BETRAYAL IS ONLY A KISS AWAY - MATA HARI - A legendary beautiful seductress spy
BETRAYAL IS ONLY A
KISS AWAY – MATA HARI - A legendary
beautiful seductress spy
Margaretha Geertruida
"Margreet" MacLeod (née Zelle; 7 August 1876,
Leeuwarden – 15 October 1917, Vincennes), better known by the stage
name Mata Hari, was a Dutch Exotic Dancer and Courtesan who was convicted of being a
spy and executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for
Germany during World War-I.
Prior to World War I, she was generally viewed as an artist and a free-spirited bohemian, but as war approached, she began to be seen by some as a wanton and promiscuous woman, and perhaps a dangerous seductress.
"The Spy" - novel based on Mata Hari's life by the
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho will be released on Nov. 22, 2016.
Mata Hari is the focus
of the New York Times bestselling historical fiction author Michelle Moran's
new book, Mata Hari's Last Dance. The book released on July 19th, 2016.
One of the most effective ways to compile information about an enemy (or potential enemy) is by infiltrating the enemy’s ranks. This is the job of a spy. Spies can bring back all sorts of information concerning the size and strength of an enemy army. They can also find dissidents within the enemy’s forces and influence them to defect. In times of crisis, spies can also be used to steal technology and to sabotage the enemy in various ways. For centuries women have served their allegiances with as much efficacy as their male counterparts in espionage.
Mata Hari ‘drew every man’s lustful admiration
and every woman’s envy. A Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan, and accused spy who
was executed by firing squad in France for espionage for Germany during World
War I. Her popular acts toured other European cities, where she became the
courtesan of powerful men in government and the military. Her relationships and
liaisons with powerful men frequently took her across international borders.
When World War I broke out, the French suspected her of spying for the Germans,
even though she was also likely doing so for the French. In January 1917, the
German military attaché in Madrid transmitted radio messages to Berlin
describing the helpful activities of a German spy, code-named H-21. French
intelligence agents intercepted the messages and, from the information they
contained, identified H-21 as Mata Hari. Unusually, the messages were in a code
that German intelligence knew had already been broken by the French, leaving
some historians to suspect that the messages were contrived. She was
subsequently tried for espionage and found guilty. She was executed by Firing
Squad on the 15th of September, 1917 at the age of 41.
Promiscuous, flirtatious, and openly flaunting
her body, Mata Hari captivated her audiences and was an overnight success from
the debut of her act at the Musee Guimet on 13 March 1905. She became the long-time mistress of the
millionaire Lyon industrialist Emilee Etienne Guimet, who had founded the
Musée. She posed as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth, pretending to
have been immersed in the art of sacred Indian dance since childhood. She was
photographed numerous times during this period, nude or nearly so. The most
celebrated segment of her act was her progressive shedding of clothing until
she wore just a jeweled bra and some ornaments upon her arms and head. She was
seldom seen without a bra as she was self-conscious about being small-breasted.
Museum
Statue of Mata Hari in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands
The Fries
Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, contains a "Mata Hari
Room". Included in the exhibit are two of her personal scrapbooks and an
oriental rug embroidered with the footsteps of her fan dance. Located
in Mata Hari's native town, the museum is well known for research into the life
and career of Leeuwarden's world-famous citizen.
Mata Hari -
Double Agent -
Mata
Hari was a professional dancer and mistress who accepted an assignment to spy
for France in 1916. Hired by army captain Georges Ladoux, agreeing to pass military information gleaned from
her conquests to the French government. Not long after, however, Mata Hari was
accused of being a German spy. She was executed by firing squad on October 15,
1917, after French authorities learned of her alleged double agency.
Brief Biography -
Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in
Leeuwarden, Netherlands, on August 7, 1876, to father Adam Zelle, a hat
merchant who went bankrupt due to bad investments, and mother Antje Zelle, who
fell ill and died when Mata Hari was 15 years old. Following her mother's
death, Mata Hari and her three brothers were split up and sent to live with
various relatives.
At an early age, Mata Hari decided that sexuality
was her ticket in life. In the mid-1890s, she boldly answered a newspaper ad
seeking a bride for Rudolf MacLeod, a bald, mustachioed military captain based
in the Dutch East Indies. She sent a striking photo of herself, raven-haired
and olive-skinned, to entice him. Despite a 21-year age difference, they wed on
July 11, 1895, when Mata Hari was just shy of 19. During their rocky, nine-year
marriage—marred by MacLeod's heavy drinking and frequent rages over the
attention his wife garnered from other officers—Mata Hari gave birth to two
children, a daughter and a son. The couple’s son died in 1899 after a household
worker in the Indies poisoned him for reasons that remain a mystery till date.
By the early 1900s, Mata Hari's marriage had
deteriorated. Her husband fled with their daughter, and Mata Hari moved to
Paris. There, she became the mistress of a French diplomat who helped her hatch
the idea of supporting herself as a dancer.
In 1903, Zelle moved to Paris where she performed as a circus horse rider using the name Lady MacLeod, much to the disapproval of the Dutch MacLeods. Struggling to earn a living, she also posed as an artist's model.
All things "Oriental" were the fad in the Paris of 1905. The time seemed ripe for Mata Hari's exotic looks and the "temple dance" she created by drawing on cultural and religious symbolism and that she had picked up in the Indies with characteristic confidence, she seized the moment. She billed herself as a Hindu artist, draped in veils—which she artfully dropped from her body. In one memorable garden performance, Mata Hari appeared nearly naked on a white horse. Although she daringly bared her buttocks—then considered the most titillating part of the anatomy—she was modest about her breasts, generally keeping them covered with brassiere-styled beads. Completing her dramatic transformation from military wife to siren of the East, she coined her stage name, "Mata Hari," which means "eye of the day" in Indonesian dialect.
Mata Hari took the Paris saloons by storm and
then moved on to the bright lights of other cities. Along the way, she helped
turn the striptease into an art form and captivated critics. A reporter in
Vienna described Mata Hari as "slender and tall with the flexible grace of
a wild animal, and with blue-black hair." Her face, he wrote, "makes
a strange foreign impression." Another enthralled newspaper writer called
her "so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand
curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms."
Within a few years, however, Mata Hari's cachet
had faded. As younger dancers took the stage, her bookings became sporadic. She
supplemented her income by seducing government and military men; sex became
strictly a financial practicality for her. Despite the growing tension in
Europe in the years leading up to World War I, Mata Hari foolishly knew no
borders with her lovers, who included German officers. As war swept the
continent, she had some freedom of movement as a citizen of neutral Holland and
took full advantage of it, country-hopping with trunks of clothing in tow.
Before long, however, Mata Hari's cavalier travels and liaisons attracted attention
from British and French intelligence both of whom put her under surveillance.
Now nearing 40, plumpish and with her dancing
days clearly behind her, Mata Hari fell in love with a 21-year-old Russian
captain, Vladimir de Masloff, in 1916. During their courtship, Masloff was sent
to the Front, where an injury left him blind in one eye. Determined to earn
money to support him, Mata Hari accepted a lucrative assignment to spy for
France from Georges Ladoux, an army captain who assumed her courtesan contacts
would be of use to French intelligence.
Mata Hari later insisted that she planned to use
her connections to seduce her way into the German high command, get secrets and
hand them over to the French—but she never got that far. She met a German attaché
and began tossing him bits of gossip, hoping to get some valuable information
in return. Instead, she got named as a German spy in communiqués he sent to
Berlin—which were promptly intercepted by the French. Some historians believe
that the Germans suspected Mata Hari was a French spy and subsequently set her
up, deliberately sending a message falsely labeling her as a German spy—which
they knew would be easily decoded by the French. Others, of course, believe
that she was in fact a German double agent. In any case, the French authorities
arrested Mata Hari for espionage in Paris on February 13, 1917. They threw her
in a rat-infested cell at the Prison Saint-Lazare, where she was allowed to see
only her elderly lawyer—who happened to be a former lover.
During lengthy interrogations by Captain Pierre
Bouchardon, a military prosecutor, Mata Hari—who had long lived a fabricated
life, embellishing both rearing and resume—bungled and facts about her
whereabouts and activities. Eventually, she dropped a bombshell confession: A
German diplomat had once paid her 20,000 francs to gather intelligence on her
frequent trips to Paris. But she swore to investigators that she never actually
fulfilled the bargain and always remained faithful to France. She told them she
simply viewed the money as compensation for furs and luggage that had once
disappeared on a departing train while German border guards hassled her.
"A courtesan, I admit it. A spy, never!" she defiantly told her
interrogators. "I have always lived for love and pleasure."
Mata Hari's trial came at a time when the Allies
were failing to beat back German advances. Real or imagined spies were
convenient scapegoats for explaining military losses, and Mata Hari's arrest
was one of many. Her chief foil, Captain Georges Ladoux, made sure the evidence
against her was constructed in the most damning way—by some accounts even
tampering with it to implicate her more deeply.
So when Mata Hari admitted that a German officer
paid her for sexual favors, prosecutors depicted it as espionage money.
Additionally, currency she claimed was a regular stipend from a Dutch baron was
portrayed in court as coming from German spymasters. That amorous Dutch baron,
who could have shed light on the truth, was never called to testify. Nor was
Mata Hari's maid, who acted as an intermediary for the baron's payments. Mata
Hari's morals conspired against her, as well. "Without scruples,
accustomed to make use of men, she is the type of woman who is born to be a
spy," concluded Bouchardon, whose relentless interviews were the blueprint
for the prosecution.
The military tribunal deliberated for less than
45 minutes before returning a guilty verdict. "It's impossible, it's
impossible," Mata Hari exclaimed, upon hearing the decision.
Mata Hari was executed by firing squad on October 15, 1917. Dressed in a blue coat accented by a tri-corner hat, she had arrived at the Paris execution site with a minister and two nuns and, after bidding them farewell, walked briskly to the designated spot. She then turned to face the firing squad, waved away her blindfold and blew the soldiers a kiss. She was killed in an instant when their multiple gunshots exploded as one.
It was an improbable end for the exotic dancer
and courtesan, whose name became a metaphor for the siren spy who coaxes
secrets from her paramours. Her execution merited a scant four paragraphs
inside The New York Times, which called her "a woman of great
attractiveness and with a romantic history."
A news paper tit-bit about Mata Hari’s conviction
-
Mystery continues to surround Mata Hari's life
and alleged double agency, and her story has become a legend that still piques
curiosity. Her life has spawned numerous biographies and cinematic portrayals,
including, most famously, the 1931 film Mata Hari, starring Greta
Garbo as the courtesan-dancer and Ramon Novarro as Lieutenant Alexis Rosanoff.
Marguerite Zelle or Mata Hari who flaunted her
bodily charms to conquer the life’s adversities remains a legendary figure in
the history of mankind. The danseuse
tantalized her way into the military ranks and was caught accepting money to
part intelligence information and was alleged to be a double agent while trying
to save her romantic hero, a Russian military captain, who was partially blinded
while honoring his duties at the war front.
Mata Hari was allegedly a woman tiptoed into
higher military ranks to seduce men of power to dance to her tune to part with
invaluable secret which was shared to vested interests for monetary
considerations. Mata Hari carelessly crossed European boundaries using her
influence and was gunned down by the law enforcing French firing squad on the
charges of being a German spy.
LET US LEARN ABOUT SOME SIMILAR BEAUTIFUL LADY SPIES IN THE WORLD HISTORY. THE SPIES LISTED HERE ARE THE TOP 10 BEAUTIFUL LADY SPIES FROM THE HISTORY –
Mata Hari
2. Charlotte de Sauve
(c. 1551 – 30 September 1617)
A French noblewoman and a mistress of King Henry
of Navarre, who later ruled as King Henry IV of France. She was a member of
Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici’s notorious Flying Squadron (Escadron
Volant in French), a group of beautiful female spies and informants
recruited to seduce important men at Court, and thereby extract information to
pass on to the Queen Mother. Charlotte de Sauve has been credited as a source
of the information that led to the execution of Marguerite de Valois’s lover
Joseph Boniface de La Môle and Annibal de Coconnas for conspiracy in 1574. In
1575, Catherine de’ Medici, abetted by her son Henry III, instructed Charlotte
to seduce the king’s brother, her youngest son, François, Duke of Alençon, with
the aim of provoking hostility between the two young men, so that they would
not conspire together in the future. Charlotte subsequently became the duke’s
mistress, creating a rift between the former close friends, as Navarre and
Alençon became rivals over Charlotte. According to Marguerite’s memoirs:
“Charlotte de Sauve treated both of them [Navarre and Alençon] in such a way
that they became extremely jealous of each other, to such a point that they
forgot their ambitions, their duties and their plans and thought of nothing but
chasing after this woman”.
3. Liu Hulan
(1932–1947)
She was a young, beautiful female spy during the
Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. She was born
in Yunzhouxi village, in the Wenshui County of the Shanxi province. She joined
the Communist Party in 1946 and soon after joined an association of women
working in support of the Liberation Army. She was actively involved in
organizing the villagers of Yunzhouxi in support of the Communist Party of
China. Her contributions involved a wide range of activities, such as supplying
food to the Eighth Liberation Army, relaying secret messages, and mending boots
and uniforms. The life and death of Liu Hulan has become a symbol of the
courage of the Chinese people, and is often cited as a homily of their loyalty
to Communism. Her story is often told as homage to the struggles endured, and
the sacrifices made, for the cause of liberating China from centuries of rule
by foreign powers.
4. Violette Szabo
(26 June 1921 – c. 5 February 1945)
She was a Second World War British secret agent.
She was born Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell in Paris, France on 26 June 1921,
the second child of a French mother and an English taxi-driver father, who had
met during World War I. The family moved to London and she attended school in
Brixton until the age of 14. At the start of the Second World War, she was working
in the Bon Marché department store in Brixton on the perfume counter. Violette
met Etienne Szabo, a French officer of Hungarian descent, at the Bastille Day
parade in London in 1940. They married on 21 August 1940 after a whirlwind
42-day romance. Violette was 19, Etienne was 31. Shortly after the birth of
their only child, Tania, Etienne died from chest wounds at the Battle of El
Alamein in October 1942. He had never seen his daughter. It was Etienne’s death
that made Violette, having already joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in
1941, decide to offer her services to the British Special Operations Executive
(SOE).
5. Anna Chapman
(Born 23 February 1982)
Anna Chapman, a beautiful 28-year-old Russian
with an IQ of 162, having a diplomat father and a taste for the high life, is a
Russian national, who while living in New York, United States was arrested
along with nine others on 27 June 2010, on suspicion of working for the
Illegals Program spy ring under the Russian Federation’s external intelligence
agency, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki).Chapman pleaded guilty to a charge
of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the
U.S. Attorney General, and was deported back to Russia on 8 July 2010, as part
of a prisoner swap.
6. Noor Inayat Khan
(1 January 1914, Moscow – 13 September 1944, Dachau concentration camp)
On September 13, 1944, a beautiful Indian
princess lay dead on the floor at Dachau concentration camp. She had been
brutally tortured by the Nazis then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat
Khan. The Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy. The first female
radio operator to infiltrate occupied Paris, she was posthumously awarded the
Croix de Guerre and the George Cross – one of only three women from the Special
Operations Executive to receive the latter medal. But while Odette Hallowes and
Violette Szabo have had Hollywood films made of their lives and blue plaques
put up in their honor, Noor has been largely overlooked. The gentle Indian
woman who sacrificed her life for Britain, has become a footnote in history. A
memorial to her has long been overdue. And when a bust of Noor goes up in
London’s Gordon Square in 2012, it will be the first statue to an Indian woman
in Britain – and the first to any Muslim. Given the contribution of Asian women
in this country to arts, music, literature, law, human rights and education, it
is a gap that is crying out to be filled. Noor’s journey from her birthplace in
Moscow to London was in many ways part of her exotic upbringing. A descendant
of Tipu Sultan – the famous 18th century ruler of South India, known as the
Tiger of Mysore – she was brought up a fierce nationalist by her father, Hazrat
Inayat Khan, a Sufi preacher and musician. Noor was trained as a secret agent,
given arms training, taught to shoot and kill, and finally flown to Paris under
the code name of Madeleine, carrying only a false passport, a clutch of French
francs and a pistol. Despite her spy network collapsing around her, Noor stayed
in France for three months, until she was betrayed. What followed in October
1943 was arrest, imprisonment in chains, torture and interrogation. Noor bore
it all. She revealed nothing to her captors, not even her real name. When the
end came on September 13, 1944, it was not swift or painless. Defiant till the
last, she shouted “Liberte” as she went down to a bullet fired at the back of
her head.
7. Josephine Baker
(June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975)
She was an American-born French dancer, singer,
and actress. Nicknamed the “Bronze Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, and even the
“Créole Goddess” in anglophone nations. Baker was the first African American
female to star in a major motion picture and to integrate an American concert
hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her
contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was
offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968
following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, but turned it down), for
assisting the French Resistance during World War II and for being the first
American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre.
8. Margaret Kemble Gage
(1734-1824)
She was the wife of General Thomas Gage, who led
the British Army during the American Revolutionary War, and is said to have
spied against him out of sympathy for the Revolution. She was born in New
Brunswick, New Jersey and resided in East Brunswick Township. Historical texts,
most notably Paul Revere’s Ride suggest that Mrs. Gage provided Joseph
Warren with information regarding General Gage’s raid at Lexington and Concord.
All of the circumstantial evidence shows that Dr. Warren’s informer was indeed
Margaret Kemble Gage – a lady of divided loyalties to both her husband and her
native land. As a result, Gage was sent to England aboard the Charming
Nancy on her husband’s orders in the summer of 1775.
9. Nancy Wake
(born 30 August 1912)
She served as a British agent during the later
part of World War II. She became a leading figure in the maquis groups of the
French Resistance and became one of the Allies’ most decorated servicewomen of
the war. Born in Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand, Wake’s family moved to
Sydney, Australia in 1914. She was two years old at the time, and the youngest
and most independent of six children. Later, her father left the family to return
to New Zealand, leaving her mother to raise the children. Later, in 1939 she
met wealthy French industrialist Henri Edmond Fiocca, whom she married on 30
November. She was living in Marseille, France when Germany invaded. After the
fall of France, she became a courier for the French Resistance and later joined
the escape network of Captain Ian Garrow. The Gestapo called her the “White
Mouse”. By 1943, she was the Gestapo’s most-wanted person, with a 5
million-franc price on her head. From April 1944 to the complete liberation of
France, her 7,000 maquisards fought 22,000 SS soldiers, causing 1,400
casualties, while taking only 100 themselves. Her French companions, especially
Henri Tardivat, praised her fighting spirit; amply demonstrated when she killed
an SS sentry with her bare hands to prevent him raising the alarm during a
raid. After the war, she received the George Medal, the United States
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Médaille de la Résistance and thrice the
Croix de Guerre. She was not awarded any Australian decorations. She also
learned that the Gestapo had tortured her husband to death in 1943 for refusing
to disclose her whereabouts. After the war she worked for the Intelligence
Department at the British Air Ministry attached to embassies of Paris and
Prague. After marrying John Forward in 1957 she returned to Australia.
10. Isabella Marie Boyd
(May 9, 1844 – June 11, 1900)
Best known as Belle Boyd or Cleopatra of the
Secession, was a Confederate spy in the American Civil War. She operated
from her father’s hotel in Front Royal, Virginia and provided valuable
information to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson in 1862. Belle Boyd’s
espionage career began by chance. According to her 1866 account, on July 4,
1861, a band of Union army soldiers saw the Confederate flag hung outside her
home. They tore it down and hung a Union flag in its place. This made her angry
enough, but when one of them cursed at her mother, she was enraged. Belle
pulled out a pistol and shot the man down.
She was fuming. A board of inquiry exonerated her, but sentries were
posted around the house and officers kept close track of her activities. She
profited from this enforced familiarity, charming at least one of the officers,
Captain Daniel Keily, into revealing military secrets. “To him,” she wrote
later, “I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered
flowers, and a great deal of important information.” Belle conveyed those
secrets to Confederate officers via her slave, Eliza Hopewell, who carried the
messages in a hollowed-out watch case.
The End.
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