Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, née Zelle
Mata Hari
AKA: "Eyes of the Morning,"
"Child of the Dawn,"
H.21
German spy in WW I
(1876 - 1917)
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The most celebrated female spy in history was also one of the most inept agents in the world of espionage. But when it came to the notorious Mata Hari, her accomplishments were counted in the bedroom and on the stage, not in the recorded annals of secret intelligence. She was a creature of her own imagination. Her wild fancies finally engulfed her in terrible adventure and led her to the muzzle-point of a French firing squad on October 15, 1917.
The enigmatic Mata Hari struck down by bullets that day had nothing to do with the little Dutch girl born Margaret Gertrude Zelle on August 7, 1876, in Leenwarden, Holland. Her parents, Adam Zelle and Antje van der Meulen, were wealthy. Her father owned a successful hatter's business and he and his wife lavished attention and gifts on their only daughter. Her mother died when she was fourteen, however, and her father sent her to a convent school.
Graduating at eighteen, Margaret met within a few weeks a dashing Dutch officer, Captain Rudolf MacLeod, a man of forty whose uncle was an admiral and who bragged of his frequent visits to the court of The Hague where he chatted with Queen Wilhelmina. The couple married in 1895 and left for Java where MacLeod was serving as a colonial officer. They made their home in Banjoe-Biroe, a Dutch East Indies settlement that was anything but idyllic. It was a place of squalor and uncomfortable climate, unbearably hot and rain-soaked.
MacLeod's image of the handsome, dashing husband soon vanished. He drank incessantly, while his wife struggled against boredom and labored through a difficult pregnancy, which had begun before the nuptials. Worse, MacLeod kept a string of native girls as mistresses, bringing these women into his home at all hours of the day for quick assignations. When Margaret gave birth to her son Norman MacLeod on January 30, 1896, MacLeod, according to her bitter statements in divorce court later, was having sex with a native girl in the next room. The boy later died, poisoned by an embittered servant.
MacLeod then proposed that Margaret and he operate a badger game. He would arrange through intermediaries for wealthy plantation owners in Java and Sumatra to visit his wife. While the visitor was having sex with her, MacLeod would suddenly barge into the bedroom to play the outraged husband. Both MacLeod and Margaret would then blackmail the victims for heavy payments. Margaret later summed up this sordid episode of her life by sarcastically repeating MacLeod's oft-stated philosophy that "man is an animal! Let's make the most of it."
In her divorce proceedings, Margaret claimed that she was little more than a naive, confused young woman who was easily manipulated by her calculating spouse. "My husband picked wealthy men as suitable objects for blackmail," her petition stated. "One gentleman was a great admirer of my eyes and I led him on as I was told… I was able to collect several thousand guilders."
Awarded custody of her daughter, Margaret received only a small court-ordered settlement from MacLeod. Placing her child in the home of a relative, she spent most of the settlement money on dancing lessons. She had resolved to support herself as an Oriental dancer, and intended to emulate the dances she had seen performed in Java, those that emphasized the arms, legs, and eyes, which Margaret felt were her best physical attributes. To make her body supple and lithe, she performed strenuous acrobatic exercises.
In October 1903, she believed she was ready to astound the world with the mystical dances of Shiva (or Siva) and traveled to Paris to make her reputation. Her ambitions were dashed by failure, no one would hire her. The tall, long-legged beauty, however, found work for a while as a stripper in some low-life clubs.
For most of the following year, Margaret was a common streetwalker. By late 1904 she was servicing ten to twenty men a day in a cheap bordello. She contracted a venereal disease and a Dr. Bizard was summoned to examine her. (Ironically, this same physician would become her mentor in Saint-Lazare Prison while she awaited a firing squad.)
Returning to Holland, Margaret pressed all she knew, friends, and family members, for cash. With a substantial amount of money, Margaret returned to Paris with a new wardrobe and took an expensive suite of rooms at the luxurious Hotel Crillon.
The woman was no longer Margaret Gertrude Zelle. She was Mata Hari, a stage name she had created, one that meant "Eye of the Morning," or "Child of the European Dawn," whichever definitIon Margaret cared to give. Acting as if she were a member of visiting royalty, Mata Hari summoned the entrepreneurial nightclub owner, Emile Guimet, to her Crillon suite.
Guimet went out of curiosity, being told by a courier that "the most exotic dancer in the world wished to see him." He was greeted by a tall, sloe-eyed brunette who exuded sultry sex with every move of her curvaceous body. Guimet was captivated, enthralled by a woman he thought was the most sophisticated, worldly female he had ever encountered. Guimet fell in love with the siren, making her the dancing star of his nightclub and his mistress as well. Guimet presented Mata Hari to high society Paris in a stunning nightclub debut in 1905. Audiences and critics alike swooned over Mata Hari's exotic, interpretive dancing. They heaped praise upon her for her undulating prowess as she shed one veil after another with swirling precision, ending her act with shuddering, quivering nakedness.
Everywhere the dancer appeared she was mobbed by rich men begging her to take their wealth in exchange for her sexual favors. Police had to be called to put down riotous crowds when Mata Hari appeared at the Casino de Paris, the Olympia, and the Follies-Bergere. She was by then called "the red dancer, after the many red veils she would shed while dancing the Dance of Love, the Dance of Sin, the Dance of Death.
Leaving Paris for two years, the dancer toured the capitals of Europe-London, Vienna, Rome, Berlin. Fame and fortune were dumped into her coffers. To men everywhere, Mata Hari became the smoldering symbol of sex. She knew it and capitalized on it at every turn. She was summoned to perform privately before Crown Prince Wilhelm in Berlin. The Prince and the dancer had a brief but passion-filled affair during which Wilhelm gave Mata Hari diamonds and emeralds worth more than $100,000.
When Emperor Wilhelm objected to his son's liaison with the courtesan, the Prince flaunted the dancer in public. On one occasion, he had the dancer at his side on a Berlin parade ground while he reviewed the royal guards. In 1907, he escorted the dancer into his officers' mess where he ordered her to perform naked on the tables before his salivating men. Some time later Wilhelm tired of the dancer and turned her over to his future brother-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick. Within months, she had stepped down another notch to become the mistress of Berlin Police Chief Traugott von Jagow.
A beefy, bald man, Jagow would later become the adjutant of Colonel Maugham Walther Nicolai, head of German intelligence (Nachrichtendienst) during World War I. Although he could not afford her extravagant lifestyle, Jagow's love for Mata Hari was genuine and remained for the rest of her life but her association with him would, indeed, cost the dancer her life. Though she drew an allowance regularly from Jagow, the dancer continued her many affairs with diplomats and aristocrats.
By 1912, however, Mata Hari had risen to great heights as a legitimate ballet dancer. She had never forsaken ballet, which she practiced painfully each and every day, exercising for several hours in a ballet exercising room that she had constructed in her villa.
She scored great successes at the Paris Opera Ballet and also in the ballet theaters of Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin. In 1912, she appeared at La Scala in Milan, Italy and rendered a magnificent performance of the classic ballet Bacchus and Gambrini, one which dispelled all doubts of her most severest of critics about her dancing abilities.
Like all in her profession, the dancer kept a bulging scrapbook of clippings praising her and her performances. Unlike other dancers, she kept a second scrapbook, much thicker, which contained hundreds of letters from Europe's most powerful men, all of which were compromising, along with copies of her own profane, obscene letters to them. Undoubtedly, these letters made up her insurance policy, correspondence that could easily be converted to blackmail.
The year 1912 was pivotal for Mata Hari. She not only scored her most triumphant artistic successes at that time, but decided on a new career packed with adventure, excitement, and danger. She had decided to become a spy. Exactly how she slipped into the dark shadows of espionage is uncertain to this day. The accomplished spymasters of Europe would minimize her activities in this realm. The British joked about her ineptitude, the Germans dismissed her as ineffective. Only the French branded her so devastating as to be equal to a whole German army.
Jagow was the inspiration for this new career. The ever faithful lover invited Mata Hari to lunch in a private room of a Berlin restaurant some time in 1912. Jagow by then had become one of Nicolai's spymasters for German military intelligence, which was already preparing for war with France and England. The German came bluntly to the point.
The spymaster proposed that the dancer go on using her boudoir as a source of money, but that she get information in the bargain. Jagow told her that he would supply her with a list of clients who would pay her handsomely&$151;he told her the fee should be 30,000 marks per night&$151;and that she was to pry state, political, and military secrets from these lovers.
The spy was by then designated as a German agent under the code number of H.21. The prefix H learned later by Allied intelligence, applied only to German spies recruited before August 1914, the beginning of World War I. As such, Jagow arranged for her to attend important diplomatic parties and receptions in all of the capitals of central and western Europe, even North Africa. In the German embassies in Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Cairo, the dancer met and seduced high-ranking diplomats and military officers who mixed their bedroom babble with information about troop movements, munitions dumps, espionage operations, naval maneuvers, warships, new artillery weapons. All of this Mata Hari or H.21 dutifully reported in eyebrow-raising detail to Jagow.
When the war began, Mata Hari was well positioned to spy for Germany, a country that she is said to have adopted and one that secretly granted her citizenship. Jagow then ordered the dancer to return to France via her native Holland. Once she arrived at her villa in Neuilly, she would receive further instructions. Mata Hari went to Amsterdam but found the French border closed to her. Only those with special passes were permitted to cross.
Undaunted, the spy went to the French Consulate in Amsterdam, pleading non-belligerency. "My home is in Neuilly," she said. "My friends are there. My career is in France." To a French official she showed letters she had received from high-ranking French politicians and military officers. The consul agreed to prepare a pass for her. While she waited, the ever sexually active dancer seduced the richest Dutch trade merchant in Amsterdam. She learned from him the number and embarkation dates of food ships leaving Holland for England, and subsequent rerouting to France. The spy delivered this information to Major Sprecht, a German intelligence officer in Amsterdam, and he sent it on to Jagow.
Agents did watch the dancer as one important Foreign Office official after another dined with her, went to her hotel suite, and slept with her. But these officials were much too important to be questioned by the police. Further, nothing Mata Hari did suggested that she was a spy. Her mail was inspected and nothing incriminating was found. What investigators did not know was that she was told much by her paramours, how the French armies were supplied, where troops were positioned, even where recruits to act as reinforcements were being trained.
This information the spy sent to Jagow in Germany inside the diplomatic pouches of certain neutral countries with the cooperation of diplomats in the embassies of those countries. When French counterintelligence was about to close its dossier on Mata Hari, agents turned up evidence that brought more suspicion upon the dancer. Jules Cambon, department chief of the French Foreign Office and a close friend of the dancer, arranged for Mata Hari to receive a pass to travel to the village of Vittel which was near the front lines.
Although French agents watched her day and night for almost seven months they could not collect any evidence against her. All they reported was that she worked tirelessly in nursing wounded men. Most of these, however, were officers whom the dancer subtly pumped for information. The wounded men gladly told her all she wanted to know about a great French offensive that was going to be mounted in that sector, which later became known as the battle of the Somme.
Jagow later received this information from the spy when she returned to Paris. A huge German army lay in wait for the French attack and smashed the French armies, slaughtering more than 200,000 men.
Captain Georges Ladoux of French counterintelligence then thought to jolt the spy into an admission by having her brought to his office where he bluntly accused her of being an agent for Germany. "Madam," Ladoux intoned, "you are under suspicion by all the Allied Powers. You are to be deported, returned to your native Holland."
Mata Hari knew that deportation would end her career as a German agent. She thought to outwit the French officer by offering to spy for France. "I can be extremely useful," she promised. "I have access to German military matters." Then she asked that she be sent to German military headquarters. "I will obtain any secret intelligence the French General Staff might require."
Though she thought she was being clever, the spy had made a fatal mistake. She had all along denied that she knew anything of espionage and yet, to prevent her deportation, she offered to expertly perform the acts of a professional spy. Ladoux pretended to be persuaded that Mata Hari would do anything for her "beloved France." He agreed that she could spy against the Germans, but not at Stenay where she originally proposed to go.
Ladoux ordered the dancer to travel to occupied Brussels. Then came a report from British intelligence that told the French that one of its agents had been captured and killed in Brussels. The agent, the British said, had been betrayed by a woman who answered the description of Mata Hari. Now convinced that the dancer was working with the Germans, Ladoux ordered that Mata Hari was to be arrested the moment she returned to France. The Germans had all but given up on Mata Hari. She was no longer beautiful, nor sultry. Her sallow complexion had hardened and she now bore a decidedly wrinkled and well-lined face. She appeared gaunt, emaciated. Everything about her seemed severe, including her attitude and personality. She was shrewish and demanding.
Also, the Germans knew that their spy had been identified as such many months earlier She was too notorious now to be used with any kind of effectiveness. Realizing that she was no longer the beau ideal of espionage, Mata Hari went to other foreign powers, offering her services as an agent but she was rebuffed. Returning to the Germans in Madrid, the spy demanded that she be paid for her services and that she receive another assignment. A nervous Captain von Kalle contacted Jagow in Berlin.
Jagow was irked and resigned to the fact that Mata Hari was now expendable. He sent a wire to the German Embassy in Madrid that agent H.21 was to return to France where, through a neutral legation, she would be paid 15,00 pesetas. French intelligence intercepted this message and quickly identified agent H.21 as Mata Hari. Agents trailed her back to Paris where she registered at the Plaza-Athenée Hotel on the avenue Montaigne. She collected her check but oddly did not cash it.
On the morning of February 13, 1917, Commissioner Priolet, in the company of his secretary and two gendarmes, burst into Mata Hari's suite to find the spy in bed, eating her breakfast. Priolet ordered her to dress. As she silently did so, her rooms were searched and the check for 15,00 pesetas was discovered. The spy was unperturbed. As she was leaving her rooms, she swooped up several bunches of wild violets and thrust them into the arms of the startled Priolet.
Mata Hari was taken to the crumbling prison fortress of Faubaourg Saint-Denis where she was kept in a padded cell to prevent possible suicide. The French expected to get information from the dancer before eliminating her. She languished in her cell until brought to a closed military trial, which occurred on July 24-25, 1917. So secretive was this hearing that armed sentries were placed outside the doors with strict orders to shoot anyone who came closer than ten paces.
Colonel Maugham Semprou of the Guard Républicain acted a president of the court. Lieutenant Andre Mornet represented the Commissioner of the Government (Judge-Advocate General) and acted as the prosecutor. Also in attendance was Major Massard of the Deuxiéme Bureau. Mata Hari was represented by a brilliant lawyer, Edward Clunet, who so enthusiastically undertook the case that he became the spy's devoted champion.
Semprou opened with a damning statement: "On the day that war was declared you had breakfast with the Prefect of Police (Jagow) at Berlin and then drove with him through a shouting crowd." Dressed all in black, Mata Hari was unperturbed, calmly responding: "It is true. I had met the Prefect in a music hall where I danced. That is how we came to know each other." She added the titillating tidbit that Jagow had come to inspect her scanty costume after receiving complaints that it revealed too much of the dancer's body.
"A little later the Prefect charged you with a mission and gave you thirty thousand marks." intoned Semprou.
"That is true," the dancer replied softly. "He was the man and gave me thirty thousand marks. But not for the reason you impute. He was my lover."
"Hundreds of thousands of marks were paid to you-"
"As a courtesan, yes! I confess it, but never a spy!" The dancer had lost her composure. She leaned forward as if pleading with the officers of the court who sat ramrod stiff in front of her. "Harlot, yes, I am that! But traitoress-never!"
Then Semprou presented the court's real evidence: "At the order of German Headquarters you were notified in Madrid that you were to be paid 15,000 pesetas, money waiting for you here in France, and you came to France and collected those funds."
Mata Hari for the first time appeared frantic. She shook her head and said: "I was the mistress of Kalle, head of German intelligence in Madrid. That payment was a love debt, that's all."
Semprou than drove home his point like a dagger into her heart: "But that remittance was sent to the order of H.21. That is a number on the list of German spies. That was your number. That is what you were known as-not as a mistress, a lover, a harlot. That was the pay of a spy. You, madam, are H.21, an agent in the employ of the German intelligence service. And that is what you have always been since long before this war began."
The dancer was trapped and knew it. She was shattered at the evidence. Her body trembled. Her doe-eyes blinked uncontrollably. Her mouth quivered as it delivered a final answer: "That… that is not true! I'm telling you that-it was-it was to pay-to pay for my nights of love. It-it is my price. Please believe me, gentlemen."
The court deliberated for a half hour. Then Mata Hari was ordered to stand and hear its verdict. The president of the court stated in an emotionless voice that she had been found guilty of espionage against France. He then said: "Margaret Gertrude Zelle-you are condemned to death."
Stunned, the dancer muttered: "It's not possible, it's not possible."
On the day before the scheduled execution, she maintained a confident, almost cheerful air.
Also on that day, Sister Léonide was present with Dr. Bizard in the dancer's cell. The nun had been instructed to be Mata Hari's cellmate and watch the prisoner closely so that she would not harm herself before the sentence was carried out. At one point, to cheer up the condemned spy, Sister Léonide said to Mata Hari: "Show us how you dance." The spy rose from a small bed, smiling. She loosened her robe and began to slowly dance about the cell.
At 4 a.m. the following morning, Commandant Julien came into the cell. He asked Sister Léonide to wake the spy. The condemned woman put on her warmest gown and chatted calmly as she dressed. "It is cold. I slept so well. Another day I would not have forgiven them for waking me so early. Why do you have this custom of executing people at dawn? In India it is otherwise. It takes place at noon. I would much rather go to Vincennes [the place of execution] about three o'clock after a good lunch. Give me my nice little slippers, too. I always like to be well shod."
After powdering her face, the spy cocked her head at Julien and announced: "Gentlemen, I am ready."
She was escorted into a large touring car, which sped off toward Vincennes, arriving there at 5:40 a.m., the car driving up to the firing range where twelve hand picked soldiers of the Fourth Regiment of Zouaves awaited her. Dr. Bizard quickly poured a small glass of brandy for the dancer and she drank this down. Then she lifted her skirts and stepped from the car and began marching toward a post staked in the middle of the rifle range.
An officer offered her a blindfold, which she refused. When he attempted to tie her waist to the post, the dancer waved him away. She smiled and held that smile as the twelve riflemen, standing twelve paces away from her, fired their bullets into her body. As the spy slumped to the ground, an officer walked up to her, placed a pistol behind her ear and fired a bullet into her brain, the traditionAl coup de grace.
No one came forth to claim the body.
AKA: "Eyes of the Morning,"
"Child of the Dawn,"
H.21
German spy in WW I
(1876 - 1917)
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The most celebrated female spy in history was also one of the most inept agents in the world of espionage. But when it came to the notorious Mata Hari, her accomplishments were counted in the bedroom and on the stage, not in the recorded annals of secret intelligence. She was a creature of her own imagination. Her wild fancies finally engulfed her in terrible adventure and led her to the muzzle-point of a French firing squad on October 15, 1917.
The enigmatic Mata Hari struck down by bullets that day had nothing to do with the little Dutch girl born Margaret Gertrude Zelle on August 7, 1876, in Leenwarden, Holland. Her parents, Adam Zelle and Antje van der Meulen, were wealthy. Her father owned a successful hatter's business and he and his wife lavished attention and gifts on their only daughter. Her mother died when she was fourteen, however, and her father sent her to a convent school.
Graduating at eighteen, Margaret met within a few weeks a dashing Dutch officer, Captain Rudolf MacLeod, a man of forty whose uncle was an admiral and who bragged of his frequent visits to the court of The Hague where he chatted with Queen Wilhelmina. The couple married in 1895 and left for Java where MacLeod was serving as a colonial officer. They made their home in Banjoe-Biroe, a Dutch East Indies settlement that was anything but idyllic. It was a place of squalor and uncomfortable climate, unbearably hot and rain-soaked.
MacLeod's image of the handsome, dashing husband soon vanished. He drank incessantly, while his wife struggled against boredom and labored through a difficult pregnancy, which had begun before the nuptials. Worse, MacLeod kept a string of native girls as mistresses, bringing these women into his home at all hours of the day for quick assignations. When Margaret gave birth to her son Norman MacLeod on January 30, 1896, MacLeod, according to her bitter statements in divorce court later, was having sex with a native girl in the next room. The boy later died, poisoned by an embittered servant.
MacLeod then proposed that Margaret and he operate a badger game. He would arrange through intermediaries for wealthy plantation owners in Java and Sumatra to visit his wife. While the visitor was having sex with her, MacLeod would suddenly barge into the bedroom to play the outraged husband. Both MacLeod and Margaret would then blackmail the victims for heavy payments. Margaret later summed up this sordid episode of her life by sarcastically repeating MacLeod's oft-stated philosophy that "man is an animal! Let's make the most of it."
In her divorce proceedings, Margaret claimed that she was little more than a naive, confused young woman who was easily manipulated by her calculating spouse. "My husband picked wealthy men as suitable objects for blackmail," her petition stated. "One gentleman was a great admirer of my eyes and I led him on as I was told… I was able to collect several thousand guilders."
Awarded custody of her daughter, Margaret received only a small court-ordered settlement from MacLeod. Placing her child in the home of a relative, she spent most of the settlement money on dancing lessons. She had resolved to support herself as an Oriental dancer, and intended to emulate the dances she had seen performed in Java, those that emphasized the arms, legs, and eyes, which Margaret felt were her best physical attributes. To make her body supple and lithe, she performed strenuous acrobatic exercises.
In October 1903, she believed she was ready to astound the world with the mystical dances of Shiva (or Siva) and traveled to Paris to make her reputation. Her ambitions were dashed by failure, no one would hire her. The tall, long-legged beauty, however, found work for a while as a stripper in some low-life clubs.
For most of the following year, Margaret was a common streetwalker. By late 1904 she was servicing ten to twenty men a day in a cheap bordello. She contracted a venereal disease and a Dr. Bizard was summoned to examine her. (Ironically, this same physician would become her mentor in Saint-Lazare Prison while she awaited a firing squad.)
Returning to Holland, Margaret pressed all she knew, friends, and family members, for cash. With a substantial amount of money, Margaret returned to Paris with a new wardrobe and took an expensive suite of rooms at the luxurious Hotel Crillon.
The woman was no longer Margaret Gertrude Zelle. She was Mata Hari, a stage name she had created, one that meant "Eye of the Morning," or "Child of the European Dawn," whichever definitIon Margaret cared to give. Acting as if she were a member of visiting royalty, Mata Hari summoned the entrepreneurial nightclub owner, Emile Guimet, to her Crillon suite.
Guimet went out of curiosity, being told by a courier that "the most exotic dancer in the world wished to see him." He was greeted by a tall, sloe-eyed brunette who exuded sultry sex with every move of her curvaceous body. Guimet was captivated, enthralled by a woman he thought was the most sophisticated, worldly female he had ever encountered. Guimet fell in love with the siren, making her the dancing star of his nightclub and his mistress as well. Guimet presented Mata Hari to high society Paris in a stunning nightclub debut in 1905. Audiences and critics alike swooned over Mata Hari's exotic, interpretive dancing. They heaped praise upon her for her undulating prowess as she shed one veil after another with swirling precision, ending her act with shuddering, quivering nakedness.
Everywhere the dancer appeared she was mobbed by rich men begging her to take their wealth in exchange for her sexual favors. Police had to be called to put down riotous crowds when Mata Hari appeared at the Casino de Paris, the Olympia, and the Follies-Bergere. She was by then called "the red dancer, after the many red veils she would shed while dancing the Dance of Love, the Dance of Sin, the Dance of Death.
Leaving Paris for two years, the dancer toured the capitals of Europe-London, Vienna, Rome, Berlin. Fame and fortune were dumped into her coffers. To men everywhere, Mata Hari became the smoldering symbol of sex. She knew it and capitalized on it at every turn. She was summoned to perform privately before Crown Prince Wilhelm in Berlin. The Prince and the dancer had a brief but passion-filled affair during which Wilhelm gave Mata Hari diamonds and emeralds worth more than $100,000.
When Emperor Wilhelm objected to his son's liaison with the courtesan, the Prince flaunted the dancer in public. On one occasion, he had the dancer at his side on a Berlin parade ground while he reviewed the royal guards. In 1907, he escorted the dancer into his officers' mess where he ordered her to perform naked on the tables before his salivating men. Some time later Wilhelm tired of the dancer and turned her over to his future brother-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick. Within months, she had stepped down another notch to become the mistress of Berlin Police Chief Traugott von Jagow.
A beefy, bald man, Jagow would later become the adjutant of Colonel Maugham Walther Nicolai, head of German intelligence (Nachrichtendienst) during World War I. Although he could not afford her extravagant lifestyle, Jagow's love for Mata Hari was genuine and remained for the rest of her life but her association with him would, indeed, cost the dancer her life. Though she drew an allowance regularly from Jagow, the dancer continued her many affairs with diplomats and aristocrats.
By 1912, however, Mata Hari had risen to great heights as a legitimate ballet dancer. She had never forsaken ballet, which she practiced painfully each and every day, exercising for several hours in a ballet exercising room that she had constructed in her villa.
She scored great successes at the Paris Opera Ballet and also in the ballet theaters of Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin. In 1912, she appeared at La Scala in Milan, Italy and rendered a magnificent performance of the classic ballet Bacchus and Gambrini, one which dispelled all doubts of her most severest of critics about her dancing abilities.
Like all in her profession, the dancer kept a bulging scrapbook of clippings praising her and her performances. Unlike other dancers, she kept a second scrapbook, much thicker, which contained hundreds of letters from Europe's most powerful men, all of which were compromising, along with copies of her own profane, obscene letters to them. Undoubtedly, these letters made up her insurance policy, correspondence that could easily be converted to blackmail.
The year 1912 was pivotal for Mata Hari. She not only scored her most triumphant artistic successes at that time, but decided on a new career packed with adventure, excitement, and danger. She had decided to become a spy. Exactly how she slipped into the dark shadows of espionage is uncertain to this day. The accomplished spymasters of Europe would minimize her activities in this realm. The British joked about her ineptitude, the Germans dismissed her as ineffective. Only the French branded her so devastating as to be equal to a whole German army.
Jagow was the inspiration for this new career. The ever faithful lover invited Mata Hari to lunch in a private room of a Berlin restaurant some time in 1912. Jagow by then had become one of Nicolai's spymasters for German military intelligence, which was already preparing for war with France and England. The German came bluntly to the point.
The spymaster proposed that the dancer go on using her boudoir as a source of money, but that she get information in the bargain. Jagow told her that he would supply her with a list of clients who would pay her handsomely&$151;he told her the fee should be 30,000 marks per night&$151;and that she was to pry state, political, and military secrets from these lovers.
The spy was by then designated as a German agent under the code number of H.21. The prefix H learned later by Allied intelligence, applied only to German spies recruited before August 1914, the beginning of World War I. As such, Jagow arranged for her to attend important diplomatic parties and receptions in all of the capitals of central and western Europe, even North Africa. In the German embassies in Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Cairo, the dancer met and seduced high-ranking diplomats and military officers who mixed their bedroom babble with information about troop movements, munitions dumps, espionage operations, naval maneuvers, warships, new artillery weapons. All of this Mata Hari or H.21 dutifully reported in eyebrow-raising detail to Jagow.
When the war began, Mata Hari was well positioned to spy for Germany, a country that she is said to have adopted and one that secretly granted her citizenship. Jagow then ordered the dancer to return to France via her native Holland. Once she arrived at her villa in Neuilly, she would receive further instructions. Mata Hari went to Amsterdam but found the French border closed to her. Only those with special passes were permitted to cross.
Undaunted, the spy went to the French Consulate in Amsterdam, pleading non-belligerency. "My home is in Neuilly," she said. "My friends are there. My career is in France." To a French official she showed letters she had received from high-ranking French politicians and military officers. The consul agreed to prepare a pass for her. While she waited, the ever sexually active dancer seduced the richest Dutch trade merchant in Amsterdam. She learned from him the number and embarkation dates of food ships leaving Holland for England, and subsequent rerouting to France. The spy delivered this information to Major Sprecht, a German intelligence officer in Amsterdam, and he sent it on to Jagow.
Agents did watch the dancer as one important Foreign Office official after another dined with her, went to her hotel suite, and slept with her. But these officials were much too important to be questioned by the police. Further, nothing Mata Hari did suggested that she was a spy. Her mail was inspected and nothing incriminating was found. What investigators did not know was that she was told much by her paramours, how the French armies were supplied, where troops were positioned, even where recruits to act as reinforcements were being trained.
This information the spy sent to Jagow in Germany inside the diplomatic pouches of certain neutral countries with the cooperation of diplomats in the embassies of those countries. When French counterintelligence was about to close its dossier on Mata Hari, agents turned up evidence that brought more suspicion upon the dancer. Jules Cambon, department chief of the French Foreign Office and a close friend of the dancer, arranged for Mata Hari to receive a pass to travel to the village of Vittel which was near the front lines.
Although French agents watched her day and night for almost seven months they could not collect any evidence against her. All they reported was that she worked tirelessly in nursing wounded men. Most of these, however, were officers whom the dancer subtly pumped for information. The wounded men gladly told her all she wanted to know about a great French offensive that was going to be mounted in that sector, which later became known as the battle of the Somme.
Jagow later received this information from the spy when she returned to Paris. A huge German army lay in wait for the French attack and smashed the French armies, slaughtering more than 200,000 men.
Captain Georges Ladoux of French counterintelligence then thought to jolt the spy into an admission by having her brought to his office where he bluntly accused her of being an agent for Germany. "Madam," Ladoux intoned, "you are under suspicion by all the Allied Powers. You are to be deported, returned to your native Holland."
Mata Hari knew that deportation would end her career as a German agent. She thought to outwit the French officer by offering to spy for France. "I can be extremely useful," she promised. "I have access to German military matters." Then she asked that she be sent to German military headquarters. "I will obtain any secret intelligence the French General Staff might require."
Though she thought she was being clever, the spy had made a fatal mistake. She had all along denied that she knew anything of espionage and yet, to prevent her deportation, she offered to expertly perform the acts of a professional spy. Ladoux pretended to be persuaded that Mata Hari would do anything for her "beloved France." He agreed that she could spy against the Germans, but not at Stenay where she originally proposed to go.
Ladoux ordered the dancer to travel to occupied Brussels. Then came a report from British intelligence that told the French that one of its agents had been captured and killed in Brussels. The agent, the British said, had been betrayed by a woman who answered the description of Mata Hari. Now convinced that the dancer was working with the Germans, Ladoux ordered that Mata Hari was to be arrested the moment she returned to France. The Germans had all but given up on Mata Hari. She was no longer beautiful, nor sultry. Her sallow complexion had hardened and she now bore a decidedly wrinkled and well-lined face. She appeared gaunt, emaciated. Everything about her seemed severe, including her attitude and personality. She was shrewish and demanding.
Also, the Germans knew that their spy had been identified as such many months earlier She was too notorious now to be used with any kind of effectiveness. Realizing that she was no longer the beau ideal of espionage, Mata Hari went to other foreign powers, offering her services as an agent but she was rebuffed. Returning to the Germans in Madrid, the spy demanded that she be paid for her services and that she receive another assignment. A nervous Captain von Kalle contacted Jagow in Berlin.
Jagow was irked and resigned to the fact that Mata Hari was now expendable. He sent a wire to the German Embassy in Madrid that agent H.21 was to return to France where, through a neutral legation, she would be paid 15,00 pesetas. French intelligence intercepted this message and quickly identified agent H.21 as Mata Hari. Agents trailed her back to Paris where she registered at the Plaza-Athenée Hotel on the avenue Montaigne. She collected her check but oddly did not cash it.
On the morning of February 13, 1917, Commissioner Priolet, in the company of his secretary and two gendarmes, burst into Mata Hari's suite to find the spy in bed, eating her breakfast. Priolet ordered her to dress. As she silently did so, her rooms were searched and the check for 15,00 pesetas was discovered. The spy was unperturbed. As she was leaving her rooms, she swooped up several bunches of wild violets and thrust them into the arms of the startled Priolet.
Mata Hari was taken to the crumbling prison fortress of Faubaourg Saint-Denis where she was kept in a padded cell to prevent possible suicide. The French expected to get information from the dancer before eliminating her. She languished in her cell until brought to a closed military trial, which occurred on July 24-25, 1917. So secretive was this hearing that armed sentries were placed outside the doors with strict orders to shoot anyone who came closer than ten paces.
Colonel Maugham Semprou of the Guard Républicain acted a president of the court. Lieutenant Andre Mornet represented the Commissioner of the Government (Judge-Advocate General) and acted as the prosecutor. Also in attendance was Major Massard of the Deuxiéme Bureau. Mata Hari was represented by a brilliant lawyer, Edward Clunet, who so enthusiastically undertook the case that he became the spy's devoted champion.
Semprou opened with a damning statement: "On the day that war was declared you had breakfast with the Prefect of Police (Jagow) at Berlin and then drove with him through a shouting crowd." Dressed all in black, Mata Hari was unperturbed, calmly responding: "It is true. I had met the Prefect in a music hall where I danced. That is how we came to know each other." She added the titillating tidbit that Jagow had come to inspect her scanty costume after receiving complaints that it revealed too much of the dancer's body.
"A little later the Prefect charged you with a mission and gave you thirty thousand marks." intoned Semprou.
"That is true," the dancer replied softly. "He was the man and gave me thirty thousand marks. But not for the reason you impute. He was my lover."
"Hundreds of thousands of marks were paid to you-"
"As a courtesan, yes! I confess it, but never a spy!" The dancer had lost her composure. She leaned forward as if pleading with the officers of the court who sat ramrod stiff in front of her. "Harlot, yes, I am that! But traitoress-never!"
Then Semprou presented the court's real evidence: "At the order of German Headquarters you were notified in Madrid that you were to be paid 15,000 pesetas, money waiting for you here in France, and you came to France and collected those funds."
Mata Hari for the first time appeared frantic. She shook her head and said: "I was the mistress of Kalle, head of German intelligence in Madrid. That payment was a love debt, that's all."
Semprou than drove home his point like a dagger into her heart: "But that remittance was sent to the order of H.21. That is a number on the list of German spies. That was your number. That is what you were known as-not as a mistress, a lover, a harlot. That was the pay of a spy. You, madam, are H.21, an agent in the employ of the German intelligence service. And that is what you have always been since long before this war began."
The dancer was trapped and knew it. She was shattered at the evidence. Her body trembled. Her doe-eyes blinked uncontrollably. Her mouth quivered as it delivered a final answer: "That… that is not true! I'm telling you that-it was-it was to pay-to pay for my nights of love. It-it is my price. Please believe me, gentlemen."
The court deliberated for a half hour. Then Mata Hari was ordered to stand and hear its verdict. The president of the court stated in an emotionless voice that she had been found guilty of espionage against France. He then said: "Margaret Gertrude Zelle-you are condemned to death."
Stunned, the dancer muttered: "It's not possible, it's not possible."
On the day before the scheduled execution, she maintained a confident, almost cheerful air.
Also on that day, Sister Léonide was present with Dr. Bizard in the dancer's cell. The nun had been instructed to be Mata Hari's cellmate and watch the prisoner closely so that she would not harm herself before the sentence was carried out. At one point, to cheer up the condemned spy, Sister Léonide said to Mata Hari: "Show us how you dance." The spy rose from a small bed, smiling. She loosened her robe and began to slowly dance about the cell.
At 4 a.m. the following morning, Commandant Julien came into the cell. He asked Sister Léonide to wake the spy. The condemned woman put on her warmest gown and chatted calmly as she dressed. "It is cold. I slept so well. Another day I would not have forgiven them for waking me so early. Why do you have this custom of executing people at dawn? In India it is otherwise. It takes place at noon. I would much rather go to Vincennes [the place of execution] about three o'clock after a good lunch. Give me my nice little slippers, too. I always like to be well shod."
After powdering her face, the spy cocked her head at Julien and announced: "Gentlemen, I am ready."
She was escorted into a large touring car, which sped off toward Vincennes, arriving there at 5:40 a.m., the car driving up to the firing range where twelve hand picked soldiers of the Fourth Regiment of Zouaves awaited her. Dr. Bizard quickly poured a small glass of brandy for the dancer and she drank this down. Then she lifted her skirts and stepped from the car and began marching toward a post staked in the middle of the rifle range.
An officer offered her a blindfold, which she refused. When he attempted to tie her waist to the post, the dancer waved him away. She smiled and held that smile as the twelve riflemen, standing twelve paces away from her, fired their bullets into her body. As the spy slumped to the ground, an officer walked up to her, placed a pistol behind her ear and fired a bullet into her brain, the traditionAl coup de grace.
No one came forth to claim the body.