Speaker 1: We're working back everybody. Today, we're talking about the butterfly
Speaker 1: who wasn't inside the shape Pooh espionage affair, Beijing, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four is where we begin our story. A young
Speaker 1: French embassy employee named Bernard Bosco is at a party
Speaker 1: when he meets a captivating opera performer. The singer's name
Speaker 1: is Shee Pepe, who celebrated for playing female rules in
Speaker 1: Peking opera, a tradition where male performers called Dan specialized
Speaker 1: in portraying women on stage with such precision that audiences
Speaker 1: forget they're watching a man. Borscou has drawn in immediately.
Speaker 1: He believes from the very beginning that he's falling for
Speaker 1: a woman, though that belief will hold for the next
Speaker 1: twenty years and it will cost him almost everything. Let's
Speaker 1: set the scene, because context matters in this story. China
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen sixties is a closed, watched, paranoid
Speaker 1: country on the edge of the Cultural Revolution. Foreign diplomats
Speaker 1: are followed Chinese citizens who associate with them or suspects
Speaker 1: by default into that environment. Steps of relationship that on
Speaker 1: its face looks like forbidden romance. A young frenchman and
Speaker 1: a beautiful Chinese performer meeting secretly falling in love against
Speaker 1: the backdrop of political upheaval. What Bosco didn't know was
Speaker 1: that Chapei, who had, by his own leader admission, been
Speaker 1: recruited by Chinese intel. The relationship was not incidental at all.
Speaker 1: It was the vehicle for recruitment. And here's why the
Speaker 1: psychology gets interesting and complicated. Where a purely spy thriller
Speaker 1: framing starts to fall apart. Che The or Shai maintained
Speaker 1: the illusion of being a woman with extraordinary level of consistency.
Speaker 1: The two reportedly always had intimate encounters in darkness, where
Speaker 1: Briscou attributed at the time to modesty, to cultural difference,
Speaker 1: to a woman's shyness. It's worth city with how much
Speaker 1: cognitive work that requires from both parties. She had to
Speaker 1: perform a sustained performance, not just on stage but in
Speaker 1: the most private, unguarded moments of a decade's long relationship,
Speaker 1: and Moorscow had to hold for two decades an interpretive
Speaker 1: frame that made every consistency explainable. That's not gullibility. That's
Speaker 1: the machinery of motivated belief, the mind's tendency to protect
Speaker 1: the story it has already invested heavily in the more
Speaker 1: someone has already sacrificed for a belief, reputation, family relationships,
Speaker 1: a stainable sense of self. The heart of the mind
Speaker 1: works to preserve it, and Burscow had sacrificed plenty. He
Speaker 1: took a hardship post of Mongolia and enduring brutal winters
Speaker 1: over largely so he could keep visiting she in Beijing.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the relationship, she even produced a child.
Speaker 1: It bore. The couple raised on their as their biological son,
Speaker 1: who she claim was conceived to what Burscou understood to
Speaker 1: be an elaborate and secret of conception. It would later
Speaker 1: come out to the child was not biologically theirs at all.
Speaker 1: During these years, Briscoe passed classified embassy documents that she
Speaker 1: documents that made their way to Chinese intelligence. This is
Speaker 1: part of the story that moves it out of tabloid
Speaker 1: territory into genuine national security issue. Whatever the emotional architecture
Speaker 1: of the relationship, the practice tackle outcome was a foreign
Speaker 1: diplomat compromise and turned into an unwinning intelligence asset through
Speaker 1: what intelligence services call a honeypot operation. The deception finally
Speaker 1: collapsed in the early eighties, when Bursuko and she had
Speaker 1: both relocated to Paris and French counter intelligence began investigating
Speaker 1: in a jail cell. At nineteen eighty three, in a
Speaker 1: direct and unavoidable circumstances, she finally revealed the truth. There
Speaker 1: was no wife, no mistress, no woman at all. Bursa
Speaker 1: co described the moment as devastating, not just the revelation
Speaker 1: of a lie, but the collapse of two decades. Both
Speaker 1: men were charged with espionage and put on trial in
Speaker 1: Paris in nineteen eighty six. The defense strategy leaned heavily
Speaker 1: into portraying both defendants as psychologically unusual, rather than calculating
Speaker 1: an early example of a courtroom trying to litigate the
Speaker 1: murkiness of intention. The jury wasn't fully persuaded either way.
Speaker 1: Both men were convicted in SEVENCE to six years well
Speaker 1: then roughly a year though French President met Heran pardoned
Speaker 1: Sheepei Pu, reportedly to avoid further diplomatic issues with China,
Speaker 1: a decision that speaks volumes about how espionage cases get
Speaker 1: quietly absorbed into larger, larger geopolitical calculations. The story might
Speaker 1: have stayed a footnote in cold War intelligence history. If
Speaker 1: it wasn't that For the playwright David Wang, who turned
Speaker 1: out into m Butterfly, a Tony Award winning play later
Speaker 1: adopted into a ninety sorry nineteen ninety three film. Hwang
Speaker 1: used the bones of the real case, but built something
Speaker 1: more symbolic, an exploration of Western fantasy, orientalism, and the
Speaker 1: assumptions people make about gender and desire. It's worth noting
Speaker 1: that the real Shay Pey Poo would offer to share royalties,
Speaker 1: reportedly turned it down in favor of a much grander
Speaker 1: and unrealized request a solo at Carnegie Hall that theatrical
Speaker 1: instinct never really left him. Shay Pay Pooh died in
Speaker 1: Paris nursing home in two thousand and nine. Bursa Co,
Speaker 1: when reached for common, offered no sentiment, only a kind
Speaker 1: of hard won relief that the story was finally over. Well,
Speaker 1: this case, like most cases in the world of SPA
Speaker 1: and ours, rarely closed. They linger as case studies and
Speaker 1: how identity gets performed, and how intelligence service weaponized intimacy,
Speaker 1: and how just friend mind will travel to protect the
Speaker 1: story doesn't want to lose. That's different now, folks,