/Were these six Chinese trespassers confused tourists or spies? The FBI wants to know.

Were these six Chinese trespassers confused tourists or spies? The FBI wants to know.

On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-December, a Chinese woman entered the grounds of President Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida through a service entrance and snapped photos on her cell phone. “Who is Mar-a-Lago?” she said in court following her arrest.

Eight days later, a Chinese student walked around a perimeter fence at a U.S. Naval base in Key West, taking pictures of government buildings. Stopped by police, he said he was trying to capture images of the sunrise.

And nine days after that, two more Chinese students drove past a guard at the same Naval base. When stopped by security 30 minutes later, they voluntarily displayed the videos and photos they took of the base.

Were the incidents isolated cases of tourists mistakenly taking photos in sensitive locations? Or could some or all of the individuals be part of a spy operation run out of Beijing?

Federal authorities are now working to answer those questions. FBI counterintelligence agents are investigating whether the spate of incidents might be part of a coordinated espionage effort, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the matter.

Naval Air Station Key West’s Truman Harbor in Florida on Aug. 3, 2019.Danette Baso Silvers / U.S. Navy file

In total, four Chinese men have been arrested for trespassing and taking photos at the Naval Air Station in Key West since Sept. 2018, and two Chinese women have been arrested for trespassing at Mar-a-Lago since March 2019.

“Coincidences take a lot of planning,” said Frank Figliuzzi, the former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence.

“These types of brazen and repeated attempts to breach security at two separate facilities in the same region are highly unusual and worthy of serious inquiry by our intelligence community,” said Figliuzzi, who is an NBC News analyst.

Figliuzzi said the cases could represent a range of possible scenarios.

“These attempts could be a distraction from some greater targeting, or an attempt to tie up federal security resources in an area responsible for securing the president’s residence,” he said. “This could also be an attempt to test the Trump administration’s ability to react to targeting by one of our greatest adversaries.”

Some China experts said they found the incidents at the military installation to be particularly suspicious.

“You don’t just saunter onto a base like that, and individual Chinese students are extremely risk averse to this kind of thing,” said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“All of these people are in the same location, are Chinese, have cameras and backgrounds that are not those of casual tourists,” Daly added. “I never thought this could be anything other than a coordinated effort.”

A spokesperson for the FBI in Miami declined to comment citing the ongoing cases. The Chinese embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

The first Chinese student arrested at the Naval base in Key West was Zhao Qianli, 20, who was taken into custody on Sept. 26, 2018.

Zhao entered the base by walking along the facility’s secure fence line and trudging through the beach, court documents say.

Zhao headed directly to the Joint Interagency Task Force South property, according to court records, where he took several photographs on his Motorola cell phone and Canon EOS digital camera.

His devices contained photos and videos of sensitive equipment at the facility’s “antenna farm,” as well as images of warning signs that read “Military Installation” and “Restricted Area,” according to court documents.

Zhao initially told military police he was “lost” and a “dishwasher from New Jersey.” In later conversations with the FBI, Zhao said he traveled to Key West to “see the sights, such as the Hemingway House,” but there were no images of tourist attractions on his phone, according to his sentencing memo.

Zhao admitted to receiving military training as a university student in China and was found to have a “police blouse” and People’s Republic of China interior ministry belt buckle at his hotel, the memo says.

He pleaded guilty to one count of photographing defense installations. U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore sentenced him to one year in prison.

Zhao’s lawyer Hongwei Shang did not respond to a request for comment. At his sentencing, Zhao’s lawyer argued that his actions were motivated by stupidity, not spycraft. “He’s not a spy,” she said, according to the Miami Herald. “…He committed a stupid mistake. He confessed to it. He just wants to go home.”

The next incident came on March 30, 2019, when Yujing Zhang, 32, tried to enter Mar-a-Lago carrying a trove of electronics including four cellphones, a laptop computer, a hard drive and a thumb drive.

Zhang said she purchased a ticket for an event at the club that had originally been scheduled that Friday night at Mar-a-Lago. There was an event slated for that night, but it had been canceled in the wake of scrutiny of another Chinese woman, Cindy Yang, who built a business around selling access to Mar-a-Lago to wealthy Chinese. In an interview with NBC News, Yang said she had wanted to portray herself as close to Trump with her social network but has no connection to the Chinese government.

Trump was reportedly golfing near Mar-a-Lago at the time of Zhang’s arrest. After her arrest, law enforcement searched her hotel room and reportedly found nine USB drives, five SIM cards, another cellphone, a radio frequency device to detect hidden cameras, and over $8,000 in cash.

Zhang pleaded not guilty and acted as her own attorney at trial. She was convicted of trespassing and served eight months in jail.

Zhang was slated to be deported but her current whereabouts are unknown. Spokespersons for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not return a request for comment. Zhang’s initial public defender, Robert Adler, also did not respond to a request for comment.

Lu Jing, 56, was arrested near Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 18, 2019. Trump was not at the club at the time but was scheduled to be in Florida for the upcoming holidays.

Jing was initially turned away from the club when she showed up, but she then walked back through a service entrance and began snapping photos on Mar-a-Lago property.

Jing Lu, a Chinese national trespassed at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club Wednesday, and was arrested when she refused to leave on Dec. 18, 2019.Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office via AP

A surveillance camera recorded her on the premises, but Jing made it all the way to a high-end shopping district about 1.5 miles away before she was stopped by police.

According to a police report, she raised her arms and shouted “No, no, no,” when an officer approached her on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach after Mar-a-Lago staff alerted authorities. Police soon discovered she was in the U.S. on an expired visa.

When the judge ordered her to stay away from Mar-a-Lago during a court hearing, she asked through a Mandarin translator, “Who is Mar-a-Lago?” She later testified that she paid $200 for a Chinese guide to drop her off at several locations and “made a mistake” by entering the president’s private property.

She was found guilty of resisting arrest but was acquitted on a trespassing charge. A judge sentenced her to six months in jail.

“You don’t start deleting photos and resisting arrest if you’re just a tourist visiting Palm Beach,” Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg told NBC News.

Jing’s public defender did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Lyuyou Liao, 27, a Chinese national who was in the U.S. on a student visa, was arrested the day after Christmas last year after ignoring warning signs at the Key West Naval base and taking photos on his cell phone of the “Truman Annex.”

According to a federal complaint, witnesses said they observed Liao walking around a perimeter fence and entering the Naval Station from the rocks along the water. He is currently in custody and could face up to four years in jail. Liao’s attorney, Daniel Rashbaum, declined to comment on the case.

Federal prosecutors said Liao entered the Naval base’s restricted area “by walking around the perimeter fence and entering the facility from the rocks along the water line” — nearly the identical route taken by the earlier trespasser Zhao.

The most recent incident took place on January 4th at the same naval facility.

Yuhao Wang and Jielun Zhang, both aged 24 and studying at the University of Michigan, were charged with entering military, naval or coast guard property for the purpose of photographing defense installations.

According to a federal complaint, they drove onto the restricted area in a blue Hyundai sedan after ignoring a guard’s instructions to turn around after neither could provide military identification. They were located by security 30 minutes later and found to have taken photos on a Nikon camera and captured videos on their cell phones, the complaint says.

The pair have pleaded not guilty. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

Aronberg, the Palm Beach state attorney, said he’s been alarmed by the number of cases of Chinese nationals entering sensitive locations in south Florida.

“The facts of these cases are bigger than Mar-a-Lago or any one individual,” Aronberg said. “This is about an overall pattern of activity that raises questions and concerns involving national security.”

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