The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – formerly led by Joe Biden’s Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns – has continued its relationship with Chinese Communist Party influence groups despite Burns claiming otherwise during sworn testimony to the U.S. Senate, The National Pulse can reveal.

Burns became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2015 and claimed, during Senate confirmation hearings, that he merely “inherited” the think tank’s longstanding relationship with the China-United States-Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

Lying to Congress?

Purporting to be “increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations,” Burns – who currently leads the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – was adamant he cut Carnegie’s ties with CUSEF “not long after” he began his tenure while answering questions from Senator Marco Rubio. 

Rubio explained that CUSEF is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which seeks “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” according to the U.S. government.

The U.S. State Department also compares the United Front to the Chinese regime’s “magic weapon” to advance its preferred policies by infiltrating American politics, media, and academia.

In response, Burns claimed that “…on the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, this is a relationship that I inherited when I became president of Carnegie and that I ended not long after I became president precisely for the concerns that you just described because we were increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations. Shortly after I ended that relationship, we began a program at the Carnegie Endowment on countering foreign influence operations which was aimed mostly at China and Russia and was supported in part from a grant from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department in the last administration.”

Still A ‘United Front’.

But Burns’s think tank continued to accept funds and collaborate with officials tied to CUSEF during his tenure, and recently released another research paper on the subject of cyber attacks, in partnership with CUSEF and other Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions. The paper, released March 2022, is the latest piece of evidence contradicting Burns’s assertions.

The 76-pager – “Managing U.S.-China Tensions Over Public Cyber Attribution” – is the second joint research publication produced by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A foreword to the work by SIIS President Chen Dongxiao thanks CUSEF for its “generous support” of the effort.

Authors contributing to the paper included several individuals from the SIIS Research Center for Global Cyberspace Governance – a “joint effort” involving China’s National Defense University and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS).

SASS has been flagged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s top spy agency: the Ministry of State Security.

SASS – which the FBI explicitly labels a “front group for Chinese intelligence collection and overseas spy recruitment” – was a key player in a 2019 criminal case involving a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative selling classified U.S. defense documents to the Chinese Communist Party.

The publication is a compendium of six papers – authored by SIIS fellows and their Carnegie counterparts – focusing on how governments should publicly respond to cyberattacks. Chapters include “Attribution and Characterization of Cyber Attacks” and “The Purpose of U.S. Government Public Cyber Attribution.”

The paper explains in great detail the U.S. government’s approach to responding – both publicly and privately – to cyberattacks conducted by China, effectively granting the Chinese Communist Party America’s playbook on the issue.

The paper also appears to undermine U.S. attribution of cyberattacks to Chinese actors, with one SIIS fellow writing:

“Yet so long as the United States is making accusations outside of the international legal system and without sufficient evidence to hold the Chinese government accountable, Chinese observers will question the United States’ intention in launching unilateral accusations: Are they to warn against cyber operations? To simply point fingers at China? Or to ease domestic pressure? This further highlights the need for both states to strengthen communication and cooperation in public attribution.”

The unearthed paper follows the Carnegie Endowment collaborating with SIIS on a publication focused on nuclear energy collaboration in April 2021.