A BRIEF LIFE OF PASSION AND INTRIGUE

 

If you’re from Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, today is a red-letter day on your calendar. Today, October 15^th, marks the one hundred fourth anniversary of the execution of the town’s most famous citizen, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. Who, you ask? Perhaps you’ll know whom I’m talking about if I tell you that she was better known as Mata Hari.

I remember when I was quite young that it was fairly common to hear people of my grandparents and parents’ generation refer to a particularly seductive woman—especially a duplicitously seductive woman—as being “a Mata Hari”. I didn’t have any idea where the term came from, but it was obvious from the confidential tone people used when employing it what sort of woman they were referring to. Not anyone like the wholesome, steadfast, down-to-earth women you knew. Rather, a stunning temptress, a woman who was exotic, feline, powerfully attractive, a dizzying presence, and a woman with a deeply secretive life that she shared with no one. In short, just the sort of woman a boy dreamed of but never seemed to be acquainted with.

Margaretha, nicknamed M’greet, was born in Leeuwarden on August 7^th, 1876. She was the eldest of four siblings and the only girl. Her father was a milliner who used the money from his hat shop to make investments in the oil market. For a time, that went quite well for him and the family lived high on the hog. The children were sent to excellent private schools, M’greet until she reached adolescence—an education that left her with well-developed intellectual curiosity from then on.

A statue pays tribute to Mata Hari
in Leeuwarden

But eventually, M’greet’s father’s investments stopped panning out. Before long, he was forced to declare bankruptcy and the family’s fortune changed. M’greet’s parents divorced, her father remarried, her mother fell ill and died, and she was sent to live with her godfather’s family in the town of Sneek. Her godfather sent her to train as a kindergarten teacher, but at the first school she was assigned to, she became the sexual fantasy of the school’s principal, who hit on her mercilessly until her godfather made her quit the job. Not long afterward, she moved to an uncle’s home in The Hague.

Ever restless, at age eighteen, M’greet saw a mail-order wife ad placed by a Dutchman of Scottish origin named Rudolf McLeod. McLeod was serving as a captain at a Dutch Colonial Army post in the West Indies. On the spur of the moment, M’greet decided to answer the ad. She and McLeod, who was nearly old enough to be her father, married in Amsterdam before he took her back to his posting in what is today Indonesia and was then called Java.

Rudolf was a direct descendant of Clan McLeod of the Isle of Sky and this opened a new door for M’greet into genteel Dutch society. Four years into the marriage, M’greet gave birth in rapid succession to two children, a boy born in 1897 and a girl born in 1898. Syphilis was rife in those days, especially in the military, and both children were born with the venereal disease, contracted from their parents.

M'greet with her husband, Captain McLeod

There were no antibiotics in those days. Poisonous mixtures, including, among other things, mercury and arsenic, were used internally to treat syphilis. Although after the turn of the century an arsenic-based drug would have limited success in treating syphilis (as writer Isak Dinesen, who suffered from the disease, would find out, if the syphilis didn’t kill you, the cure very well might), in the latter part of the nineteenth century, these toxic concoctions were largely experimental. Both of M’greet’s children became deathly ill from treatment for the disease. The boy, Norman, died at age two. The girl, Louise Jeanne, as it turned out, survived her mother, but died at twenty-one, very likely due to the effects of improperly cured syphilis.

M’greet’s marriage to Captain McLeod was a stormy one. She was an intelligent and liberated young woman with a cultural bent, who became a serious student of Indonesian culture and took up Javanese dance. She was ill-suited to the boring life of an Army wife and Rudolf blamed her for his being passed over for promotion. He kept a lover in town near his base, drank heavily and regularly beat his wife. For a time, they separated and M’greet went to live with another Army officer. Rudolf eventually coaxed her to come back, promising to change. Predictably, he didn’t.

In the meantime, however, M’greet continued her Indonesian culture and dance studies and, while still married, ended up landing a spot in a Javanese dance company. It was then that she first took the stage name Mata Hari, which, in the Malay language spoken in Indonesia, means “eye of the day”.

It wasn’t her only stage name, however. After she and Captain McLeod moved back to Holland, their marriage broke up definitively. She received custody of her daughter but her husband failed to pay child support. Instead, Rudolf basically kidnapped Louise Jeanne on one of her visits to her father’s house and refused to return her. M’greet was penniless and couldn’t raise the funds to fight a custody battle, so ended up having to leave the girl in her father’s care. Seeking a new life, M’greet relocated to Paris. To make ends meet, she joined the circus and became one of the skimpily-clad horsewomen that were so popular in circuses of the Belle Époque, modeling, in her spare time, for artists. Under the Big Top, she was known—to her great satisfaction and to the utter chagrin of Rudolf and his Scottish clan—as Lady McLeod.

It was only a year later, however, that the real legend of Mata Hari began. By 1904, she had initiated a meteoric rise as a famous exotic dancer. She reinvented herself, taking on a mysterious persona rumored to have Asian, Jewish, and Javanese blood, despite her being of decidedly Dutch heritage.  Known as a precursor of modern dance with Asian influences, she rivaled the fame of her contemporary, Isadora Duncan. But Isadora had a much more acceptable reputation as a serious dancer, while Mata Hari, although wildly popular, was often viewed more as a very high-class stripper.

Her dances grew increasingly daring, tending ever further from exotic to erotic and with her ever revealing costumes giving way to nearly full nudes. Her choreography was classically graceful, but shamelessly sassy, sexy and flirtatious, brazen for her time and delightfully uninhibited. Off the stage, she posed nude or nearly nude for photographers and entertained at the private parties of the rich and famous. While many attended her performances in admiration for her extraordinary talent as a dancer, probably just as many went in wild expectation of the dance’s climax when Mata Hari would be left dressed in little but her own skin. The only item she always kept in place was a jewel-studded golden chest-plate, not because she was at all shy about nudity, but, so the story goes, because she was very self-conscious about having small breasts.

Although she had started her dancing career relatively late in life, she enjoyed great success in Paris and other parts of Europe for nearly a decade. But by 1912, there were many imitators along the trail that dancers like her and Isadora had blazed. Her once svelte figure was growing somewhat chubby, and critics who had once praised her originality turned their backs on her, or worse still, turned from describing her with phrases such as “slender and tall with the flexible grace of a wild animal, and with blue-black hair,” to writing that she was a mere exhibitionist who had never really displayed any serious talent as a dancer.

Her last public performance was in 1915. But she remained well-connected in high society. Known and desired by powerful men throughout Europe, Mata Hari forged intimate relationships with politicians, high-ranking military men and members of the royal houses of several nations. In the spirit of the new millennium, she was viewed by the more liberal minds of Europe simply as a bohemian, an artist and a liberated woman.

But as the rumors of war began to circulate, her promiscuity among some of Europe’s most prominent men, with whom she consorted and often journeyed from one country to another, began to raise eyebrows in the more conservative sectors. Already by then, she began to be seen by some as a dangerous seductress and potential security risk, while others, in the different intelligence communities, began to view her as a possibly useful tool in their information-gathering efforts. 

With the full outbreak of World War I, these views were underscored, especially since, as a native of the Netherlands, which remained neutral throughout the war, Mata Hari was free to travel to any country she wished, and did, making trips from France, which she had adopted as her home, to Britain, Spain and Holland.

During these war years, she met and fell passionately in love with a Russian flying ace named Vadim Maslov, who was seventeen years her junior. Part of a Russian expeditionary force sent to France to fight on the side of the Allies against Germany, the young captain apparently fell as hard for Mata Hari as she did for him. By all accounts, it was an all-consuming romantic and sexual obsession.

It wasn’t long, however, before Maslov engaged in a dogfight with a German pilot who shot his plane down. Mata Hari received word that her young lover had survived the crash, but had been seriously wounded. Among other things, he had lost his left eye. Even after he recovered, his flying days would be over.

Mata Hari with Captain Maslov after the crash

Decisive as always, she sought to visit Maslov at the hospital near the Western Front, where he was recovering from his wounds, but she was denied permission. Eventually, however, she secured a meeting with French intelligence agents who told her that they would get her permission to visit her lover, but only if she, in return, would agree to become a French spy. She agreed.

The agents apparently had information that, prior to the start of the war, Mata Hari had danced on more than one occasion before Germany’s Crown Prince Wilhelm, heir to then Kaiser Wilhelm II. Prince Wilhelm had, unsurprisingly, reached the rank of general and was the country’s senior officer on the Western Front. Mata Hari’s mission, they told her, would be to seduce the younger Wilhelm and pump him for military secrets that she would then report back to the French. If the intelligence she brought back was good, they told her, she would be paid a million francs. She agreed.

Crown Prince Wilhelm

French intelligence, however, ended up being disappointed with what little Mata Hari was able to bring back from her meetings with Prince Wilhelm. They apparently thought she’d merely been shining them on, and suspicions surrounding her grew among the Allies.

In hindsight, what was faulty was France’s intelligence. They might have known a great deal about the exotic dancer’s movements, but they apparently knew nothing about Prince Wilhelm.

The crown prince was basically a fool, a playboy whose most serious efforts went into consorting with far-right politicians in potential plots to overthrow his father and take over as Kaiser himself. Other than that, he was merely a self-styled playboy whose rank was the result of his lineage rather than his expertise. He had never actually commanded anything bigger than a regiment and his position as the top commander on the Western Front was nominal, with real generals behind the scenes actually prosecuting the war while the prince lived the high-life.

But men being men, the intelligence agents preferred to blame Mata Hari for their own ineffectiveness in intelligence-gathering. Indeed, Mata Hari’s handler, intelligence Captain Georges Ladoux, would later testify against her in her subsequent trial for espionage.

It wasn’t the French, however, but the British who were the first to arrest Mata Hari. The detention took place when she was traveling aboard a ship out of Spain that put in at the port of Falmouth in England. Clearly, Mata Hari’s movements were again being tracked because agents of British intelligence were there waiting to arrest her and take her to London for interrogation.

She was questioned at New Scotland Yard by the assistant commissioner for counter-espionage. Although at first she balked at his questions, he eventually got her to admit that she was working for French intelligence. The interview is on public record in the British National Archives. France apparently failed to acknowledge their deal with the dancer, however, fearing the embarrassment that the story could cause the authorities if it were made public.

Shortly afterward, Mata Hari again traveled to Spain. In Madrid she met with the German military attaché and is alleged to have offered his country French military secrets in exchange for cash. What has never been clarified is whether she decided to do this based on simple pecuniary considerations, or whether there was another motive—such as payback for France’s hanging her out to dry with the British, or as a ruse designed to get her closer to the Kaiser’s son.

The German attaché reported the offer to headquarters in Berlin and assigned Mata Hari the codename H-21. And this is where things got ugly. In their communications about Mata Hari, the Germans exchanged descriptions of Agent H-21 that made it all too obvious who she was, and there is evidence that they used an encryption in their messaging that they knew the French had already broken. There is reason to believe that the head of German intelligence felt that Mata Hari was playing them since the only “intelligence” she was providing them with was gossip about the private lives of French officials and military men.

Truth be told, it is probable that these were the only kind of secrets Mata Hari was capable of gathering. She wasn’t a spy in any real sense, but a pawn that both the French and Germans were trying to use against one another but without ever reaching the conclusion that the only thing any of the men she consorted with would be willing to share with her was, indeed, idle gossip, certainly not military secrets which she really hadn’t the wiles to extract from them.

Nevertheless, German intelligence apparently thought the best way to get even with Mata Hari for what they construed as holding back on them, was by making their communications about her so obvious that she couldn’t help but be exposed to the French as a German spy.

If that was their plan, and there is every indication that it was, it worked. The French took the bait, believed she was a double agent and started setting a trap for her. To do this, they floated the names of a half-dozen Belgian agents to her. Five of them were under suspicion of providing false information to France at the behest of Germany. The other one they were almost certain was a double agent. After French intelligence fed the names to Mata Hari, the double agent was almost immediately eliminated by the Germans, while the other five continued to gather intelligence for France. This seemed to make it clear that five of the six weren’t working for Germany, that the sixth had indeed been working both ends against the middle, and that Mata Hari was leaking information to the Germans.

Mata Hari, the day of her arrest

French agents went to Paris’s Hotel Elysée Palace where Mata Hari lived and arrested her. She was remanded into custody for five months until the opening of her trial in July of 1917.

Throughout the trial, Mata Hari maintained her innocence. France, she said, was her home, and any espionage she had taken part in had been for the Allied cause. “A harlot?” she was reported to have said during the trial, “Yes, but a traitor, never!”

Historians tend to agree that, while both Britain and France accused her of spying for the Germans, the intelligence services of neither country were ever able to provide definitive proof that the charge was true. But that didn’t keep the French court from charging her with espionage at the service of the enemy that led to the deaths of fifty thousand French troops.

Historical revisionists today claim that Mata Hari was framed. They suggest that, at the time, France was, objectively, losing to Germany in World War I and needed a scapegoat to assuage their own sense of guilt at being on the losing side and sending their soldiers to slaughter by the Germans. The Dutch Mata Hari Foundation has petitioned France repeatedly to clear her name. And there have even been calls for her trial to be reopened in the French courts based on vast research, documentation and testimonies gathered since the First World War.

But despite the lack of sound evidence against her, Mata Hari was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Repeated defeats had led French troops to exhaustion. Presented in court as a woman of moral turpitude who had lied her entire life about her identity and origins, while serial-seducing every man she could in positions of power, a harlot who knew loyalty to nothing and whose only motives were self-interest and greed, Mata Hari became the perfect patsy on which to blame much of what had gone wrong for France so far. This, at a time when Georges Clemenceau had just returned to power as France’s prime minister, bent on wiping the slate clean and reversing the tide of his country’s war with Germany.

British historian Julie Wheelwright seems spot on when she indicates that, in a wartime, ultra-conservative, ultra-Catholic France, Mata Hari “was kind of held up as an example of what might happen if your morals were too loose.”

Mata Hari faces the court

In her own defense during the trial, Mata Hari made the case that she never set out to be a spy, that all of her international connections were the result of her popularity as a dancer, adding, “It is terrible that I cannot defend myself.” The one person who could have helped, explained how she first got involved in espionage through French agents who extorted her cooperation in exchange for access to her wounded lover, was the young pilot himself, Captain Maslov. But he broke her heart by refusing to go to court and testify in her defense.

Mata Hari’s attorney was a well-known international lawyer, but in what was clearly a kind of kangaroo court, his hands were tied. He wasn’t even permitted to cross-examine the witnesses that the prosecution presented. In the end, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: Mata Hari was convicted and sentenced to death.

Mata Hari’s subsequent appeals for clemency were denied. She wasn’t informed of the denial. She only learned about it when she was awakened at daybreak on October 15^th, in her cell in Paris’s Saint-Lazare Prison. Prison guards said that she had slept soundly the night before. A priest and two nuns entered the cell with two prison authorities and her lawyer. She asked for paper, pen and envelopes and sat on the edge of her bed to hurriedly write two letters before handing them to her lawyer for forwarding. Then she calmly dressed, put on high-heeled shoes, donned a large hat and ankle-length coat and said, “I am ready.”

From there, she was driven to an Army post where the car stopped in an open field in which she was led to stand in front of a small mound of earth somewhat taller than a man, designed to catch any stray rounds that might miss her body.

An excellent eyewitness report by British journalist Henry Wales, reporting for the International News Service describes how Mata Hari stood before the twelve-man firing squad, hands unbound and refused the blindfold that was offered to her. At no time did she break or move. She stood stock-still and never changed expressions, except, according to Wales, to defiantly blow a kiss to the members of the firing squad when they were called to attention and stood aiming the dozen barrels of their rifles at her chest.

At the signal of the lieutenant in charge, the marksmen fired. Wales writes, “At the report Mata Hari fell. She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back. Instead, she seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.”

The squad’s sergeant then stepped forward, drew his service revolver, placed the muzzle less than an inch from the woman’s temple and pulled the trigger.

Mata Hari was dead, but her story and the controversy over her life and death continue to arouse passions up to the present.

It happened one hundred four years ago today.