South Florida has become a common destination for Chinese nationals to be arrested while taking photographs.
At least six people from China have been charged since September 2018 in connection with incidents at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach and at Naval Air Station Key West.
But even as the United States increasingly warns about Chinese intelligence activities, none of the cases resulted in charges of espionage or of acting as an agent of a foreign government.
“It’s hard to believe that all of these characters are simply passionate tourists with a photography hobby,” David Laufman, a former senior counterintelligence official at the Justice Department, told the Washington Examiner. Yet, that was the common defense.
Zhao Qianli, a 21-year-old musicology student, waded into the water to get around a security fence at the military base when he was arrested for photographing defense installations in September 2018. Qianli, who was sentenced to a year in prison for illegal photography, claimed he was just a lost tourist, not a spy.
A few months later, Yujing Zhang, a 33-year-old tourist, flew from Shanghai to Newark, New Jersey, and made her way to Palm Beach. She was found guilty of trespassing at the president’s resort and lying to federal agents about why she was there. Zhang had been allowed onto the property by security guards who believed she was related to a member of the club and came there to swim. A Mar-a-Lago receptionist said Zhang was recording video with her phone when she walked into the lobby.
Late last year, police arrested another Chinese woman at Mar-a-Lago. Jing Lu, 56, tried to enter the club via the main gate and was turned away. She then entered the property through a service driveway, where security cameras captured her taking photographs with her cellphone, according to court documents. Lu, whose visa was expired at the time of her arrest, has been charged with loitering and nonviolently resisting an officer.
Lyuyou Liao was arrested the following week at the Key West base. Liao, 27, told authorities he was trying to take photographs of the sunrise after he was taken into custody. Witnesses said they spotted him walking around the perimeter fence at Naval Air Station Key West. Liao, who is awaiting trial, was charged with taking photographs of a defense installation.
Authorities arrested two Chinese students earlier this month when they drove onto the military base without authorization. Yuhao Wang and Jielun Zhang, both 24-year-old students at the University of Michigan, were charged with taking photographs at the base.
Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior intelligence officer and author of the book Chinese Intelligence Operations, said the four people at Key West could have been seeking details on military communications capabilities.
“Our communications gear and such is what a lot of the photographs appear to have been,” Eftimiades told the Washington Examiner, adding that there were other “sensitive things” he was not authorized to speak about.
The base, located about 90 miles north of Cuba, houses sensitive weapons. A U.S. intelligence cell, known as the Joint Interagency Task Force South, operates there. The station hosts the U.S. Army Special Forces Underwater Training School and supports missions for the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.
“Commercial intelligence was probably the target at Mar-a-Lago,” Eftimiades said. “Something like the guest membership list at the resort would be an excellent targeting list for research and collection.”
He speculated that Yujing Zhang, a consultant at an asset management company in China, may have been trying to collect personal details and insider commercial information that would boost her firm’s investment portfolio.
Current and former national security officials have referred to China’s efforts to steal information as a “whole-of-society” approach, using its own intelligence services, state-owned enterprises, private companies, students, researchers, and other actors to conduct espionage.
In a 2018 opinion piece, former FBI China analyst Paul Moore was quoted explaining how Beijing has made inroads on U.S. targets.
“If a beach were a target, the Russians would send in a sub; frogmen would steal ashore in the dark of night and collect several buckets of sand and take them back to Moscow,” Moore said. “The United States would send over satellites and produce reams of data. The Chinese would send in a thousand tourists, each assigned to collect a single grain of sand. When they returned, they would be asked to shake out their towels. And they would end up knowing more about the sand than anyone else.”
John Demers, the top national security official at the Justice Department, said changing the behavior of China “has proven to be a real challenge,” partly because of the pressure it can put on its own citizens.
“Well, you’re in the U.S., I’m sure you’d love to have a good job when you get back. You’re in the U.S., but you know who’s still in China? Your mom, your dad, your sister, your brother,” Demers said Friday at an event in Washington, portraying the influence Beijing could exert.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Eftimiades said similar cases are likely to surface.
“If someone had satisfied that collection requirement, we wouldn’t have seen the case this past couple weeks ago,” he said of the University of Michigan students’ arrests.
The presiding authority in that case, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Lurana Snow, said earlier this month that she doesn’t think either of the men are “undercover agents or master spies.”
But they could have been at the base to “obtain information that’s valuable to someone other than these two defendants,” she said.
[Read more: China luring US intel veterans to leak government secrets with cash]
