What LinkedIn Told Me This Weekend About U.S. National Security – The Contrarian

When I told my wife I was probably ready to retire from the CIA, she said, “You need to get on LinkedIn.” My response: “What’s LinkedIn?” Like many in the intelligence community, I had no social media profile. For nearly three decades, I’d worked in a world where digital visibility was something to be avoided, not cultivated. But when retirement came, my wife insisted. And, so—awkwardly, belatedly—I set up a LinkedIn profile, trying to explain a career most assumed was thrilling but irrelevant, useful only if I stayed tethered to the national security bureaucracy. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself on the receiving end of such inquiries via LinkedIn. Since I began teaching in January, those messages have included the occasional outreach from students at other universities, asking the same questions my students were asking that semester: How do I apply to the CIA? Can you tell me about a career in the intelligence community? Did the Russians ever try to recruit you? But in late May, I noticed a shift. The volume crept up. So did the diversity of backgrounds and the urgency in tone. These weren’t just college seniors looking for guidance. They now included
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