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Mata Hari
Exotic Performer and Notorious Spy Mata Hari (1876-1917)
She said that her name was Mata Hari (Child of the Dawn) and that she had been born in an Indian temple and taught the sacred ancient dances.
All of Paris celebrated her beauty, exotic dancing, and mysterious background. But she had made it all up. In fact, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in northern Holland.
When she was 19, Margaretha answered a classified ad from a colonial officer looking for a wife, and shortly afterwards married Captain Rudolf MacLeod. The couple moved to MacLeod's post in Indonesia, but MacLeod was by turns neglectful and abusive, and Margaretha spent a lot of time in the officer's club learning native dances.
After their son was poisoned in retaliation for MacLeod's rape of a servant's daughter, the couple and their daughter returned to Holland. Margaretha and MacLeod divorced, and she took off for Paris. After failing to succeed as an artist's model, Margaretha found the first of her many lover-patrons, the Baron de Marguérie. Together they created the persona of Mata Hari, drawing on Margaretha's experience in the Orient, and the Baron introduced her to the Parisian salon set as a true exotic.
Through clever merchandising and raw sex appeal, Mata Hari became a European sensation, attracting thousands to her strip shows (she is in fact credited with inventing the striptease as we know it today). But then came World War I. Mata Hari had several German and French officers as lovers, giving her intimate access to the men who orchestrated the war. The Germans were the first to recruit her as a spy, and later the French, who knew nothing about the German arrangement, approached her as well, effectively turning her into a double agent. Mata Hari's double-dealing caught up with her in February 1917 when the French intercepted a series of telegrams referring to German agent H21.
At her trial, Mata Hari admitted that she took money from the Germans, but said that the Germans owed her for possessions she lost when she left Berlin after the war started. The telegrams, she said, were a deliberate German frame in retaliation for her failure to spy. Nevertheless, Mata Hari was convicted and executed by firing squad for treason. She contended until the day of her death that she was always loyal to France. Was Mata Hari an infamously manipulative double agent or merely a desperate woman trying to survive who became the victim of her dangerous games and a scapegoat for the enormous losses suffered by the French? That is her great mystery.
I am a woman who enjoys herself very much; sometimes I lose, sometimes I win.
— Mata Hari
Suggested Reading:
Mata Hari : The True Story
by Russell Warren Howe