If James Bond really knew the spy profession, he would know that ... dresses are more useful than funny gadgets. Learn the history of great agents who achieved success in women's disguise. And what kind!
Probably everyone has heard the anecdote about King Henryk Walezy, who was supposed to escape from Wawel in a woman's disguise. And although this story was made up, it does not change the fact that the ruler liked to parade in fairly feminine frills. Besides, it has happened more than once in history that men - for various purposes - pretended to be representatives of the fair sex. One such situation is described by Douglas Boyd in his latest book "Agents. Enforcers, seducers, traitors ":
Once upon a time, Sandy Gall, the most unfeminine of TV reporters, wore large burqas with two cameramen and drove across the Pakistani-Afghan border in this disguise. The trick was successful. None of the hundreds of armed men they met along the way noticed the three "women" sitting on the platform of the van bouncing on dusty roads.
A feminine outfit has often been the best disguise for a man!
But not only crowned heads and sensationalist journalists pretend to be women in order to sneak past unnoticed and engage in not entirely legal activities. Surprisingly often also… secret agents hide behind the "mask" of the opposite sex.
Agent at the service of the king
Probably the most famous "spy in a skirt" (or rather - a dress) operated in 18th-century France. In his case, the gender issue was complicated from childhood. As Douglas Boyd reports in "Agents", the doctor receiving the delivery had a problem with determining whether the newborn was a boy or a girl , the parents decided to baptize him with both male and female names at the same time.
Charles d'Eon as a man and a woman.
According to some tales, Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont was raised initially as a girl, but his talent for fencing, equestrian skills and extraordinary intellect led his parents to finally recognize him as a boy and send him to Paris to follow his father's footsteps as a lawyer, which was unavailable to women at the time.
He made a completely different career in the capital. It is said that Louis XV himself offered him to join the Secret du Roi, a secret intelligence organization that even the royal ministers did not know existed. D'Eon's task was to penetrate the Russian court in a woman's disguise, in order to win the sympathy of Empress Elizabeth. The idea turned out to be successful - the operation resulted in a negotiated treaty, under which Russia joined the Seven Years' War in 1757.
For his activities, d'Eon received the Royal Military Order of Saint Louis from the monarch. He died in 1810 in London. He spent the last years in the form of a woman, but human inquisitiveness did not give him peace even after his death. As Boyd recalled, in the presence of seventeen witnesses, the surgeon announced:"After examining the Bachelor d'Éon in the presence of [names of witnesses] I found that the deceased had perfectly formed male genitalia ”.
Pregnant Chinese and agent dress
It also happened that the French were the victims of secret sex games. The target of the attack was, for example, Bernard Boursicot, an embassy employee in Beijing who had entered into an affair with a Mandarin teacher. This confessed to him once that he was in fact a girl , brought up by his parents as a boy. The whole story was made more plausible by the voice of Shi Pei Pu, who performed in a Beijing opera, performing soprano parts. The romance resulted not only in a diplomatic scandal (more than 500 documents were leaked), but also in a child that the lovers were to beget one intoxicating night.
The true nature of Boursicot's "mistress" was only revealed during the trial in Paris. It turned out that, contrary to the assumptions of the French, Shi Pei Pu was in fact a man, and he had made up the whole story with the child and the sex change for intelligence purposes. You can guess that he also used special techniques to cheat his partner in bed…
One of the most important British spies of World War II, Dudley Clarke, almost fell into disguise. He was once arrested while parading around Madrid in a woman's dress. This put the entire London headquarters on their feet, because Clarke was on a mission at the time and was transferring classified information to Egypt .
The Spaniards reportedly wanted to convict the agent of homosexuality, which, however, was not the worst. A greater threat came from the possible interest in the case of the Briton in a dress on the part of the Third Reich. During the investigation, the Germans could find in his suitcase something more than just a bra and high heels. However, at the behest of Churchill himself, Clarke was recaptured and then evacuated by Gibraltar to Cairo.
Interestingly, spies in disguise were also active in Poland. As reported by the authors of the album published by the Institute of National Remembrance, 'Spyware arsenal of the secret police. Observation, operational technique, correspondence control as means of work of the Security Service of the People's Republic of Poland ”SB often sent its people in women's costumes and make-up to the field. And who knows how many agents in skirts can be found on the street today?
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Trivia is the essence of our website. Short materials devoted to interesting anecdotes, surprising details from the past, strange news from the old press. Reading that will take you no more than 3 minutes, based on single sources. This particular material is based on:
- Douglas Boyd, Agents. Enforcers, seducers, traitors , Bellona 2019.