Greening as a participant in a city-wide tree planting event. Prior to his position as commissioner, Xu was a military attaché stationed in the Chinese Embassies in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Brazil and has been referred to by the Chinese government as "a former military attaché of the Chinese Embassy in Brazil" as late as 2021. The Intelligence Bureau controls several think tanks, such as the China Institute for International and Strategic Studies and the China Foundation for International Strategic Studies, to interact with foreign academics and analysts. History In 1931, Zhou Enlai gathered trusted communist comrades that he had personally worked with in Paris or Shanghai to establish an Intelligence Bureau (later called the General Intelligence Department) under its Central Military Commission. The new intelligence service was created specifically to maintain an intelligence body outside the control of the increasingly paranoid and power-hungry influence of Kang Sheng. In 1950, it became part of the PLA General Staff (until 1954 known as the "General Staff of the People's Revolutionary Military Committee"), and was referred to as "the 2nd Bureau" as the PLA adopted the Soviet model of organization. During the rule of Mao Zedong, and especially under the leadership of General Liu Shaowen (Director of the Intelligence Bureau from 1954 to 1967), the 2nd Bureau was active in funding, arming and training dozens of Asian, African and Latin American militant groups and liberation movements; especially in the case of Africa, the Intelligence Bureau "supplied, at one time or another, nearly all of the various African liberation movements with arms, money, food and medicines". Among those who received military training were Pol Pot (leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) and Abimael Guzmán (leader of the Shining Path in Peru). From the early 1970s and until the end of the Cold War, beginning with the tactical alliance of Mao Zedong and U.S. President Richard Nixon to jointly oppose the Soviet Union, the 2nd Bureau unofficially collaborated with the American CIA in certain cases, most notably in Afghanistan, where Chinese intelligence (both civilian and military) played a central role in funding, arming and training Afghan guerrillas against the Soviets. From 1980 to 1984 the cost of Chinese support totaled approximately $400 million. In a joint operation of the 2nd Bureau and the Ministry of State Security, Chinese assistance expanded to eventually include heavy machine guns, mortars, recoilless rifles, rocket launchers and anti-aircraft artillery.