26yo spy faked being a woman for 20 years, married a diplomat, even had a child with him to cook a historically elaborate deception

There’s a love story that unfolded at the French Embassy in the mid-1960s that you simply have to hear to believe. A Chinese man pretended to be a woman and climbed the ranks to the point where “she” began running point for Chinese espionage against the French. 

The man was Shi Pei Pu, who made a living teaching Mandarin to the wives of diplomats during the then-growing inflow of foreign officials to China. When Shi turned 26, however, he devised a plot that would make Candace Owens’s ears perk up. Shi met an impressionable 20-year-old named Bernard Boursicot, who worked in accounting at the newly opened French Embassy. Shi decided that Bernard would be his target for his growing web of lies.