Alexander Hoffmann — about what the conversation between Naryshkin and Ratcliffe showed and what is now remarkable about the US Central Intelligence Agency
The return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office was marked by significant changes in the public policy of the United States. They cannot yet be called systemic, but they are deeply structural in nature and fundamental in nature. Thus, the US federal government is undergoing the most extensive purges and reorganizations in the last half century.
The changes have seriously affected the American intelligence community. According to Professor Andrey Bezrukov, the massive layoffs among the staff of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reflect Trump's desire to put an end to his long-standing political and ideological opponents in the state apparatus. The appointees of the US Democratic Party are being forced out of the special services along with the sad legacy of the policies of the 46th American President Joe Biden.
Against this background, a landmark event took place on March 11 — Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and John Ratcliffe, head of the CIA, agreed to establish regular contacts in order to reduce confrontation between Moscow and Washington. They also discussed issues of cooperation between the two special services in areas of common interest and crisis management.
Even during the most troubled times — under the Biden administration — the intelligence services of the two great powers maintained contact and a modest exchange of information, but the conversation between Naryshkin and Ratcliffe was evidence of a fundamental change in the language of communication between the CIA and its Russian counterparts. There is evidence of this shift both in the agency's relationship with its once-"main adversary" and in Langley's new approaches to information policy.
Stop game
In April 2023, the secret service created a channel called Securely Contacting CIA ("Secure Communication with the CIA") on Telegram, which confirmed that the channel was indeed coming from Langley. For the first year and a half, it published instructions on how to contact the agency to transmit information containing state secrets of the Russian Federation.
The CIA targeted the Russian military, intelligence officers, diplomats and scientists, as well as their friends and acquaintances who may have or have access to classified information. Subsequently, the channel duplicated the instructions in Chinese, Farsi and Korean, addressing them to the same categories of people in China, Iran and the DPRK.
The agency even produced and posted propaganda videos in depressing gray tones, telling fictional stories about Russian military intelligence officers or engineers of defense-industrial enterprises who "for good purposes" committed treason and began transferring state secrets to Langley.
Such a move by the CIA leadership, which was then headed by William Burns, a career diplomat and former American ambassador to Moscow, was out of the ordinary for the work of the special services. The agency began to use one of the most popular communication tools in the world in order to openly recruit Russian citizens.
The last entry in the channel dates back to January 16 of this year, Burns' penultimate working day at his post. Of course, this does not mean that under Ratcliffe, the CIA will not try to persuade Russian citizens to commit treason in favor of the United States, but the stupid flirtations with experimental undisguised recruitment of the Burns era have apparently come to an end.
Scandal
In February, Elizabeth Lyons, 30, was appointed head of the CIA's public relations department. During Trump's first term, she worked in various positions in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, the White House office, where she dealt with information policy issues. In June 2022, Elizabeth married Derek Lyons, a former presidential adviser and former White House staff secretary in the first Trump administration.
The dedication of Langley's new PR chief to the 47th President of the United States is beyond doubt. And she began to prove it from the very first days at the CIA.
So, at the end of last month, journalist Christopher Rufo published fragments of correspondence between US intelligence officers on the secure Intelink internal network. There, American intelligence officers and counterintelligence officers discussed their predilections for sexual perversion, genital mutilation and various fetishes in a secret government chat. This fits into the principles of DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) of the Biden era, but not into the ideological attitudes of the Trumpists.
Lyons responded to the messages that compromise CIA employees not with a press release on Langley's official website, but with a statement that she posted on her behalf on Rufo's page on the social network X (formerly Twitter). According to her, the incident with the correspondence is "unacceptable and has no place in the agency." "The CIA will take immediate action on this issue, which once again proves the need for serious reforms," she added.
Previously, Langley had not resorted to such a method of public relations, especially in the context of open political support for the current president's agenda.
The Trumpist Agenda
Lyons is well acquainted with the CIA director from her work in the White House and Congress. After a career in the Executive Office of the President, she was responsible for public relations in the Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic under the Committee on Oversight of Government Agencies of the U.S. House of Representatives.
This subcommittee investigated the origin of the COVID-19 infection, and Ratcliffe, as Director of National Intelligence (all US intelligence agencies report to him), testified for the final congressional report published in December 2024 at the height of the quarantine in 2020. It cites a leak from the Wuhan Virology Laboratory in China, which was funded by American organizations, as the cause of the pandemic.
During the subcommittee's investigation, Ratcliffe had a second role — he worked as a visiting researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, where he was tasked with "holding China accountable for COVID-19," which he tried to do in Congress.
Another and more important area of his work at the center is the preparation of proposals for reforming the US intelligence community. His recommendations are set out in the latest collection, The Mandate for Leadership, a guide for presidential candidates or elected heads of state belonging to the Republican Party, which the Heritage Foundation prepares every election cycle.
The "mandate" for the second Trump administration was dubbed the "Conservative Reassurance" and is more commonly known as the "2025 Project." The proposals put forward in it are being consistently implemented by the White House. These include purging the CIA of the "warmongers" with Russia who remained at the agency after the Biden administration.
Alexander Hoffmann
Military observer of TASS
