I think YOU are missing the point. If someone "else" has done the thinking, or John Searle is doing the thinking (or the program; or a combination) then there IS thinking in the room and not just syntactic manipulation. This is similar to this thought experiment:

I was on a flight where I saw 2 chess masters A and B sitiing very far apart. I know both. I went to A and said would you like to play chess, and I also went to B and asked to play chess. I started 2 matches and I kept going back and forth between the two. I do not know how to play chess at all. Yet, whatever player A made, I went and made that move with B. Whatever B replied, I went back to A and replied with that move. And so on,

In the end:

While I do not know how to play chess, I will beat one of the grandmasters of chess !!!

In this case, I cannot say "there was no chess playing going on" - there was, and I was just the "medium".

So, if "someone else" did the thinking, or John Searle did the thinking, THERE WAS THINKING in the room.

The point: YOU CANNOT ANSWER (* SENSIBLY *) WITHOUT SEMANTICS/UNDERSTANDING, REGARDLESS OF WHO DID THAT THINKING.

So either his experiment is flawed, or it is FALSE.