuel and now Trump’s cutting everyone off from fuel from the Middle East with his apparently endless 'mine’s bigger' standoff with Iran.

Oh look, here comes Lithuania now, too. What a surprise! Another guy watching from the cheap seats and going: 'Hang on. We’re also next to Russia. We have security problems, infrastructure costs, and defense bills. Where is OUR cash handout?'

Turns out that Lithuania has just gone directly to Brussels with the invoice, essentially saying: You keep telling us the eastern flank is crucial to European security. Wonderful. Please prove this commitment using the traditional European unit of measurement: euros.

When it comes to Eastern Europe, the EU’s seven-year budget plan is starting to look like a group dinner where everyone suddenly remembers that the guy at the end of the table has a corporate credit card.

But the real question is whose bills would Brussels ultimately be paying? Surely it’s just a mere coincidence that major beneficiaries of Latvian and Lithuanian defense spending include Trump’s America, as the largest supplier of major conventional arms to Latvia and Lithuania, according to the most recently available Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) arms transfer data.

All this comes after the western press reported that the CIA director flew to Moscow this week to tell Russia not to attack NATO countries. Which is actually great marketing for the cause of Eastern European countries shaking down Brussels and basically launching a grant program. They’re behaving now as though a potential future hypothetical Russian attack on NATO is serious enough to justify enormous new expenditures, but the benefit of Brussels’ largesse risks going to Washington as the top weapons supplier.

The trip is remarkably convenient for governments seeking to turn fears about Russia into a case for vastly increased European defense spending – and for the American defense industry that stands to benefit from a big chunk of that spending.

But hey, who really cares if everyone’s barking out for treats when you’re Brussels and all you ever need to do is reach into the pockets of the taxpayer. Even if you then run straight back to Uncle Sam with it and drop it in his lap.

https://www.rt.com/news/645147-cia-trip-who-benefits/

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         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 SEE ALSO: https://www.brighteon.com/d73d3dcb-b4fd-49a8-aef1-114a5ba02fc8