Recruiting foreign students
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Recruiting foreign students is the long-horizon case Kiriakou makes for keeping American universities open to foreign nationals, put in operational rather than moral terms.

The argument

Looked at operationally, he says, the United States wants foreign students to come, and wants them to study the hard sciences, because the CIA can recruit them while they are students and then send them home, into the Chinese missile programme, or the Russian nuclear programme, or the Iranian nuclear programme. They are then not a target to be approached later but an asset already in place. Foreign doctoral students are the category he singles out.

His explanation for why the argument never reaches the top is institutional. The director of the CIA is most of the time a political appointee, and political appointees are not thinking about issues on that timescale, so it is unlikely anyone puts the case to a president at all.

The loss

Against a reported 17 per cent fall in first-time international enrolment across American institutions, Kiriakou's only comment on the policy is that it could be a very important operational opportunity lost.

His own experience of it

He frames the interest as personal as well as professional, saying he valued his relationships with foreign students at university. The composition of that group tracked the crises of the period: when he arrived, most of the foreign upperclassmen were Iranians stranded in the United States by the revolution; by the time he left, most were Lebanese who had fled the civil war.

Chinese doctoral students specifically

Asked in 2025 why China continues to send students to American universities, Kiriakou answered from the other side of the question. "If I were the CIA director, I would want as many Chinese PhD students in American universities as possible, because every single one of those Chinese PhD students should be a CIA target for recruitment."

The reasoning is about placement over time. They are "almost exclusively in the hard sciences," they will return to China, and "they're going to take positions of authority, they're going to rise up through the ranks of the Ministry of Defence or whatever. I would want to recruit them while they're in college in the United States, and then send them back to China and have them work in place."

He treats the reduction of foreign student numbers as a strategic self-injury for a second reason as well: the United States is forfeiting its standing as the place even adversaries want to be educated, and forcing China into building equivalents it would otherwise not need, hiring American teachers into American-style schools at home, which he says is already happening.

See also

- The scholar-in-residence pipeline
- Scholar-in-Residence program
- Asset acquisition cycle
- Access Agent
- George Washington University
