（文中“Yu Zhensan”就是俞強聲）
……
Bernard Boursicot and the Beijing Beauty
Before his defection, Yu Zhensan delivered a dossier on another spy—one in the French embassy whom he had actually handled in Beijing. Three months after the suicide of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, on 6 May 1986, Bernard Boursicot went on trial in Paris accused of spying for China. This was the first case of its kind in Western Europe, in contrast to the multiple espionage trials that had taken place in the United States. Previously only spies for the Eastern Bloc had been tried and convicted.
Boursicot’s case was unusual, not least because he had been recruited to the Diaochabu—CCP intelligence—by his Chinese lover, a woman called Shi Peipu, a singer at the Beijing Opera. As it turned out, his lover was a man. Both were denounced by Yu Zhensan; according to some sources, Boursicot was also denounced by a second, less important, Chinese spy who handed the information to MI6. He was arrested by the French DST.
Boursicot and his lover became a public laughing stock, fuelled by the mockery of the examining magistrates. The prosecutor appeared to be having much fun at their expense: “By what curious acrobatics was Shi Peipu able to convince Boursicot that he was female?” The presiding judge, Versini, was even more brutal: “What on earth did you get up to in bed?” It was certainly a unique case; its only historical parallel is the story of the knight of Eon, a hermaphrodite spy sent by the French King Louis XV to the English court in the eighteenth century. David Cronenberg even made a moving film about Boursicot, M. Butterfly (1993), starring Jeremy Irons as the French diplomat/spy.
But beyond a romantic tragicomedy treated as a burlesque worthy of Monty Python, the Boursicot affair was also a case study for both Chinese and Western counterintelligence. The French DST, with the help of intelligence provided by the Americans, intercepted Shi and Boursicot.
I have interviewed Boursicot dozens of times, including for this new English-language edition of my book. Born in 1944 in Brittany into a modest family, Boursicot left France at eighteen to take up a post as a teacher in the newly independent Algeria. He had not only a burgeoning interest in the developing world, but also a passion for cinema, and despite his modest background he was adopted as the protegé of Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque française, who introduced him to the work of film-makers like Akira Kurosawa and Joris Ivens. Ivens was at the time in preproduction for his 1976 propaganda film about the Chinese revolution, How Yukong Moved the Mountains. It is one of the longest films ever made, at 763 minutes.
General de Gaulle had recently officially recognized the PRC. After passing the foreign service examination as an accountant, Boursicot was lucky enough to be posted there in October 1964. Western diplomats tend to stick together, but the young Breton was burning to discover China, which had undergone such a huge transformation, into a society of the common people. All he wanted was to get out on his bicycle and explore Beijing. Sometimes, his boss and eventual friend, the consul Claude Chayet, invited him to cocktails, where a few local people from Beijing were permitted to meet foreigners.
It was at one of these affairs, in the run up to Christmas 1964, that Boursicot met an intriguing and attractive young man, finely built, not tall, but with a striking face and wearing a Mao-collared suit. Shi Peipu was a member of the Writers’ Union and the author of opera libretti and plays. Bernard was irresistibly drawn to this talented young man, who had trained with Mei Lanfang, a Beijing Opera actor who was world-renowned for his performances in the great female roles traditionally played by men.
Over the following months, Boursicot and Shi together explored ancient China, the worlds of the Tang and Ming dynasties, of the last Manchu emperor, and of the Forbidden City. Then, in May 1965, there was a dramatic development: on one of their walks, Shi took his hand and revealed to him that he was actually a woman. When Shi Peipu was born in 1938, into an aristocratic family in the northern province of Shandong, Shi’s mother had feared that her mother-in-law, the matriarch of the house, would insist that her husband take a third wife unless she gave him a son. She decided to raise her daughter as a son: to dress and educate her like a boy.
Shi begged Boursicot to keep her secret: it was vital that everyone still believed she was a man. “This revelation changed my life, my entire way of seeing the world,” Boursicot told me twenty years later. “It became impossible for me to conceive of life without Peipu.”
A few weeks later, Boursicot lost his virginity to Shi. It was very different from what he had imagined. He allowed himself to be guided, confident that certain caresses and gestures of modesty were linked to the complexity of Chinese tradition. Returning to the bedroom from the bathroom, he noticed blood beading on his lover’s thigh.
“Now you are my wife,” he whispered in her ear, bursting with joy. In December 1965, when the French foreign ministry told him that he would be changing jobs and returning to Europe, they met for one last time. Shi Peipu, in tears, told him that she thought she was pregnant.
“It will be a boy, and we shall call him Bertrand. I’ll be back soon, I swear it,” Bernard told her. He was inconsolable.
A Breton in China
After a period in Saudi Arabia and Paris, Boursicot returned to Beijing in September 1969 as an archivist and officer responsible for the diplomatic pouch, a subordinate but sensitive administrative position, given that all embassy secrets now passed through his hands.
The Cultural Revolution was in full swing, and Mao Zedong was trying to wrest power back from his rivals. In governments around the world, the political earthquake was being watched with apprehension. Diplomats at the British embassy found themselves under attack, as did journalists: Reuters correspondent Anthony Grey was accused of spying and held under house arrest for two years until his release in October 1969.
In the French embassy, the newly arrived ambassador, Étienne Manac’h, a Breton like Boursicot, warned his diplomats to take care. Despite the chaos, Bernard, criss-crossing Beijing by bicycle in his Mao suit, eventually located Shi. His first question to her was about their child:
“Where is our son Bertrand?”
“He is being brought up by farmers in Xinjiang,” she told him. “It is far too dangerous to go and see him now.”
In order for them to continue seeing each other, Shi Peipu requested permission to teach the young diplomat Chinese and Mao Zedong Thought. The report by DST commissioner Raymond Nart describes an apparently comical but actually serious consequence: “One evening, a week after [the discovery of] Shi Peipu, while he was at her apartment, a crowd of local people burst in, grabbed Shi Peipu and dragged her away.”
In late spring 1970 Bernard met an official from the Ministry of Public Security called Kang. Of course, this was a trap laid by the Chinese secret services, and Shi Peipu told Boursicot that two men from the Beijing municipality were going to replace her as his “teachers”. “Kang” and his accomplice “Zhao”—their real names were Kang Gesun and Peng Zhe—were from the Diaochabu, which had a special section for compromising and recruiting foreigners stationed in China.
“Kang was my case officer from 1970 to 1981,” Boursicot told me. “He was Muslim. I remember he didn’t eat pork. Zhao was the political commissar and he taught me Marxism-Leninism. In 1981 Kang told me, ‘We were very lucky to have recruited you, because there wasn’t much left of the intelligence service during the Cultural Revolution.’ That was when I realized that Kang was very high up in the intelligence world.”
Kang and Zhao drilled him on Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and love of the common people. Wei renmin fuwu! He had to learn this expression—serve the people. Boursicot could not have asked for more. All he wanted in exchange was to enjoy his romance with Shi Peipu and retrieve his son; even, perhaps, to take them both back to France one day. If we are to believe the DST interrogations, Boursicot began passing diplomatic documents to the Chinese in the spring of 1970, and continued to do so up until May 1972, when he was posted to Dublin as an archivist-cryptographer. He resumed his espionage activities in April 1979, when he was posted to the ghostly embassy in Outer Mongolia. He lived in a suite in a hotel in Ulaanbaatar, where he stored archives in a safe.
“During the interrogations,” Boursicot has explained, “the DST commissioner Raymond Nart told me, ‘You should have come to us, you would have been given fake documents to deliver to them, and instead of going to court, you would have been given the Légion d’Honneur!’ Frankly, would I have had fewer problems if I had become a double agent? Well yes, of course I would, but I was politically committed. I thought I would be able to help the country out of its isolation. There was one major condition, however: I never gave the Chinese information about my own country, France.”
This was confirmed by the DST investigation. It would have been treason if he had handed over documents in French stamped “secret” or “highly confidential”. The Chinese were in any case mainly interested in the Americans’ intentions in Vietnam, and in their sworn enemies, the “Soviet revisionists”, with whom they had been in a seven-month border dispute in 1969 over the Amur River.
Thanks to his work, Boursicot was finally given permission to visit his son Bertrand, or Dudu by his Chinese name, and was even able to spend holidays with him and his mother. The documents he delivered to his handlers came from other French embassies around the world, from the foreign ministry, and the various embassies in the PRC where he served. The Chinese were increasingly eager for documents about the USSR’s military capacity, so Boursicot, in Ulaanbaatar, began cutting out articles from the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, typing them out in his own words, and—using a stamp filched from the ambassador—adorning them with a beautiful “TOP SECRET” stamp in red ink. Mao’s agents were very happy.
They also received some more serious intelligence about the Soviet economy, the revival of Japanese militarism, the Indian elections, ethnic problems in Mongolia, Richard Nixon’s trip to Beijing, and various news roundups on Hong Kong and China. The collaboration ended when Boursicot left Ulaanbaatar in March 1981. As the DST commissioner Nart noted, “Boursicot told us that during a visit to France with Shi Peipu—and this had nothing to do with any intervention from Kang or anyone else in the People’s Republic—one day in Paris the two made the decision to break off relations with the Chinese cadre.”
The Chinese knight of Eon
Boursicot was arrested in Paris at 11.40am on 30 June 1983, near the École Militaire metro station, by a team of police officers who took him to DST headquarters. He was led down to the basement, fearing the worst. The investigators, led by divisional commissioners Raymond Nart and Yvan Bassompière, took turns questioning him. For them, it was a perfect Chinese espionage case that would throw light on the modus operandi of the new Chinese secret services: the Guoanbu, or State Security, which was barely known to the DST; its creation had only been announced by Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang three weeks earlier, on 6 June.
Questions flew thick and fast about the disappearance of about 100 documents from the embassies in Beijing and Ulaanbaatar, right around the time when Boursicot had been there. But Raymond Nart also had another question: who were the Chinese people living with him on Boulevard du Port Royal, Monsieur Shi Peipu, and his son Shi Dudu?
Bernard Boursicot, almost relieved, answered: “I didn’t do any of it for money!”
“But who is Shi Peipu?” the DST officers repeated. Shi had not yet been arrested. The diplomat hesitated, because of course his big secret was not the fact that he had been spying for China, but his rather unusual love affair.
“Shi Peipu is a woman,” he confessed eventually. “And Shi Dudu is my son!” he added with pride. At this stage of the discussion, it was clear that he had nothing left to hide. He had spent too long pretending and concealing things, and wanted to explain himself. People in the DST would understand what had happened to him. He had done nothing serious. At last he would be able to live openly with his Chinese wife and their son. He would be released, probably with an official reprimand from the French foreign ministry. But that was not too bad.
The following day, 1 July 1983, the DST investigators arrested Shi Peipu at the diplomat’s apartment. Because of her heart problems, they agreed to interview her there.
Shi recounted her version of the story to Commissioner Bassompière. Her account was almost identical to that of her “husband”. She explained how she had grown up in Shandong and begun taking singing lessons in 1945 with the great teacher Mei Lanfang. She soon found herself immersed in an underworld where the worlds of the arts and the secret services collided—a remarkably common trope in Asian spy stories, as we have seen.
She explained how, thanks to the Deng regime’s liberalization policy, in October 1982 she had managed to get herself invited to France by an academic institution. Security services agreed to allow her and her child to join Boursicot in Paris. Shi remained in contact with Wang Erqing, a cultural attaché at the Chinese embassy on Avenue George V and the darling of the French Sinophile world. He was even once the subject of a French television documentary.
The day after Shi’s first interrogation, the examining magistrate Bruno Laroche accused Bernard Boursicot of “handing over intelligence information to agents of a foreign power”. He charged Shi Peipu with being his accomplice—this was somewhat strange considering the chronology of events, for if anything it had been Boursicot who was Shi Peipu’s accomplice, rather than the other way round.
The judge also ordered a medical examination to determine Shi’s sex, for “she” was now claiming that “she” was a man—which the doctors confirmed. The news was made public on 13 July. In his cell in the Fresnes prison, Boursicot fainted when he heard the unbelievable news on the radio: “The Chinese Mata Hari is actually a man!” The news made the front page of all the newspapers, as the DST expected, tearing the Franco-Chinese couple apart, and hinting none too subtly at the homosexual overtones of the affair. The truth was not confirmed to Boursicot himself until he saw Shi Peipu in the hallway after a meeting with Judge Laroche.
“I don’t believe it. I want to see,” Boursicot insisted. Shi unbuttoned his trousers.
A week later, the Frenchman tried to cut his throat with his razor. How could he have been tricked like this? During the first medical examination, Shi had given a “technical” explanation of how the French diplomat had been tricked. American journalist Joyce Wadler, then New York correspondent for The Washington Post, explained it ten years later in her book on the case, Liaison. She quotes the statement Shi Peipu made to the judge:
“As concerns our sexual relations, these always took place in the dark as Boursicot always showed the greatest délicatesse toward me. I want to stress that this was my first sexual experience, and according to Boursicot, the same was true for him. Since I did not have a female sexual organ Boursicot could not penetrate me. When we made love, I kept my legs lightly pressed together, so that Boursicot may have had the impression that he was penetrating me.”
During the trial, medical expert Dr Jean-Pierre Campana described how Shi had managed to conceal his genitals during a relationship that had lasted eighteen years: “Shi Peipu hid his penis inside the folds of his scrotum, which if the thighs are squeezed tightly together can be confusing because of the pubic hair. Of course, this allows only a fleeting and superficial penetration and requires a very credulous partner.”
Wadler quotes the doctor’s statement, which was published in The New York Times during the trial, detailing Shi’s manipulation: “Then, as the examination is ending, the prisoner, without being asked, says that he would like to explain something to the doctors. Easily, smoothly, he pushes his testicles up into his body cavity. The skin of the scrotal sack hangs slack, like curtains. The man now pushes his penis between his legs, toward his back, bisecting the skin of the scrotum, and squeezes his legs tightly together. The penis is hidden, while the skin of the scrotum resembles the vaginal lips, beneath a triangle of pubic hair. Pushed between the empty scrotal sac, the penis has also created a small cavity so that shallow penetration is possible.”
However in his statements to psychiatrists, Shi Peipu insisted that he had never deceived his lover about his sex. Having tricked him once already, with this statement Shi Peipu now betrayed for a second time the man whose love had got them in this mess in the first place.
Shi was well rewarded for giving evidence against Boursicot: in February 1984 he was released on bail by the Court of Appeal. The Chinese authorities were putting pressure on the French by various means, and high-up ministers were keen to smooth out these “diplomatic” difficulties. Meanwhile, Boursicot remained behind bars.
“A magnificent setup”
During the trial, the prosecutor summarized the DST’s position, arguing that the case was “a magnificent setup by the Chinese intelligence services” and claiming that Shi Peipu had come to France in 1982 in order to “reactivate Boursicot, because he was on his way to becoming a ‘cadre B’, that is, a fully fledged diplomat.”
In his own testimony, the DST commissioner Raymond Nart did eventually acknowledge Boursicot’s extenuating circumstances: “You have to understand that espionage is a martial art in China and that the Chinese, with the assumption that one launches an attack on a defeated army, quickly spotted Boursicot in his first post: he was nineteen years old, immature, with sexually undefined tastes, and they threw Shi Peipu at him.” He sagely concluded, “Such a fragile character as Boursicot should never have been posted to Beijing. The tragedy of this case is that it is not the instigators being judged, nor the reckless people who sent Boursicot first to China and then to Ulaanbaatar.”
While the prosecutor left the jury to decide on Shi Peipu’s sentence—he had recently suffered a heart attack—he demanded that Boursicot serve at least five years “because of his mentality”. Henri Leclerc, Boursicot’s lawyer, argued that “if any intelligence was handed over to the enemy, it must be recognized that it was very low level”, but he was ignored. The court sentenced both of the accused to six years in prison. Libération captured the feelings of many with its headline: “Boursicot case: a verdict as cruel as Chinese torture.”
On the whole, though, the great and good of Paris seemed more sympathetic to the androgynous Chinese artist than to the French diplomatic archivist. President Mitterrand pardoned Shi Peipu in 1987, and he settled in Paris. This was the first time a convicted foreign spy had escaped being declared persona non grata. Shi often returned to Beijing, where he was friends with the deputy mayor and had an apartment near the Forbidden City. Boursicot, rather less fortunate, had to wait to be released from prison, and was only given permission much later to return to China for a visit. Without his knowledge, a small group of former colleagues at the Beijing embassy, including his loyal friend Claude Chayet, had worked behind the scenes to secure his release. The ambassador, Étienne Manac’h, was not among them—he was not willing to stoop to the aid of a junior official, even though he was a great friend of China and particularly of Zhou Enlai, who once said of Manac’h that he was a “great bridge between the West and China”.
Despite this sad double epilogue—the suicide of Larry Wu-Tai Chin and the imprisonment of Bernard Boursicot—Yu Zhensan’s revelations enabled Western intelligence services to learn a great deal, both about how to proceed with the new Chinese KGB and about its own battle strategy. It was Ling Yun, the head of the Guoanbu, who lost face in these cases. In August 1986, the Chinese fought back by sentencing a Chinese-origin American citizen, Roland Shensu Loo, to twelve years in prison for spying for the CIA and the Taiwanese secret services. Around the same time, John Burns, a New York Times correspondent, was deported, officially for reporting from a no-go zone. The Guoanbu established strict guidelines on dealing with foreigners; Shanghai call girls were permitted to dance with tourists and businessmen on condition that they did not give out state secrets. Forbidding all contact with them would have prevented the security services from being able to engage in the classic operations known as the “beautiful woman stratagem” (meiren ji), the erotic recruitment of Western, Japanese and Korean businessmen and diplomats.
It took decades for me to discover that, when Yu Zhensan was debriefed by his CIA hosts, he told them that at the beginning of Boursicot’s handling, the Chinese services were sufficiently prudish to doubt that their trick would work—they believed that Boursicot would quickly realize that he was in a homosexual relationship. The unexpected success of the operation encouraged the Guoanbu to increase this kind of honeytrap over the following decades.
Meanwhile, a senior official named Guan Ping replaced Yu Zhensan as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Yu, who served for a long time as an advisor to the American, British and Taiwanese secret services, died in 2013. He had been living in the Chinatown of an American city, under the false identity that the CIA had given him. Before he moved there a rumour had circulated—perhaps on his protectors’ initiative—that he had been murdered by Chinese agents in his safe house.
Ling Yun quit the intelligence world in 1985. That long-serving spymaster died in 2018 just after turning 100 years old. His replacement was a politician, rather than an intelligence professional. Jia Chunwang was born in 1938 in Beijing, and graduated in Physical Sciences from Tsinghua University, the Chinese MIT. He was the son-in-law of Bo Yibo, a famous CCP leader and veteran of the anti-Japanese war, who had served as finance minister in 1949 and was a major supporter of the economic reforms instigated by Deng Xiaoping. Jia’s only relationship to the security services came from his recent co-optation onto the Discipline Commission. His meteoric rise up to the top echelons of the Communist Youth League had impressed leaders like Hu Yaobang; perhaps his appointment was already on the cards during his July 1985 trip to Washington, accompanied by Ling Yun, at the head of a youth delegation.
As a member of the CCP’s Beijing Municipal Committee, Jia knew Fan Jin, mother of the defector Yu. Obviously, he did not care to have this fact raised, and when John Burns of The New York Times had the audacity to try to question the Guoanbu’s new boss about the Yu Zhensan affair, he was promptly expelled from China.
The Guoanbu was sensitive on the matter because it feared other defections would follow the Yu case. The 9th Bureau went round all the Chinese embassies and repatriated any agents at risk of defecting. Despite these precautions, in September 1986, one of the heads of the service, nicknamed “Fu Manchu”, proposed to the French that he defect to the West. That November, Du Bingru, the commercial attaché at the West German embassy, offered his services to the BND.
Despite this series of misfortunes afflicting Jia’s special services, he was described as being affable, and fascinated with the West. He spoke English and, just as Zhou Enlai had in the early days, he had great admiration for the French intelligence services and the CIA. He was also on the frontline of China’s new offensives in economic, scientific and technological intelligence—Deng Xiaoping’s dream. This was how the pool of “deep-water fish” (Chendi yü) developed: the Guoanbu term for the thousands of exceptional special agents, hidden in the deepest strata of society—the cultural, scientific, economic and military worlds of the enemy, each a significant piece of the puzzle.
……
— R. Faligot Les Services secrets chinois, de Mao aux JO （2008）
選擇“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
選擇“don't run on pages on this domain”
