Double agent Mata Hari may have gone to her death an innocent woman
A century ago exotic dancer and double agent Mata Hari was executed for espionage but she may have been innocent.
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ON a cold autumn morning in France in 1917, a tall, well-dressed woman was taken from her St Lazaire prison cell and driven through the streets of Paris to an army barracks at Vincennes on the outskirts of the city.
Impeccably dressed in a long fur-trimmed velvet cloak and a stylish wide-brimmed hat, she stepped with dignity from the car and was led to a muddy parade ground before a hill where a firing squad waited.
Offered a blindfold she said: “Must I wear that.” To which the commanding officer replied: “If madam prefers not, it makes no difference.”
A nun and a lawyer accompanying the woman stepped away then the officer raised his sword and gave the order to fire. The shots rang out and within seconds Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, was dead.
The execution happened a century ago tomorrow and over the decades since the name Mata Hari has become synonymous with espionage and femme fatales.
Her death in a French field was far from her origins in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands.
Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born on August 7, 1876, the daughter of a well-to-do milliner. She wanted for nothing. But in 1889, after her father went bankrupt, her parents divorced and her life was thrown into turmoil. She was sent off to train as a teacher, but fled after a headmaster tried to seduce her.
Living with an uncle in The Hague, she saw an advertisement for a wife, placed by Rudolf MacLeod, a Dutch army officer with Scottish heritage. MacLeod was 21 years her senior and heading for a posting in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). But for Margaretha it represented an escape from her old life.
They soon had two children, but her husband was a womanising, gambling alcoholic who infected Margaretha with syphilis. Her son was born with syphilis and died while being treated. They returned to the Netherlands in 1902, but the marriage ended. Rudolf kept custody of their daughter and Margaretha looked for a new life, eventually settling in Paris.
She found whatever work she could, including prostitution, working in a circus, modelling and finally, in 1905, as a dancer under the name of Lady MacLeod. In 1906 she began using the stage name of Mata Hari, meaning the Sun (literally “eye of the day”) in Indonesian, and styled herself as an Indonesian princess.
Taking what she had learnt of Far East culture, she created exotic dance moves she claimed were sacred temple dances, performing them wearing quasi-Indonesian costumes, which she would remove.
Within a few years she was famous throughout Europe, with a string of lovers who were mostly military men, but also included influential businessmen. But her popularity had begun to wane and she was forced back to prostitution before World War I broke out in 1914.
As a citizen of neutral Netherlands she was still able to move freely from country to country despite the war. In 1916 she had furs confiscated at a German border and was thereafter offered money to spy on the French. She took the money, but later said she never actually did any spying, only passing on old information, and took the money as payment for her confiscated goods.
However, when she was offered money by the French to spy on the Germans, she neglected to mention her “arrangement” with the Germans. In November 1916 she was detained in London on a return trip from Spain and interrogated by a British counterespionage officer Sir Basil Thomson, but later released. In January 1917 the French intercepted a message for agent H21 (sent in a code that the Germans knew had been broken) and suspected the agent was Mata Hari.
She was arrested and relentlessly interrogated. Her Indonesian princess persona and promiscuity were seen as signs that she was untrustworthy.
At her trial in July 1917 it was claimed that she was not allowed to call two witnesses who could have attested to her innocence.
Sentenced to death, she languished in prison for months, writing letters protesting her innocence. When she was finally taken to Vincennes on October 15, 1917, she continued to refuse to confess. She is said to have blown a kiss to her executioners and after being shot slumped to her knees still looking them in the eye. She was 41.
A dossier of documents in French archives, relating to the case, is scheduled for release on the centenary of her death.
Originally published as Double agent Mata Hari may have gone to her death an innocent woman
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