Drama
Trilogy of Women Spies Part I - Mata Hari
Published: 15 April 2021
User Rating: 5 / 5
Margareth Geertruida Zelle ( August 7, 1876- October 15, 1917) is the most famous and controversial spy of World War One. She was also known as Mata Hari, a Dutch born woman who carried exotic stripping to an art form. So many myths and legends have surrounded her past that it's hard to tell reality from mystery.

Greta Garbo Portrayed Mata Hari in the 1931 Film produced by MGM
Margareth Zelle (Mata Hari) was an admitted courtesan, was not as she invented, an exotic dancer from India, and she was shot by the French accused falsly to be a German spy. Historians now say that her principal French accuser was in reality a spy for the Germans and that her death was as much a needless charade as were her bumbled attempts at spying.

The Execution of Mata Hari in 1917
She stood alone in the sodden field on the outskirts of Paris, her fashionable ankle boots firmly planted in the mud churned up by the cavalry who drilled there. No, she would not be tied to the stake, she told her executioners politely. And nor would she allow them to blindfold her. She faced the barrels of the firing squad without flinching. Earlier, at 5am, they had woken her in her filthy cell in the Prison de Saint-Lazare to tell her this was the day she would die. She dressed in her best - stockings, a low-cut blouse under a dove-grey, two-piece suit. On her head she perched a three-cornered hat at a jaunty angle, hiding her greying hair, unkempt and unwashed through nine months of incarceration. Over her shoulders she slung a vivid blue coat like a cloak to keep out the cold October air. In a black car with its window blinds down, Margaretha Zelle, convicted of espionage, was then driven at speed through the still streets of the capital - a place she loved with a passion, though she was Dutch not French - to this damp and drear spot. The 12 soldiers in their khaki uniforms and red fezzes raised their rifles. She waved to the two weeping nuns who had been her comfort in prison and on her last journey. She blew a kiss to the priest and another to her lawyer, an ex-lover. The sun was coming up when the shots rang out. Zelle slumped to the ground. The officer in charge marched forward and fired a single bullet into her brain, the coup de grace. An extraordinary life was over. The woman who was executed that day in 1917 was better known as Mata Hari, the name Zelle had chosen for herself when she became Europe's queen of unbridled eroticism, an exotic dancer, courtesan, harlot, great lover, spendthrift, liar, deceiver and thief.
Mata Hari's body was not claimed by any family members and was accordingly used for medical study. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris, but in 2000, archivists discovered that the head had disappeared, possibly as early as 1954, when the museum had been relocated. Records dated from 1918 show that the museum also received the rest of the body, but none of the remains could later be accounted for.
In a fascinating biography, American academic Pat Shipman makes the case that, far from being the betrayer, she was the one betrayed, and by that breed she loved all her life - men. It was men who, like witchhunters, built the case against her, driven by prejudice not fact. And with France gripped by anti-German spy mania, few would stick their heads above the parapet to defend her. Britain's fledgling intelligence service, MO5 (soon to change its name to MI5) also helped dig her grave with, as we will see, the dodgiest of dossiers.

But in the story of Mata Hari, there was one thing that needed no sexing-up - Mata herself. Sex was the driving force of her life. In the little Dutch town where she grew up, her shopkeeper father lavished extremes of affection on his "little princess". It made her vain, self-centred and spoilt, and with an insatiable longing for male attention. At school, the 16-year-old bedded the headmaster. Was he the seducer or her? No one knows, but this was 1893 and it was the girl who was sent home in shame. The restless teenager now set about finding a man to take her away from the stuffiness of Dutch society.

When, through a Lonely Hearts ad, she met Captain Rudof MacLeod, a hard-living, hard-drinking officer home on leave from Holland's vicious colonial wars in the East Indies, she didn't care that he was 22 years older than her. He was handsome, with a splendid moustache. She was tall (5ft 10in) and elegant, with flirty dark eyes and a dark olive complexion. The attraction was immediate, sexual and very strong. She told him she longed to do "crazy things" and they were engaged within six days. They married three months later, she in a bright yellow gown rather than the traditional white.

There were problems almost straight away. She couldn't keep her eyes off the other officers and, as she was the first to admit, did not have it within her to be "a good housewife". "I was not content at home," she later confessed. "I wanted to live like a colourful butterfly in the sun." He was jealous, though saw no reason why he should forego the womanising, drinking and coarseness of his bachelor days. He was constantly in debt; she was extravagant, always spending. As for his syphilis, caught overseas, he neglected to tell her. The omens were not good.Nonetheless, she bore him two children, and they returned as a family to his new posting in the colonies.

Mata Hari's Daughter
In the exotic surroundings of Indonesia, their marital problems multiplied. She did not fit the mould of the officer's wife, not least because her dark skin made the snobbier women suggest she had native blood in her. To the men, however, that look was seductive, and she made the most of it. "Her languid, graceful style of moving, her dark eyes and luxurious hair, telegraphed her sexuality to any male in her presence," writes Shipman. "She drew every man's lustful admiration and every woman's envy. She was seen as morally dangerous, selfish and frivolous." The marriage deteriorated into sharp quarrels, too much drinking, rows about money and accusations of infidelity. But what destroyed the union was tragedy. Their son, Norman, was struck by serious illness and died at the age of two. His sister, one-year-old Nonnie, nearly died, too, but pulled through. The boy's death shattered both parents. Who was to blame? A local nanny was said to have poisoned the children because of some grievance, real or imagined, against MacLeod, though no case was ever brought. Nor was the death ever reported in the colonial press. For some reason, it seemed to have been hushed up. Shipman's hypothesis is that the children were being treated for congenital syphilis, caught from their father, and the garrison doctor accidentally overdosed them with mercury. Whatever the real cause of the boy's death, the couple blamed each other.

The relationship sank into hatred. His wife was "scum of the lowest kind" MacLeod told his family back in Holland, "a woman without heart, who cares nothing for anything". On that he was wrong - she cared for officers. He caught her with a second lieutenant. She flaunted herself in a low-cut dress at a ball. She was punishing him by stoking up his jealousy. He punished her in return with a cat-o'-nine-tails. She wrote to her father: "I cannot live with a man who is so despicable. I eat and live apart and I prefer to die before he touches me again. My children caught a disease from him." MacLeod left the army and the family returned to Holland. There they separated. But MacLeod had one more weapon to use against her. He put an advertisement in the local papers warning shops not to give her credit because he had resigned all responsibility for her. It left her penniless. She had to earn money - and there was only one way she knew how. Sexual favours were her only useful assets, but she did not see Holland as the best place to exploit them. In 1903, with little money and no contacts, she took herself off to Paris.
There, she would recreate herself as a model, an actress, perhaps, or a chic cosmopolitan in that chicest of cities. But, as Shipman tells us, "the only dependable source of income available to her was pleasing men for money." But then a circus gave her a job, and the owner advised her where her talents lay - dancing. And dance she did. From the depths of her experiences in the East Indies she invented what she called "sacred dances".
They were exotic and seemed to have some mysterious eastern mythology about them but, most of all, they involved her ending up all but naked. It was a brilliant move. Dancers at the Moulin Rouge were flashing their knickers and breasts but Zelle's great departure was to push the bounds of discretion even further and wrap sex up with religion and art. She began by performing in private homes, but soon the stories of her "artistry" and, above all, her nudity were passing round the salons of Parisian high society. She wore a beaded metallic bra, which never came off - she was self-conscious about her tiny breasts - but the veils covering the rest of her floated free as she danced in "slow, undulating, tigerlike movements". The critics enthused, "feline, trembling in a thousand rhythms, exotic yet deeply austere, slender and supple like a sacred serpent". She added spice to the performance with lies. First there was her name - Mata Hari, meaning "sunrise" or, more literally, "the eye of the day", in the language of the Dutch East Indies. Then there were the stories to the press, that she was the daughter of an Indian temple dancer who had died giving birth to her, that she grew up in a jungle in Java.
Her life became an unending performance, both on stage and off. Her success seemed unstoppable and the money came rolling in. But she still managed to spend more than she earned as she travelled Europe, picking up lovers, dropping some, keeping others. "Tonight I dine with Count A and tomorrow with Duke B. If I don't have to dance, I make a trip with Marquis C. I avoid serious liaisons. I satisfy all my caprices," she said. All too soon she was suffering from over-exposure in another sense. By 1908 anyone who was anyone in Europe had seen her dance at least once, while the lesser theatres were overrun with imitators doing Oriental dances. The dance work was now more irregular and increasingly she would have to rely on her men friends for her livelihood. One, a stockbroker, provided her with a chateau in the Loire and another house on the Seine - until he went bankrupt. Still she refused to cut her prodigious spending or alter her outrageous lifestyle. When she was frantic for money, some said, she would ply her trade at Paris's maisons de rendez-vous, one step up from ordinary brothels. Her financial problems seemed eased when in May 1914 she signed a contract to dance for six months at the Metropol in Berlin, starting in September. But the political situation overtook her. When war broke out in August that year, though Holland was neutral, she was stuck in a now belligerent and increasingly jingoistic German capital with no money and no job. Her fur coats and money had been seized. She charmed a Dutch businessman to pay her train fare to Amsterdam. Back in Holland, she took up again with a former lover. Aristocratic and wealthy, he was just her type. There she was visited by Karl Kroemer, the German consul, who told her he was recruiting spies. He gave her 20,000 francs and a code name, H21. She took his money but she didn't take him seriously. She told herself the cash was compensation for the furs taken from her in Berlin and threw away the invisible ink he gave her. "As she never had the slightest intention of spying for Germany, she felt no guilt or obligation to do anything for the money she had accepted. She had always taken money from men because she needed it and they had it; she always felt she deserved it," says Shipman. Others, ominously, would not agree.
