“We will never know how close we came to nuclear war.” These words were spoken to me in a run-down Moscow flat by a man who was already drinking vodka just after breakfast time, a man worn out by the memories that he had carried since 1983.

His words sprang to mind when I heard that the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, had made an unannounced journey to the Russian capital. I don’t think we are close to nuclear conflict but the world is in a bad place. The visit is reassurance that, despite the frictions, we are still able to find ways of communicating with each other. When there are tensions in 2026, when normal diplomacy isn’t working, at least a US President can send in his spymaster to try to lower the temperature.

That meeting in a Moscow flat – a BBC interview with Stanislav Petrov, the lieutenant-colonel in command at the centre for the Soviet Union’s nuclear attack early-warning system – offered me a window into what can happen when there are no back channels available to try to reduce room for misunderstanding.

On a fateful September day in 1983, Petrov told me, tensions between East and West were running high as the Cold War was at its most glacial. Three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a Korean Airlines passenger jet, killing all 269 passengers on board, and the communist leadership believed Nato was formulating an attack, using a long-planned military exercise in Germany, as a springboard. Trust between the two sides was non-existent.

In those days, a CIA director couldn’t just fly into the Russian capital – and our planet was left literally seconds away from catastrophe. On that September day, Petrov’s systems started flashing red. They seemed to be showing that a missile had been fired at the Soviet Union from the United States, and four more were incoming. Petrov should have automatically alerted his superiors who, according to protocol, would have prepared a retaliatory nuclear strike. He held back, hoping it was a false alarm.

He may have saved the world.

Today, global warning signs are flashing red once more, just as they did in 1983. We don’t know whether the CIA director was in Moscow on Tuesday to discuss Ukraine, Iran, Russian threats to the Baltic states or something else entirely, but he definitely didn’t go there to admire the Kremlin’s architecture.

In this case, the messenger could be the message. Intelligence chiefs are at their most useful precisely when governments distrust each other, formal negotiations have seized-up and public contact risks becoming political theatre. They can carry a president’s exact words without a press conference, they can test the response in the room and they can discuss dangers that cannot safely be publicised.

Right now, US-Russian relations are not as good as President Donald Trump might publicly want us to believe. The United States has no ambassador in Moscow, its embassy is run by a chargé d’affaires, its staffing is reduced and its consulates in Russia remain suspended. American-led efforts to end the Ukraine war have largely stalled. The diplomatic machinery is badly hollowed out. This visit is a sign that the CIA has become the emergency wiring.

Make no mistake, just like in 1983, the risk of miscalculation is real. The US intelligence community’s 2026 threat assessment highlights an “escalatory spiral” leading to direct hostilities, including nuclear exchanges – the most dangerous Russian threat. It also fears that continuing the Ukraine war increases the danger of inadvertent or deliberate escalation into direct conflict between Russia and Nato.

Traditional diplomats will say that a CIA director’s primary duty is to collect and assess intelligence, and not to quietly become a substitute secretary of state. Using Ratcliffe as a negotiator can blur the line between assessing policy and making it. It can leave allies unsure whether they are being consulted or bypassed. It can leave Congress and the wider public in the dark. And those who argue against such a use of the CIA boss would be right in normal times, but these are not normal times.

Ratcliffe’s Moscow dash may or may not prove significant. In a way, the outcome is not as important as the symbolism it carries – that Washington believes the US-Russian relationship is too dangerous to leave without a working backchannel, yet too broken to manage through ordinary diplomacy. This is both reassuring and alarming. Reassuring, because even adversaries need a circuit breaker; alarming, because the circuit breaker now appears to be the director of the CIA.

When presidents send spymasters it is a pointer that miscalculation has become the enemy. And yet 2026 is not 1983, and for that we should be profoundly grateful. We are still talking.

Jonathan Charles is a former BBC News foreign correspondent who reported extensively from Moscow. He now works as a geopolitical adviser to governments and multinational companies.