Putin seeks to engineer a new security crisis in Europe in a risky strategy to discredit Nato

LONDON - National spymasters regularly talk to each other even – or, perhaps, especially – when their countries are at each other’s throats. So, when John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, the United States’ top intelligence agency, flew for a brief visit to the Russian capital on Aug 25, officials in both Moscow and Washington claimed that this was business-as-usual.“I talk to leaders of other countries’ special services almost every week, whether face-to-face or online,” explained Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), soon after Ratcliffe left Moscow. It was all “semi-routine”; that’s how President Donald Trump described the meeting.