CIA Director John Ratcliffe secretly visited Moscow aboard a not-so-secret C-17 Globemaster to engage in high-level discussions with Russian officials.
His visit was reported by CBS News and was cited by Russian state media, including TASS. U.S. and Russian officials both declined to comment or claimed ignorance. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he wasn’t aware of any visit or meetings. If confirmed, it would be Ratcliffe’s first known visit to Russia.
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The use of the U.S.’s largest aircraft to visit Moscow stirred widespread speculation. The flight was viewed by both air traffic monitors and filmed by locals. In one of the most widely circulated videos on social media, a local was heard joking, “We are under attack!”
The flight remained a mystery for several hours. A convoy of vehicles with U.S. diplomatic plates was recorded in the streets of Moscow shortly after.
Ratcliffe’s visit was soon confirmed by other outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Axios, and several Ukrainian outlets. The last known trip by a CIA director to Russia was by former President Joe Biden’s CIA Director William Burns, who visited in November 2021 to warn against an invasion of Ukraine.
The C-17 departed from Moscow on Tuesday evening.
The visit is shrouded in mystery, with little known outside of the meeting itself. The different outlets reporting on the visit could only speculate, with explanations ranging from discussions around prisoner swaps, Iran war negotiations, or a warning against testing NATO defenses, as intelligence figures have been warning about for weeks.
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The meeting was most likely related to the war in Ukraine, as negotiations have stalled. Rustam Churyakov, general director of the Moscow-based intelligence think tank Laboratory Intelligence Express, told the Wall Street Journal that Russia has prioritized its continued intelligence connections with the U.S. since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, as intelligence officials are able to more openly discuss sensitive topics than their diplomatic counterparts.
“The U.S. has supported Ukraine since the very beginning of the war and from the point of view of our state, it’s an opponent, but colleagues from intelligence agencies like these can discuss a large number of issues more freely than politicians,” he said.
