CIA chief visited Moscow for meetings, sources say

CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow for meetings on August 25, CBS News reported, citing multiple sources.

The trip explains the previously unexplained flight of a U.S. Air Force C-17A Globemaster III that landed at Vnukovo International Airport near Moscow that morning after departing Riga, Latvia.

The Kremlin said it had “no information” about the visit when asked by reporters. CBS News did not disclose who Ratcliffe met with in Moscow or what was on the agenda, and no further details on the meetings have been made public.

Flight tracking data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft, carrying callsign REACH4555, land in Russia at approximately 10:04 a.m. Moscow time. The aircraft’s recent routing began in the United States on August 22, when it departed Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey and flew to Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina. It continued to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland the next day before flying to Riga and then on to Moscow.

The visit is not the first contact between Ratcliffe and Russian officials this year. In March, Ratcliffe held a phone call with Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, the first such contact between the two agencies’ leaders in more than two years, according to Russian state news agency TASS. That call came the same day Ukraine backed a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire.

Direct visits by a sitting CIA director to Moscow have been rare in recent years. Then-CIA Director William Burns traveled to Moscow in 2021 and met with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev during a period of heightened tension over a Russian military buildup near Ukraine’s border.

Neither the CIA nor the White House has issued a public statement on the purpose of Ratcliffe’s trip. What was discussed, who else may have accompanied him, and how long he remained in Moscow have not been disclosed.