Mata Hari

From Margaretha Zelle to Mata Hari

She was born in the Netherlands in 1876. As Tara Finn writes on the blog of the British Foreign Office historians, when she was 13 her father’s business failed, and less than two years later her mother died. At 18 she married Captain Rudolph MacLeod of the Dutch Army; the marriage ended in 1902, and she moved to Paris and became an “exotic oriental dancer”.¹

The press presented her as Dutch, Indonesian, Indian or Japanese and credited her with many languages. Finn attributes this to the exotic persona she created for herself.¹

War and a double game

The outbreak of war found her in Berlin; the Germans froze her bank account, and she returned to Holland with a compatriot’s help. In December 1915 British police detained and questioned her on her way back to France.¹

Captain Georges Ladoux of French intelligence asked her to spy for France; she demanded a million francs. Her clumsy approach to the German attaché, Major Arnold Kalle, put him on his guard, and a coded message she sent was intercepted by the French.¹

On another journey the British detained her for several days, mistaking her for the German spy Clara Benedix. Despite signs of tampering with her passport, they concluded that she was an ineffective amateur rather than a master criminal; Ladoux denied that she worked for France, and she was sent back to Spain.¹

Trial and execution

The French arrested her in February 1917 and put her on trial in July. The prosecution alleged that she had betrayed information about British tanks before the Battle of the Somme. She was executed in October 1917; the French did not inform the British, who learned of the execution from the press.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to Encyclopaedia Britannica she died on 15 October 1917 at Vincennes.³

The UK National Archives holds her MI5 files, including file KV 2/2 covering 1917–1924, with press cuttings from 1918–1952.⁴

Fact and legend

Lieutenant Colonel Olivier Lahaie, writing in the ‘Revue historique des armées’, the journal of the French defence historical service, summarised her court-martial file and the post-war accounts of German intelligence officers in order to separate the later myth from the facts. His conclusion: she was an ineffective spy driven by greed, but clearly in the service of German military intelligence.²

The British services, Finn writes, ultimately dismissed her as a threat; suspicion was raised mainly by her conflicting explanations of why she was travelling. The exotic image from which the legend grew was created by the press and by herself.^1,2