When the CIA checked me out on LinkedIn

Village people are subtle. They never come at you wielding machetes or as fearsome masquerades. No, they are far more cultured. They afflict you in secret. In the comfort of your office. While eating creamy cheese Alfredo pasta. Your sudden perishment will flummox people. An autopsy will reveal the cause of death as myocardial infarction. But it is your village people who bewitched you to eat a half-pounder cheeseburger every day.

I have always flown under the radar of my village people. I do nothing to pique their interest. Sometimes I write about my gallivanting around the globe. But I reckon that since they are frequent fliers also, my trifling peregrinations should provoke no envy in them. Sadly, they remembered me one fine afternoon in June 2024. They afflicted me with the type of idleness that the devil relishes. For out of nowhere, I had the sudden curiosity to check if the CIA was on LinkedIn.

Yes, that’s right. I saw a big red button marked “immolation” and I pressed it.

Here is how it unfolded.

A week earlier, I’d listened to an enjoyable ACQUIRED podcast. It was about the US military-industrial complex. The focus was on Lockheed Martin, the largest defence contractor to the US government. I love espionage and war literature, and I love military and spook movies. In secondary school, I suckled at the breasts of great spy novelists like John le Carré, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. It was thus delightful to listen to the well-researched podcast. It wove the CIA, the Cold War, the DoD and Lockheed Martin into one fine tapestry. 

Lockheed Martin makes killing machines. Like the F-22 and F-35 Raptors. Like the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters. Those bad boys knocked out 90% of Baghdad’s military infrastructure on the first night of the Gulf War. Then there is the Aegis Combat System. And the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles. And Hellfire missiles. And JASSM cruise missiles. And…you get the picture. Who knows, Lockheed Martin may well have made the lightsaber and Mjolnir.

Now, though Lockheed is the biggest defence contractor to the DoD, it is not the only notable member of the military-industrial complex. There is Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics and BAE Systems.

And all these companies, laden with US weaponry secrets, are all on LinkedIn. I wondered if the CIA might be on there too.

I wasn’t expecting an institution of spooks to be on LinkedIn. I mean, these guys unalive people. Why would they be on LinkedIn? But we live in a woke era; you never know what you might find online. Carlos the Jackal may well be advertising on Instagram. Pay for one assassination, get two assassinations.

Anyway, I fired up LinkedIn and typed in C-I-A.

And lo, there it is! The Central Intelligence Agency. With over 330 thousand followers!

Scores of CIA employees were on LinkedIn. “Recruiter.” “Intelligence Officer.” “Director, Field Operations.” “Chief Wellbeing Officer.” “Director, HUMINT” (HUMINT = Human Intelligence). I wondered if some of these folks were “Open to Work.”

But it was intriguing. I was dying to know; are there other spook agencies on LinkedIn? 

So I searched for the Mossad, Russia’s SVR and FSB, MI6 and China’s MSS

Nil.

Nada.

Not a dicky bird.

These organisations had no trace on LinkedIn, they might as well not exist.

Yet here is the CIA, in its full covert glory, conspicuous on LinkedIn.

One of the profiles I found interesting was “HR Business Partner.”

I imagined a conversation between an HR Business Partner and an “asset.”

HR Business Partner: Hey Kinkajou, I’m afraid we are putting you on a PIP – Performance Improvement Plan. That guy you were supposed to put the kibosh on in Novosibirsk? He’s still alive.

Kinkajou: What! How can that be? I drowned him in a barrel of Stolichnaya!

HR Business Partner: (Rolls eyes) He is Russian. You can’t drown a Russian in vodka…

I digress.

So, the CIA is on LinkedIn. I decided to check on specific profiles.

I checked three profiles.

And the weirdest thing happened.

Within three minutes, those three people checked me out too!

Oh Jide, you are dead now!

Can’t somebody play with you people? It is ordinary checking I was checking na!

Spooked, I closed my laptop.

Too late, fool. We’ve logged your IP and seen your picture. We’ve dispatched an asset to Lagos.

I saw visions of a SEAL Team Six packing for Lagos and the USS Gerald R. Ford and an Ohio-class submarine steaming towards West Africa. I went outside my office to look at the sky. I saw an unusual glint in the firmament – definitely an MQ-9 Reaper drone with Hellfire missiles.

Oh, my village people!

I imagined that my name must have been run through many databases. They may even have checked with the US Embassy in Nigeria.

Wait!

That explains it!

It’s why the US consulate in Lagos invited me for an interview last year!

The missus and I had submitted our B1/B2 visa renewal through the Interview Waiver Programme – “Dropbox.” We were frequent travellers to the US and took the renewal for granted.  Yet, eight weeks after the submission of our passports, the visas were not issued. When we tracked the application online, the status read “Refused.”

“Refused” on the application status portal does not mean “Denied.” This only means the consular officer did not have all the information required to approve or deny the visa. But it is not the same as “administrative processing.” You don’t want your application in that black hole. Anyway, if your status reads “Refused,” you can expect the Embassy to contact you for an interview.

And that is what happened. By the ninth week, the embassy wrote to us to invite us for an interview.

What might be wrong? What horrific truth have they discovered about me? Maybe they know about that time I had a pizza with pineapples? It was not a good feeling. It felt like a demotion. I thought I was on a first-name basis with the Founding Fathers.

We went for the interview.

Turns out the consular officer wanted to know about our trip to Cuba two years earlier. Almost all the questions she asked were about Cuba.

I do not blame her. Who flies 9,283 km from Lagos to Havana? 

Now, El Cocodrilo, or Mojito Mecca, or The Cha-Cha Chateau, otherwise known as the Republic of Cuba, is no friend of the United States. It hasn’t been since 1959 when Fidel Castro took over power and expropriated US economic assets in the country. America imposed sanctions on Cuba and tried to topple the Castro government. The CIA trained and funded exiled counter-revolutionaries to invade Cuba and topple Castro. The invasion failed. Castro was pissed. He declared Cuba a socialist state and befriended the Soviet Union, the US’ Cold War adversary. Kennedy was pissed and severed diplomatic ties with Havana. The beef would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. When America and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of thermonuclear war, with Cuba at the centre of it. America doubled down on the sanctions against Cuba and most of it persists to date.

One of such sanctions prohibited Americans and others from travelling to Cuba for tourism.

For instance, citizens of most European countries do not need a visa to travel to the United States. They fill out the ESTA form online and are off. But Donald Trump had it in for Cuba. Close to the end of his first term in 2021, he made travel to Cuba harder. Any European who travelled to Cuba after 12 January 2021 loses the privilege of visa-free travel to the US.

Imagine Frau Koch or Lord Cutler Beckett queuing outside the US Embassy for a visa interview. They now have to convince a consular officer that they are not intending immigrants. How demeaning! The same year, the US also included Cuba on the list of “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” In the eminent company of Iran, Syria and North Korea. Travelling to Cuba was simply not worth the hassle. 

Yet, that was the same country I dragged my wife to in 2022. As you can guess, I’m not blessed with much sense.

But back to the US consulate in Lagos.

We had stated in our visa applications that we’d been to Cuba. But the consular officer wanted to know why we went there and what we did while there. I’d answer and she’d probe further. She asked other questions too but kept circling back to Cuba.

And stupid me. I’d written a blog post about the trip titled Our Man in Havana. I ticked Cuba off my bucket list. It is an innocuous headline. Until you realise that Graham Greene, a former MI6 agent, wrote a spy novel about Cuba titled Our Man in Havana.

In the end, she issued the visas. But I remained suspicious. The CIA is full of tradecraft. Maybe they wanted me to travel to the US so they could abduct me and take me to a black site. I can’t be sure, but I thought the CBP officer who let me in at Dulles last November had a twinkle in his eyes. I was flying into the US through Virginia. The CIA HQ is in Virginia. Perfect.

Ah, I watch too many spy movies! 

Of course, the CIA is on LinkedIn. As is the FBI, NSA and DoD. Why shouldn’t they? Their presence on social media might seem strange to many people but everyday people and not only Jason Bourne work in the organisation. They still need to attract great talents and sell a proposition. I suspect hundreds of people check them out on LinkedIn looking for opportunities. I hear the 401K with the federal government isn’t too shabby. And you’ll be doing a morally praiseworthy job defending the American way of life. Plus there is the respect that comes with working with the number one cloak-and-dagger agency in the world.

Especially from your high school bully.

Happy New Year, folks!