Asia’s Washington powerbroker dies at 94

— Anna Chennault, the Chinese journalist who married the legendary leader of the World War II Flying Tigers squadron and, after his death, became a Republican powerbroker in Washington, has died at the age of 94.

A doyenne of Washington society in the 1960s, she charmed politicians and diplomats while running her late husband’s cargo airline, becoming embroiled in the Richard Nixon election scandal known as the Anna Chennault Affair, and funneling large sums of Nationalist Chinese money to Republicans.

Chennault, also known by her Chinese name Chen Xiangmei, died in Washington on Friday three months after she suffered a stroke, her daughter Cynthia Chennault told The Washington Post.

Born in Beijing on June 23, 1923, Chennault was raised in a well-off family of diplomats and editors who fled mainland China as Japanese invaders approached in 1937.

She studied journalism at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University and became a reporter for the Xinhua News Agency.

Covering the rise of Mao Zedong’s communists after the war, she met and married lieutenant general Claire Chennault, whose swashbuckling Flying Tigers operated out of Burma in the early 1940s in support of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese.

As the communists took power in 1949, the couple started up two Taipei-based airlines, Civil Air Transport and the Flying Tiger Line, which helped relocate Chiang’s nationalists to Taiwan.

Both continued to operate for years, Flying Tiger as a pioneering global cargo carrier and Civil Air Transport becoming a CIA front.