CIA director, Putin’s spy chief hold first phone call in more than 2 years: report

The directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) spoke by phone for the first time in more than two years, reports say. 

CIA Director John Ratcliffe called his Russian counterpart Sergey Naryshkin on Tuesday and “discussed the issues of interaction of both intelligence agencies in areas of common interest and the settlement of crisis situations,” Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, citing a statement from the SVR’s press office. 

It added that both Ratcliffe and Naryshkin agreed “on maintaining regular contact between the SVR and CIA directors with the aim of facilitating international stability and security and reducing confrontation in relationships between Moscow and Washington.” 

The CIA, when contacted Wednesday by Fox News Digital, declined to comment on the matter. 

Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer who specialized in Russian military doctrine, told Fox News Digital that the “Ratcliffe-Naryshkin meeting is supposed to be part of the revival of the CIA-SVR cooperation, which also has been tried before and abandoned.” 

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CIA Director John Ratcliffe, left, and Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

“Although such cooperation could be valuable, for example, in the counter-terrorism arena, it always eventually fails because there’s a dramatic difference between how the Russians and Americans see the world,” she said.

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Sergey Naryshkin is seen alongside then-Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin in February 2011. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

“We are ostensibly in a period of another attempted reset with Russia. Every U.S. president attempted to reset U.S. relations with Moscow and every one of them has failed,” Koffler continued. “There’s such a fundamental difference between the ways that Moscow and Washington see the world and their role in it that eventually, the policies each pursues come into collision with one another. The way that Russia and the U.S. have defined their national interests have placed the two nations in direct confrontation with each other.”

“The two are mutually irreconcilable. And this is clearly demonstrated in the war in Ukraine, which has been sacrificed and destroyed in the proxy battle between Moscow and Washington,” Koffler added. 

Vice President J.D. Vance swears in newly confirmed CIA Director John Ratcliffe while his wife, Michele Ratcliffe, looks on during a ceremony in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House on Jan. 23, 2025. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

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“It is possible that President Trump, who is a realist, will place Russia-U.S. relations on a transactional basis, without the ideological angle, as all the previous administrations, that always drove an edge between the two. It remains to be seen if he will succeed,” Koffler also said.