Strange espionage events with a Chinese flavour are piling up at Mar-A-Lago, President Trump’s home-away-from-home. Awkward questions are now being raised about what’s really going on, including: are the White House’s real spy problems with Beijing rather than Moscow?
In Goldfinger, the British spy-turned-spy-novelist Ian Fleming gave the world the classic line, ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’ Veteran counterspies generally suspect enemy action well before the third incident, however, and President Trump’s odd Chinese espionage incidents are getting too numerous to ignore.
First, there was the case of Li ‘Cindy’ Yang, a naturalised US citizen born in China, who caused a media sensation last month when it was discovered that since late 2017 she had become a habitué at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort which serves as Trump’s ‘southern White House,’ where the president enjoys entertaining friends, donors, and hangers-on.
Yang was one such, and controversially she previously owned a Florida message parlour where Trump’s billionaire pal Robert Kraft was recently arrested
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