Despite the rhetoric of the U.S. president, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under John Ratcliffe is carrying out aggressive operations against Russia, The Atlantic reported Friday.
The magazine describes the role of the CIA director, who finds himself at the center of Washington’s “internally contradictory” policy toward Ukraine. As the author writes, he advises a president who last week called on Ukrainians to choose a new leader and described Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a more difficult partner than Vladimir Putin. At the same time, he heads an agency whose support is crucial for Ukraine.
The Atlantic noted that, thanks to data provided by the United States, the Ukrainian military is striking deep inside Russia, including refineries, while American satellites warn of incoming missiles and drones. An intelligence officer from one of the Baltic states assessed that the CIA’s actions are now “much more aggressive” than under the previous administration.
According to the magazine’s sources, Ratcliffe has no illusions about the threat Russia poses to Ukraine, Europe and the United States.
The article sheds new light on Ratcliffe’s mysterious meetings with representatives of Russian intelligence services in Moscow in August and with the president of Ukraine at an airport in Ireland in September.
According to the magazine’s sources, the visit to Russia was meant to convey to Putin, through a special intelligence channel, information about the true picture of the war in Ukraine. Ratcliffe reportedly said that neither side is winning. The in-person visit was meant to ensure that Putin, who according to Western intelligence services may have a false picture of the war, receives that message. The CIA director also reportedly recounted that meeting in a conversation with Zelenskyy, though the encounter itself came about by chance, because both men happened to have layovers at Shannon airport at the same time.
The Atlantic assesses that Ukraine’s successes, achieved with CIA support, have become a problem from Donald Trump’s perspective. According to estimates by the International Energy Agency, in the first eight months of the year Ukraine attacked a Russian refinery on average every three days. Trump blames those strikes for the rise in diesel prices.
According to the author, officials in Kyiv trust that Ratcliffe tells Trump the truth about the course of the war. A senior Ukrainian intelligence official assessed that the CIA director would be a more effective negotiator than the current U.S. presidential envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. At the same time, the agency chief himself reportedly regards his role as purely advisory and informational and, according to the cited sources, does not lobby the president for a change of policy course.
The magazine also describes tensions within the agency itself: a record number of departures, according to officers, but also high morale in the operations division and low morale among analysts. Under Ratcliffe, the agency is said to be focusing on covert operations, not only in Ukraine.
From Washington, Oskar Górzyński (PAP)
