MOSCOW, March 18. /TASS/. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has stopped updating its Telegram channel through which the special service recruited Russians, Alexander Hoffmann, TASS’ military observer, said in his column.
"The last entry in the channel dates back to January 16 of this year, the penultimate working day of [former CIA chief William] Burns as director of the agency. Of course, this does not mean that under [current CIA Director John] Ratcliffe, the CIA will not try to persuade Russian citizens to treason in favor of the United States, but the silly flirtations with experimental undisguised recruitment of the Burns era have come to an end," the author writes.
In April 2023, the US intelligence service created a channel called Securely Contacting CIA (Secure Communication with the CIA) in the Telegram messenger, which confirmed that the channel was indeed from Langley. For the first year and a half, it published instructions on how to contact the agency to transmit information containing Russia’s state secrets.
"The CIA has targeted the Russian military, intelligence officers, diplomats, and scientists, as well as their friends and acquaintances who may have or may get access to classified information," the column says.
Hoffmann says that such a move by the CIA was out of the ordinary for the special services. "The agency began using one of the world's most popular means of communication to openly recruit Russian citizens," he writes.
"The agency even produced and posted propaganda videos in dreary gray tones on the channel, telling fictional sad stories about Russian military intelligence officers or engineers of the defense enterprises who committed treason for ‘good purposes’ and began transferring state secrets to Langley," the TASS columnist added.