Until recently, Mata Hari was commonly depicted as a brilliant spy. In fact, she was barely a spy at all. Mata Hari was a typical figure of the free-living Belle Epoque, and she never understood the fundamental change in attitudes brought about by the First World War. In all belligerent countries, including France, the war brought a new atmosphere of sexual repression, spy mania, and
xenophobia. Mata Hari was an independent, cosmopolitan woman, an outspoken individualist with a reputation for sexual license. Many men and some women had always regarded such “femmes fortes” as socially and morally threatening. In the grim and earnest wartime atmosphere, a woman like Mata Hari was bound to appear suspicious and dangerous to the authorities not for what she did but simply for what she was. Mata Hari’s failure to recognize this basic reality led her into a pattern of recklessly self-destructive behavior.
In December 1915 Mata Hari travelled via Britain to Paris. Mata Hari later testified that she did this of her own will and with her own money (or rather Van Der Capellen’s money). Yet according to Leon Schirmann, the most thorough of her French biographers, in late 1915 Mata Hari was approached by a neighbor of hers, Karl Cramer, an official of the German consular service in Holland. Cramer offered her money to go to Paris and obtain low-level intelligence information. (In her court testimony, Mata Hari later dated this meeting to the following year, after she had returned from her first wartime trip to France.) Mata Hari was initially cautious, but finally accepted Cramer’s proposal. Mata Hari’s motives are uncertain but she was certainly anxious to return to Paris, her only real home, where she had to dispose of her house at Neuilly and the posessions it contained. Van Der Capellen was wealthy, but not overgenerous to her. Finally, Mata Hari may have hoped that in return for her services the German government would release to her the costumes and personal items that they had seized the previous year. She may also have felt resentment towards France because she was no longer a top star there. In any case, she had no intention of doing any real spying, and used Cramer’s money for her own purposes. The German intelligence service gave her the designation Agent H21. The H stood for Hoffmann, the latter being the name of the German intelligence officer who ran the network to which Mata Hari was assigned.
To get to France, Mata Hari took passage via the United Kingdom, an act which quickly brought her under suspicion from British intelligence. The British passed on their suspicions of Mata Hari to the French. Mata Hari spent a month in Paris, closing up her Neuilly house and earning money by prostitution. While staying in a Paris hotel Mata Hari met a fellow guest who was one of her old lovers, Henri de Marguerie, and also found a new lover in Major the Marquis de Beauffort of the Belgian Army. All three lived in the hotel and the men shared Mata Hari’s favors. According to Schirmann, during this time Mata Hari sent in only one very brief report to the Germans about a possible French offensive in the coming spring. This was no more than common cafe gossip, which the Germans might just as easily have learned from reading neutral newspapers. French agents watched her every move. She soon returned to Holland, but from that point on Mata Hari was a marked woman.
Mata Hari’s initial performance as a secret agent had been very disappointing, but Cramer’s superiors were determined to make use of her--perhaps in the hope of redeeming their investment. In May 1916 Cramer approached her again. This time he offered even more money. In return, Mata Hari was asked to undertake a more serious mission. Several of Mata Hari’s former lovers held prominent positions in the French military and diplomatic hierarchy. Because of her connections, Colonel Walter Nicolai, head of the German General Staff’s intelligence service (Section 3B) regarded Mata Hari as a potenially excellent agent. Nicolai interviewed her personally in Cologne, but was rather disconcerted when she attempted to seduce him. Despite this, he assigned Mata Hari to gather information from her highly placed friends and lovers in Paris. Messimy was to be the prime target. Nicolai gave Mata Hari the additional code name “Beauty”.
Mata Hari may have had some doubts about all this, but having gone so far with the Germans (and done so little for them) she was not in a good position to refuse. Mata Hari’s new mission required some training, and she travelled to Frankfurt to attend a brief course at a German spy school. Here she came under the tutelage of Elsbeth Schragmueller, a former female professor known as “Fraulein Doktor”. This woman later became nearly as notorious as Mata Hari herself, and many wild legends circulated about her. In her autobiography Schragmueller said that Mata Hari was a charming, witty, and sophisticated woman, whose company she enjoyed. Yet Schragmueller also considered Mata Hari very poor spy material, and she accurately predicted that “this demimondaine” would turn out to be more trouble than she was worth. According to Julie Wheelwright, however, Schragmueller was actually quite enthusiastic about Mata Hari’s potential as an agent. Wheelwright also states that Schragmueller met Mata Hari in Antwerp, not Frankfurt, and that Mata Hari approached Cramer rather than the other way around.
Mata Hari took the German money and sailed from Holland to England. When the British refused to let her pass through en route to France, she travelled via ship to Spain instead. A Dutchman named Henry Hoedemaker (who claimed to be a British agent but was probably simply a civilian obsessed by spy-mania), harassed Mata Hari on the ship and tried to search her cabin. Mata Hari confronted Hoedemaker and slapped him hard enough to draw blood. Hoedemaker made trouble for Mata Hari with the French authorities, and she was stopped at the Franco-Spanish border. Mata Hari appealed to her old lover, Jules Cambon, whose influence allowed her to enter France.
Mata Hari spent more than 5 months in Paris, once again plying her trade as a prostitute in the city’s hotels. Wars are always flush times for prostitutes, and Mata Hari was much in demand. In less than 6 weeks she slept with 11 officers from 4 different Allied armies. Despite later allegations, however, she never attempted to get any intelligence information from her military customers. She certainly made no special effort to pursue her old lover Messimy. Ernest Hemingway later claimed that he had slept with Mata Hari around this time, but this was untrue.
Unfortunately for herself, Mata Hari now made the worst mistake a prostitute can make: she fell in love. The man in question was a very young Russian officer, Vadim Masloff, who was soon badly wounded. Mata Hari’s deep and genuine love for Masloff seems to have affected her attitude towards her German employers. She had done virtually nothing for the Germans anyway, but now she felt that she could no longer work at all for the side her lover was fighting against. Masloff proposed marriage, and Mata Hari accepted. She was anxious to help Masloff recover from his injuries, and she also wanted to give up prostitution so that she could be true to him. This, however, would require a great deal of money.
In order to see Masloff, Mata Hari also had to get a special pass to travel to a restricted military zone. The pass required the approval of Captain Georges Ladoux, the chief of French military counterintelligence (the Deuxieme Bureau). Ladoux was an extremely ambitious officer of doubtful competence. He had been reading reports on Mata Hari since December 1915. Ladoux later insisted that he had already made up his mind that she was a German spy, and that he sought only to draw her out and expose her. Actually, Ladoux probably believed that he could “turn” Mata Hari to the French side and make some real use of her. One of Mata Hari’s favorite customers, Lieutenant Jean Hallaure, was actually one of Ladoux’s agents, and he steered Mata Hari towards his chief. Ladoux said he would give Mata Hari the pass she sought if she would become a spy for France. Mata Hari agreed, but asked for no less than 1 million francs in return. Ladoux put off her demand for money, but gave her the pass she wanted.
In November 1916 Mata Hari left Paris on her way to Belgium via Holland. She was now a French agent and she intended to spy on the Germans in Belgium. Her plans were certainly ambitious. She aimed to seduce at least three German officers: General Moritz Von Bissing, the elderly German military governor of occupied Belgium; Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, a younger officer whom Mata Hari claimed to have known before the war; and Crown Prince Wilhelm, whom she had supposedly slept with previously.
Travelling via Spain and England, Mata Hari was detained by the British when she arrived in the United Kingdom. The British confused her with another woman named Clara Benedix, whom they believed to be a German agent. The extent of British suspicion was indicated by the high-powered team they assigned to interrogate Mata Hari: Basil (later Sir Basil) Thomson of Scotland Yard, one of that force’s most distinguished detectives, and Captain (later Admiral Sir) William Reginald “Blinker” Hall of the Royal Navy, one of the greatest intelligence officers in history. Mata Hari told the British that she was a French agent, but the angry and embarassed Ladoux denied it and asked the British to send her back to Spain.
Scarcely grasping the dangerous subtleties of the game in which she was engaged, Mata Hari refused to give up. Without orders from Ladoux, Mata Hari tried to spy on German officials in the Madrid embassy. She had sex with the German military attache, Major Arnold Von Kalle, who passed on some minor rumors to her. These were the only real pieces of intelligence that Mata Hari ever collected for France, and were just as worthless as the rumors she had earlier reported to her German employers. Mata Hari passed her findings to the French, but was puzzled and then angered when she got neither congratulations nor 1 million francs from Ladoux.
The Germans in fact had a grudge against Mata Hari, and they entrapped her deliberately. She had taken money from Cramer and done almost nothing in return for it. Her approaches to Von Kalle were so awkward and obvious that Von Kalle was immediately suspicious of her. The French military attache in Madrid, Colonel Denvignes, was unaware of Mata Hari’s plans, but he pursued her ardently, and this made the Germans even more wary of her. Mata Hari even sent reports to the French through ordinary mail, reports which the Germans easily intercepted. The Germans in Madrid then sent a series of radio signals to Berlin, identifying Mata Hari as their Agent H21. These signals were sent in a code which the Germans knew the French had broken. Their interception was enough for Ladoux; he determined to arrest Mata Hari. Mata Hari obliged him by returning to Paris in January 1917. She was anxious to confront Ladoux and demand payment, but she never got the chance. The French arrested her on 13 February 1917.
For months, Mata Hari endured grim conditions in several French prisons. She was thoroughly interrogated, but continued to maintain her innocence. Her accusers gave her no opportunity to prove it. Most of the letters she wrote in prison were never forwarded by the French. The many famous persons who had known her now denounced or ignored her. Mata Hari was not brought to trial until July, 1917, and the trial lasted only two days. Even by the low standards of wartime military courts, Mata Hari’s trial was a miscarriage of justice. There were many procedural irregularities. Witnesses whom Mata Hari requested were not allowed to appear. Edouard Clunet, her lawyer and former lover, had no experience of criminal cases. Under his advice, Mata Hari committed a serious tactical blunder when she admitted to having been in contact with the Germans. Under the court’s interpretation of French military law, this was almost tantamount to a confession. Clunet and Mata Hari may have hoped that such an admission would win clemency or a reduced sentence, but Mata Hari would have been much better off to deny everything. Lieutenant Andre Mornet, the prosecutor, later admitted that there was not enough evidence in the case “to hang a cat”. Mornet failed to cite a single specific instance of espionage; mere association and contact with the Germans was considered evidence enough. Unable to produce real examples of espionage, Mornet used misogynist rhetoric to blacken Mata Hari’s character instead; he called the former nude dancer a “Salome” and a “Messalina”. Mata Hari’s many lies about herself did nothing to help her in the eyes of the court. The worst blow to Mata Hari came in a letter to the court from Masloff, who now denounced the lover who had endangered her life for his sake. In fact, Masloff had remained secretly loyal to Mata Hari, but she never knew this; his love letters to her while she was in prison were held back by the authorities.
The court took only half an hour to reach a verdict. Mata Hari was condemned to death on 25 July 1917. She remained in prison, however, for nearly three more months, as her lawyer tried every conceivable appeal. The Dutch government asked for a pardon, but this was rejected and other appeals also failed. It was never likely that they would succeed.
In her last days, Mata Hari was bitter towards former lovers and friends who refused to aid her. Yet she also showed considerable dignity and honesty. She admitted that she had made mistakes, but she refused to apologize for herself or her life. The Catholic nuns who were sent to comfort her grew very fond of her. Mata Hari was finally executed by a firing squad on 15 October 1917. She showed great bravery, refusing a blindfold and exhorting the weeping nuns to be strong. No one claimed her body, which went to a French hospital for examination and dissection.
There is still a great deal of controversy about Mata Hari’s trial and execution. Most of the French Army’s dossier on the case has now been published. The French have so far declined to revise the verdict, and the French Army still adheres to a narrow interpretation of the facts in the case. In the strictest sense, Mata Hari was guilty of being a German agent. This being so, the fact that she gave the Germans no useful information was of no importance in the eyes of French military law.
This interpretation, however, ignores a multitude of other facts in the case. Mata Hari’s change of loyalties to France was certainly sincere, since it was motivated by her love for Masloff (which no one has ever questioned). By the time she reached Madrid, the Germans had clearly ceased to regard Mata Hari as one of their own agents, and were in no doubt that she was working (however clumsily) for the French. The incrimination of such a useless or hostile double agent with the enemy intelligence service--”burning”, as it is known--was and is common in espionage, and the Germans practiced it frequently in World War I. Given her poor performance when in their service, and her clear change of loyalties to France, the Germans had every motive to frame Mata Hari. The French simply took the German bait.
Mata Hari’s trial took place in a tense atmosphere. In 1917, France and the Allies appeared to be losing the war. In the spring of that year, the failure of an offensive on the Western Front led to massive mutinies that affected most of the French Army. War-weariness was growing on the home front, and a defeatist movement was gaining strength. This movement included some prominent politicians, and some defeatists were in contact with the Germans. The Germans secretly subsidized some French newspapers to spread anti-war propaganda. Under these circumstances, the French Army and the French people were vulnerable to spy mania and prone to lash out at scapegoats. Mata Hari was available for just such a role. As Mornet allegedly said, “Innocent though she was, she had to disappear”.
The irregularities in the trial and general conduct of Mata Hari’s case by the French have already been mentioned. The military court that tried Mata Hari, the 3eme Conseil de Guerre, had an ugly record of such misconduct. The court was specially constituted to try sensitive and politically charged cases of espionage and disloyalty, and its job was to convict whatever the cost to justice and proper procedure. The anarchist Miguel Almereyda, whose case was tried by the 3eme Conseil de Guerre, was later found dead in his cell, mysteriously strangled. Two defeatist politicians accused by the court, Louis Malvy and Joseph Caillaux, would probably have been executed like Mata Hari but for their political influence; their cases were handled with equal unfairness by the 3eme Conseil de Guerre.
Mornet and the chief investigator in Mata Hari’s case, Captain Pierre Bouchardon, remained together on military courts for many years after 1917 and even served the pro-German Vichy Regime during World War II. Despite this, they also formed the prosecuting team in the post-World War II trial of Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister. Laval may well have deserved his ultimate sentence of execution, but his trial was conducted with scandalous partiality. Mata Hari, then, was simply another victim of the Mornet-Bouchardon team.
The whole case was surrounded by ironies. Such was the extent of French spy mania at the time that Ladoux himself was jailed and accused of espionage. The Germans had “burned” Mata Hari in revenge for her faithlessness to them. Once she was dead, however, the Germans made great propaganda capital out of the French execution of an innocent woman from a neutral country. Rudolph MacLeod hated his ex-wife, but even he was shocked by her execution.
Misfortune continued to pursue Mata Hari even in death. Her body was unclaimed and went to a French medical school for dissection. Her head was preserved in alcohol and used for medical study as well, but eventually disappeared decades later. Non, Mata Hari’s only surviving child, lived only a few years later than her mother, dying of illness while still a very young woman.
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