(FreedomBeacon.com)- The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington DC think tank, has employed more than a dozen individuals who worked for Chinese-based nonprofits either set up or co-opted by China’s intelligence agencies, including the intel arm of the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security, according to the Daily Caller.
The Chinese employees, many of them serving as policy experts in international relations, American politics, and nuclear policy, were working at both Carnegie’s DC headquarters and its Beijing center at Tsinghua University.
Not only did Carnegie employ these experts while the current CIA Director William Burns was serving as president of the group, but some of them are still working for Chinese intelligence front groups.
By cross-referencing publicly available employment information with Alex Joske’s book “Spies and Lies” which details Chinese intel’s efforts to infiltrate and influence Western institutions, the Daily Caller was able to determine the names of some of these Chinese assets.
In his book, Joske reveals that in the early 2000s, Chinese intelligence began courting Carnegie as part of this influence operation. While none of the individuals Joske identifies are labeled as “spies,” he does detail how Chinese agents set up various front groups hoping to attract partnerships with Western think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
According to Joske’s book, China’s Ministry of State Security, using the same tactics it deployed against the George Soros-linked China Fund in the late 80s, set out to lure Western institutions closely linked to the US government into partnerships with various Chinese nonprofit groups.
One such example was Zheng Bijian, an undercover asset with the Ministry of State Security who became the chairman of the China Reform Forum, a Chinese think tank. According to Joske’s book, four years after Zheng took over, the China Reform Forum persuaded Carnegie to launch a joint China program.
Joske told the Daily Caller that the Ministry of State Security zeroed in on think tanks considering them to be a “weak point in our system” and a way for China to influence US policy.
Read the Daily Caller report HERE.
