Was Mata Hari Actually a Spy, or France's Perfect Scapegoat?

Yes and no. Mata Hari did agree to spy, first for French military intelligence and then, apparently, for Germany, which gave her the code name H-21. But many historians now argue that she was never an important spy, that she passed on little more than gossip, and that France convicted and executed her in 1917 because it badly needed a scapegoat. The "master spy whose secrets killed 50,000 soldiers" was largely a creation of her prosecutors. The real woman, born Margaretha Zelle in a small Dutch city, is a stranger and sadder story.

A hat-maker's daughter from Leeuwarden

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born on 7 August 1876 in Leeuwarden, in the north of the Netherlands. Her father owned a hat shop and invested in oil, and for a while the family was rich enough to send her to exclusive schools. Later legends claimed she was partly Javanese or Malay, but scholars conclude that both her parents were Dutch.

The comfortable childhood ended suddenly. Her father went bankrupt in 1889, her parents divorced, and her mother died in 1891. The family broke apart, and the teenage Margaretha was passed between relatives.

A marriage by newspaper advertisement

At eighteen she answered a newspaper advertisement placed by Rudolf MacLeod, a Dutch colonial army captain looking for a wife. They married in 1895 and moved to Java in the Dutch East Indies. The marriage was miserable: MacLeod drank, abused her and openly kept a concubine. In 1899 their two children fell violently ill and their son died.

It was in Java that she first used the name Mata Hari, the local word for "sun", literally "eye of the day". The couple separated in 1902 after returning to Europe, and the divorce was finalised in 1906.

The invented princess of Paris

In 1903 she went to Paris, worked as a circus rider and an artist's model, and by 1904 was rising as an exotic dancer. Her debut at the Musée Guimet on 13 March 1905 made her an overnight success.

Like many entertainers of the time, she invented a colourful origin story. She presented herself as a Javanese princess raised in sacred Indian dance. Few Europeans knew anything about the Dutch East Indies, so audiences believed her. Her act, in which she gradually removed veils until she wore only a jewelled breastplate and ornaments, made erotic dance seem almost respectable.

By around 1910 imitators were everywhere, and critics began to dismiss her as a dancer who could not really dance. She gave her last performance on 13 March 1915. By then she was earning her living mainly as a courtesan, with lovers among senior officers and politicians in several countries.

Why a dancer could cross wartime borders

When the First World War began, the Netherlands stayed neutral. As a Dutch citizen, Zelle could travel between countries, moving between France and the Netherlands via Spain and Britain. Her movements and her powerful lovers inevitably attracted attention from intelligence services.

The turning point was love. During the war she fell for Vadim Maslov, a 23-year-old Russian captain fighting for France, whom she called the love of her life. When he was wounded and lost the sight of one eye, she asked permission to visit him near the front.

Recruited by France

That request brought her to the Deuxième Bureau, French military intelligence. Its officer Georges Ladoux met her in Vittel in September 1916 while she was visiting Maslov, and offered her work as a French spy. The plan was for her to seduce the German Crown Prince Wilhelm, before whom she had once danced, and in return she would receive one million francs, money she never received.

The plan rested on a misunderstanding. The Crown Prince was a general mainly on paper and had little to do with running his armies, so he was hardly a source of real secrets.

Agent H-21

In November 1916 the British arrested her at Falmouth and questioned her in London; according to the counter-espionage chief Basil Thomson, she eventually said she was working for French intelligence. Late that year, in Madrid, she met the German military attaché Arnold Kalle and apparently offered to share French information for money.

In January 1917 Kalle sent radio messages to Berlin about a German agent code-named H-21 whose biography obviously matched hers. The French intercepted them. But the messages used a code the Germans knew the French had already broken, which suggests they were meant to be read, and to get her arrested. The German intelligence chief Walter Nicolai was reportedly annoyed that she had supplied only Paris gossip about the private lives of politicians and generals.

The trial

She was arrested in her Paris hotel on 13 February 1917 and tried on 24 July, accused of spying for Germany and causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. Yet neither French nor British intelligence could produce definite evidence against her.

The prosecution leaned on her character rather than proof. Her interrogator Pierre Bouchardon showed that the Javanese princess was invented and used this as evidence of dishonesty. She admitted receiving 20,000 francs from a German diplomat and former lover, which she called compensation for seized belongings and he called spy pay. Meanwhile Ladoux, her former handler, built the case against her and went as far as tampering with evidence. Her lawyer was not even allowed to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses.

The cruellest moment came when Maslov refused to testify for her and said he did not care whether she was convicted. On hearing this, she fainted.

The perfect scapegoat

Timing explains much of the verdict. In spring 1917 the French army was shaken by failed offensives and mass mutinies, and the country was close to exhaustion. A German spy to blame was politically convenient. The historian Wesley Wark has said she was never an important spy, and Julie Wheelwright noted that she passed on nothing you could not find in local Spanish newspapers. As a divorced, independent foreign courtesan, Wheelwright argued, she was a perfect example of what loose morals supposedly led to.

She never confessed. Reports after her death claimed she had, but she insisted to the end that she had never spied for Germany and that she loved France.

Dawn at Vincennes

Mata Hari was shot by a firing squad of twelve soldiers in the moat of the Château de Vincennes just before dawn on 15 October 1917. She was 41. A British reporter wrote that she refused a blindfold and was not tied. By the same account, she defiantly blew a kiss to the firing squad. Later stories about the clothes she wore that morning disagree with each other, and neither matches the photographic evidence.

No family claimed her body. Her embalmed head was kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris and was found to be missing in 2000. In 2017, a century after her death, the French Army declassified her 1,275 pages of trial documents. Ladoux himself was later arrested as a suspected double agent, then cleared.

So was she a spy? She took money from both sides and played a dangerous game she did not understand. But the femme fatale who brought down armies is a myth; the woman in the moat at Vincennes was, in the words of two American historians, "naïve and easily duped".

Learn with Mata Hari: English expressions about secrets and blame

Expression	Meaning	Example
to be a scapegoat	to be blamed for others' failures	She became a scapegoat for the army's defeats.
to play both sides	to deal secretly with two opponents	He was accused of playing both sides.
to be in over your head	to be in a situation too difficult to handle	Mata Hari was in over her head.
to spill the beans	to reveal a secret	Nobody knew who had spilled the beans.
a smoking gun	clear proof of guilt	The prosecution never found a smoking gun.

Try this: Write three sentences about a famous trial using "scapegoat", "smoking gun" and "in over your head".