Treacherous Women - Sex, temptation and betrayal (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

Ambassador. Accessing material to take to his Chinese masters proved relatively easy, but the material itself was very low-level and when he met his Chinese contact in Beijing, he had nothing much to show. This was especially disappointing as the Russians were at the time massing on the Chinese border and the Chinese were keen to stay informed about troop movements.
    Women came and went in Boursicot’s life in Ulan Bator and Thierry came to visit. Every six weeks he would take the train to Beijing where, inevitably Shi would complain about his absence. He was no longer sexually interested in Shi, but they continued to make love in the usual way.
    By 1982, Boursicot had been transferred to Belize, but he had finally succeeded in obtaining an invitation from a French government institute for Shi to go to France on a three-month cultural visa. Thierry welcomed Shi and Bertrand to Paris and they moved into the apartment he shared with Boursicot. Shi gave lectures and performed traditional Chinese opera and even appeared on television. He was given a one-year extension to his visa and Boursicot, who had returned from Belize, was delighted. However, no one knew that the two had a relationship, let alone a son.
    Their discovery was the result of a stroke of bad luck. Agents of the French Directorate of Territorial Surveillance, the agency that investigated threats against France emanating from abroad, were routinely examining the Chinese diplomatic representation in Paris when they came upon a relationship between ‘a civil servant at the Ministry of Exterior Affairs posted abroad’ and ‘a Chinese national…later identified as Shi Pei-Pu’.
    On 30 June 1983 Boursicot was hauled in, questioned for two days and charged with espionage. The following day, agents interviewed Shi at the apartment. Boursicot had already told them Shi was a woman, but they reported meeting a person who seemed neither masculine or feminine. She complained that she was not well, but when they called for a doctor, she refused to be examined. She denied knowing anything about Boursicot’s espionage, but five days later, she was arrested and charged with complicity in the delivery of information to agents of a foreign power. Shi continued to deny the charge.
    The judge ordered a medical examination to determine if she was male or female and to see if she had undergone surgery. In the meantime, she was sent to the hospital wing of the men’s hospital at Fresnes. A few days later, when Boursicot learned that Shi was in the same prison as him, he was surprised and thought that she must have refused an examination and had been sent to a male prison because of that.
    On 13 July the findings of the medical examination on Shi were made public. Boursicot heard the announcement on the radio in his cell. ‘The Chinese Mata Hari, who was accused of spying, is a man,’ it said. He refused to believe it.
    They underwent interrogation by the examining magistrate separately for six months before they were questioned together in January 1984. During the questioning, to his horror, Boursicot heard Shi admit to being a man. Shi then lied about what he had told Boursicot. ‘I never told Bernard I was a woman,’ he said. ‘I only let it be understood that I could be a woman. At the time I thought I was a woman, since I did not have any male genital organs. I had a hole – although I must say it did not resemble or was not exactly like one I had seen on an actress once when I was taking off my makeup at the Beijing theatre.’ The Frenchman said that Bertrand could not, therefore, be his son but Shi replied that he had been born using artificial insemination. Tests would later prove, however, that this was another lie.
    At their trial in 1986, Shi’s lawyer, Francois Morette said: ‘This is the story of two beings, both of whom are psychologically fragile and exalted, who entered into the same dream where each will believe what the other is saying, because they both