For Chenator, M. Smith's 'The Anatomy of a Traitor'

Far from the classic Cold War frlashpoint of Berlin, other intelligence services were making equally creative use of sexual compromise to recruit agents.  The Chinese, both the communist People's Republic and the non-communist Republic of China (which is based on the island of Taiwan), have always made good use of sex to induce foreigners to provide them with the information they need.  The main intelligence agency of the People's Republic of China, the Ministry of State Security, uses students studying in the West and what the Chinese Authorities call "Overseas Chinese', ethnic Chinese communities living outside China, to gather intelligence, usually with the implied threat that, if they refuse to do so, any relatives still living in China will be punished.  Women recruited as agents in this way are expected to use sex as a means of obtaining the necessary intelligence.  One of the most prominent recent operations, which involved a female Chinese spy seducing a US government official to obtain intelligence, was carried out in 2002 by Isabelle Cheng, a member of Taiwan's intelligence service, the National Security Bureau.

Cheng, who was based in Washington, seduced Donald Willis Keyser, a Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, in order to obtain intelligence on discussions between President George W. Bush and Chinese communist leader Jiang Zemin during the latter's state visit to the United States in October 2002.  Keyser had been specifically picked out by the Taiwanese as vulnerable to such an approach: he had been married four times, and, as the deputy head of the East Asia Bureau, he was in an excellent position to provide high-grade intelligence.  Fluent in Mandarin, he was widely regarded as the State Department's leading expert on communist China and on Taiwan and he was scheduled to take part in the conversations between President George W. Bush and the Chinese president.  Keyser was 59 and shortly due to retire at the time Cheng approached him.  She was 32.

Flattered by the attention of a much younger, attractive woman, Keyser became infatuated with Cheng.  During the 2002 Zheng visit, he sent her an e-mail detailing the discussions between the Chinese president and President Bush.  In another e-mail, he told the Taiwanese intelligence officer: 'Having my arm around your shoulder, your head resting against my shoulder, and then on my chest, your hand in mine for a couple of hours while you were in "Dreamland" was more than ample compensation.'  After Cheng thanked him for some information he had provided, Keyser told her 'your wish is my command.'

The US intelligence official eventually agreed to go to Taiwan to talk to officials at the National Security Bureau headquarters in Taipei.  As a result of the improvement in relations between the United States and communist China which resulted from the 1972 visit by President Richard Nixon to Beijing, the United States had in 1979 broken off relations with Taipei - which, like the People's Republic, claimed to be the sole legitimate government of China - and American officials were not allowed to visit Taiwan.  During August 2003, Keyser traveled to Asia on an official trip that took him first to Beijing and then to Japan.  At the end of his official itinerary, he took three days leave, purportedly spending it sightseeing in Tokyo.  In fact, he flew to Taipei, where he met Cheng and other Taiwanese intelligence officials at the National Security Bureau headquarters.

The assistance he gave to Cheng even extended to advice on a State Department colleague who might be recruited as a a spy.  With what appears to have been a complete lack of self-awareness, and without any apparent sense of irony, Keyser suggested that the man's 'weakness and ego gratification needs' made him an ideal  target.

'This is the kind of person who is ripe for recruitment by careful, methodical serious intelligence agencies,' Keyser told Cheng.  'In the days of the Cold War, Soviet and East German intelligence offices were quite practiced at identifying people like this, people whop did not wake up one day and say "I want to be a traitor," but people whose relatively minor weaknesses and ego gratification needs made them potential targets.'

After discovering Keyser's illegal trip to Taiwan, FBI officers set up a surveillance operation and observed him passing documents to Cheng and Michael Huang, the head of the National Security Bureau situation in Washington, in two separate meetings that took place at a restaurant in Alexandria, across the Potomac River from the US capital.  On the second occasion, the FBI officers confronted Keyser as he left the restaurant.

A search of his home uncovered 3,559 classified documents, including top secret reports from the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), America's signals intelligence operation, and from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).  The FBI officers also found around a hundred data devices (including floppy disks) containing yet more secret documents.  Keyser was arrested in September 2004 and initially denied ever going to Taiwan or having a sexual relationship with Cheng.  Even though he admitted that on at least one occasion when they were together Cheng was in the nude, he insisted that they had only ever kissed and embraced.  As part of his attempt to secure a plea bargain that would persuade prosecutors to drop espionage charges, Keyser eventually admitted visiting Taiwan but denied passing Cheng any classified information or having a sexual relationship with her.

Yet even as the negotiations over the plea bargain were going on, Keyser continued to meet Cheng and was photographed by FBI surveillance teams on a number of occasions having sex with her in his car, including one incident when, despite the carefully prudent description presented by prosecutors to the courts, it was clear that she was performing oral sex on him.  After one of their meetings, Keyser told her (in a telephone conversation intercepted by the FBI surveillance team): 'The food was good.  The wine was good.  The champagne was good, and you were good.'

Keyser eventually pleaded guilty to the unlawful removal of classified documents from the State Department and to lying about his visit to Taiwain and the nature of his relationship with Cheng.  He insisted that, despite the surreptitious nature of his relationship with her and her colleagues in the National Security Bureau, he did not give them any information he was not already authorized to pass on to the Taiwanese, although the court was told that polygraph tests had revealed he was still concealing the full truth of what had happened.  Keyser was sentenced in January 2007 to one year and one day in jail and ordered to pay a $25,000 fine.  Cheng was not charged.

The communist Chinese were just as adept as their adversaries on Taiwan at exploiting sexual weakness for intelligence purposes.  They were responsible for what must rank as one of the most bizarre cases where a romantic or sexual relationship was used to recruit an agent.  Bernard Boursicot was an accountant in the French embassy in Beijing in the 1960s when he met Shi Pei Pu at a diplomatic party in the Chinese capital.  Shi, a Chinese male opera singer - Chinese opera uses all-male casts - was short and slim.  His face was almost effeminate and his hands tiny, perfect for playing female roles.  They agreed to meet for dinner a few days later and became close friends.  Shi was an interesting man, an opera singer, and the writer of several operas and plays.  Boursicot had struggled to make friends among the embassy staff, most of whom looked dowqn on him for his working-class background and lack of education.  Some of the young women in the embassy, daughters of the well-off and privileged, had nicknamed him Bourricot - the donkey.

Shi treated Boursicot as an equal.  There was no sexual relationship between them, but they become close, confiding their fears and dreams in each other.  One evening, Shi described the plot of an opera in which he had played the star role.  *The Butterfly Romance* involved a young girl who wanted to go to imperial school, but only boys were allowed to attend.  Wearing her brother's clothes, she enrolled in the school as a boy, and did well, but fell in love with one of the other boys, who was unable to understand why he was so attracted to someone he believed to be a boy.  When her family found her a husband and she was called home, she told the boy the truth and confessed that she was in love with him.  He said he loved her too and asked her to marry him.  Unable to go against her family's choice of husband, she returned home.  Distraught, her lover killed himself.  When the news reached her she rushed to his tomb, threw herself in and died.  The opera ended with the souls of the dead lovers leaving their bodies in the form of butterflies.

Shortly before Bouriscot went back to Franch in 1965, Shi reminded him of *The Butterfly Romance*.  He held up his hands and said: 'Look at my hands.  Look at my face.  That story of the butterfly - it is my story too.' Shi's parents had had two daughters before he was born, he explained.  They needed a boy to continue the line and Shi's paternal grandmother had said that if this child was not a boy, her son would have to take a second wife.  So his parents were desperately hoping for a boy.  But he was born a girl.  To avoid the grandmother's threat being carried out, they lied to her and raised the baby as a boy.

The story had a dramatic effect on Boursicot, who determined to save Shi, to get her out of China and allow her to live as a woman.  He decided to make love to her, even to marry her.  Their lovemaking was difficult and Shi insisted on taking control, but over the next six months they slept together on a number of occasions and in December 1965, shortly before Bouriscot was due to leave, Shi announced that she was pregnant with his child.

Desperate to see the child, Bouriscot managed to get back to Beijing four years later and was met at Shi's home by two Chinese men.  Hoping to get Shi and his son out of CHina, Bouriscot offered to supply them with documents from the embassy, explaining that he had acess to the diplomatic pouch and control over the secret documents once they were put on file.  He regularly took secret documents to Shi's home where Chinese intelligence officers copied them and, in return, at the end of his posting, Shi and their son were allowed to travel to Paris.  Shi became the darling of the Parisian cultural scene, but the fact that she (a national of a communist country) was living in the home of a former French diplomat in Beijing led to an investigation by the French security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and both Shi and Boursicot were arrested.

The scandal fascinated the French public, particularily given that Shi appeared to be a man but claimed to be a woman.  The French newspaper Le Monde ran a headline 'Espion ou Espionne', asking whether the Chinese spy was male or female.  Boursicot had no doubt: he had made love to her on numerous occasions and she had borne him a child.  But when the examining magistrate ordered a sex test, Shi admitted that he was in fact male but had the ability to transform his genitals by forcing his testicles and his penis up inside his body, leaving just two small flaps of skin from his scrotum which appeared to form the lips of a vagina.  Shi admitted that the son was not his, or Boursicot's but had been produced by the Chinese intelligence services to provide a continuing reason for the Frenchman to supply them with secrets.  Bouriscot was ridiculed and, humiliated by the scandal, attempted suicide.  Both he and Shi were jailed for six years for espionage, but a year later they were pardoned by President Francois Mitterrand.  The story inspired a Broadway play, M. Butterfly, which was later made into a film starring Jeremy Irons.  Boursicot's bitterness at his treatment by SHi and the ridicule he had suffered remained with him until the Chinese singer's death in 20009, when he said simply: 'He did so many things against me that he had no pity for, I think it is stupid to play another game now and say I am sad.  The plate is clean now.  I am free.'

Like many others before him, Boursicot had come to realize that just as he had been betrayed by his country, so he himself had also been betrayed.  The love Shi claimed to offer him was (like the singer's femininity) just an illusion, the most effective and appropriate means of recruiting him as an agent inside the enemy camp.