The Chinese spy who hunted on LinkedIn

Jun Wei Yeo, an ambitious and freshly enrolled Singaporean PhD student, was no doubt delighted when he was invited to give a presentation to Chinese academics in Beijing in 2015.

His doctorate research was about Chinese foreign policy and he was about to discover firsthand how the rising superpower seeks to attain influence, reports BBC.

After his presentation, Jun Wei, also known as Dickson, was, according to US court documents, approached by several people who said they worked for Chinese think tanks. They said they wanted to pay him to provide "political reports and information". They would later specify exactly what they wanted: "scuttlebutt" - rumours and insider knowledge.

He soon realised they were Chinese intelligence agents but remained in contact with them, a sworn statement says. He was first asked to focus on countries in South East Asia but later, their interest turned to the US government.

That was how Dickson Yeo set off on a path to becoming a Chinese agent - one who would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets.

Five years later, on Friday, amid deep tensions between the US and China and a determined crackdown from Washington on Beijing's spies, Yeo pleaded guilty in a US court to being an "illegal agent of a foreign power". The 39-year-old faces up to 10 years in prison.

Alumni at Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), which trains some of Asia's top civil servants and government officials, were left shocked by the news that their former peer had confessed to being a Chinese agent.

"He was a very active student in class. I always viewed him as a very intelligent person," said one former postgraduate student who did not wish to be named

She said he often talked about social inequality - and that his family struggled financially when he was a child. She said she found it difficult to reconcile the person she knew with his guilty plea.

A former member of staff at the institution painted a different picture, saying Yeo seemed to have "an inflated sense of his own importance".

Yeo's PhD supervisor had been Huang Jing, a high-profile Chinese-American professor who was expelled from Singapore in 2017 for being an "agent of influence of a foreign country" that was not identified.

Huang Jing always denied those allegations. After leaving Singapore, he first worked in Washington DC, and now Beijing.

According to the court documents released with Yeo's guilty plea, the student met his Chinese handlers on dozens of occasions in different locations in China.

During one meeting he was asked to specifically obtain information about the US Department of Commerce, artificial intelligence and the Sino-US trade war.

Bilahari Kausikan, the former permanent secretary at Singapore's foreign ministry, said he had "no doubt that Dickson knew he was working for the Chinese intelligence services".

He was not, he said, "an unwitting useful fool".

Yeo made his crucial contacts using LinkedIn, the job and careers networking site used by more than 700 million people. The platform was described only as a "professional networking website" in the court documents, but its use was confirmed to the Washington Post.

Former government and military employees and contractors are not shy about publicly posting details of their work histories on the website in order to obtain lucrative jobs in the private sector.