The Chinese professor on LinkedIn
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The Chinese professor on LinkedIn is John Kiriakou's account of a sustained approach he believes came from the Chinese Ministry of State Security, told on 19 November 2025 after the host raised British accusations that the MSS was recruiting through the professional network.

The opening

Kiriakou described a low-friction target surface of his own making. "I'm on LinkedIn all the time. I have thousands and thousands of contacts. I don't send out contact requests, but people send them to me, and unless you're obviously a nut or a weirdo or a scammer, I just accept people."

The approach itself was flattering and ordinary. "About a year ago I got an invitation from a professor in China at some university that I never heard of. And so I accepted it. And then he messaged me and said: oh, I've watched your videos on YouTube, and I would like to invite you to come to China to speak."

His reply was businesslike. "Okay, great. I'd love to go to China to speak. I have a speaker's agent. I have a price. And so I said: great, let's have that conversation. In fact, that's exactly what I said, let's have that conversation."

The escalation

The answer that came back skipped the conversation entirely. "So then he comes back and he says: I've made all the arrangements for five stops. And I said: whoa, wait a minute. We haven't even begun to discuss this yet. So no, we're not going to do five stops."

The pattern then repeated for a year. "As recently as two weeks ago he emailed me and said: why don't you respond to me? I've already arranged all of your stops all across eastern China."

The end of it, and the second opinion

Kiriakou's final message was one sentence. "And I wrote back finally and I said: I don't do work for the Chinese intelligence service. And then he blocked me. But that's what he was."

He did not rely on his own judgement alone. "I showed all these messages to a dear friend of mine, Fulton Armstrong. Fulton and I were at the CIA together, he was the national intelligence officer for China, and then we were on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff together. And I said: tell me if I'm nuts, but this is Chinese intelligence, right? And he looks at it and he says, 100%."

The joke underneath

Kiriakou's opening response to the British allegations had been sardonic rather than alarmed: "for years I've been on LinkedIn and I've never gotten so much as the slightest lead from LinkedIn, so I was beginning to wonder if there were any real jobs on it. So this indicates to me that at least in the UK there are real jobs betraying your country."

He also reports the platform paying off legitimately, if modestly: a stranger asked him for a one-page paper, he asked for a thousand dollars, and "boom, five minutes later" the money arrived.

See also

- Recruitment attempts on Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Chinese overseas police stations
