Mata Hari The "Man Eater" Was An Exotic Dancer Whose Secret Identity As A Spy Has Been Debated For Decades.

Mata Hari 

AKA 

Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" MacLeod

"So feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms."

-Uknown French Journalist

She was born August 7th, 1876, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands to Adam Zelle and Antje van der Meulen. She had three younger brothers.  Her father owned a hat shop that was made successful by investments in the oil industry. This gave Mata a lavish early childhood. 

Later, the business went bankrupt due to bad investments and her parents divorced. Mata's mother fell ill and died when Mata was 15 years old. Her father remarried in Amsterdam on February 9th, 1893 to Susanna Catharina ten Hoove. Soon after, the family fell apart and Mata and her three brothers were split up and sent to live with various relatives.

Mata was living with her godfather, Mr. Visser, in Sneek, as she studied to be a kindergarten teacher in Leiden. The headmaster began to flirt with her and she was removed from the institution by Visser. A few months later, she fled to her uncle's home in The Hague.

Mata was 18-years-old when she boldly answered a newspaper ad seeking a bride for Dutch Colonial Army Captain Rudolf " John" MacLeod.  MacLeod was a bald man with an elaborate mustache and living in what was then the Dutch East Indies(now Indonesia). Despite a 21-year age difference, they married on July 11, 1895. 

  

They had two children, Norman-John and Louise " Nonnie" Jeanne. Norman died in 1899. Norman and Nonnie both either had syphilis or were  poisoned for some known reason when they were in the Indies.

During their rocky, nine-year marriage, an alcoholic MacLeod regularly beat Mata. He was jealous of all the attention the other officers gave her and he blamed her for his lack of promotion. 

“One Sunday afternoon, crazed and deranged, he came close to murdering me with the breadknife,” Mata wrote in a letter to her cousin Edward. “I owe my life to a chair that fell over and which gave me time to find the door and get help.”

MacLeod openly kept a concubine and Mata temporarily moved in with Van Rheedes, another Dutch officer. She studied the Indonesian traditions intensely for several months and joined a local dance company during that time. In correspondence to her relatives in the Netherlands in 1897, she revealed her artistic name of Mata Hari, the word for "sun" in the local Malay language (literally, "eye of the day").

Mata did return to MacLeod, but after Norman died they moved back to the Netherlands and officially separated. The divorce became final in 1906. Mata was awarded custody of Nonnie and MacLeod was legally required to pay child support, which he never did. This made life difficult for Mata and Jeanne. During a visit of Jeanne with her father, MacLeod decided to keep her. Mata didn't have the resources to get her daughter back and tried to accept the loss of her Nonnie. Nonnie later died at the age of 21, possibly from complications relating to syphilis.

Mata was lost without Nonnie and she moved to Paris where she performed as a circus horse rider using the name Lady MacLeod.

“I can get by well here in Paris,” Mata wrote, “but I am abstaining from everything for my child (so far). In the event that I am certain of never again being able to have her with me as her mother, then I shall care no longer and shall cast everything aside.”

She struggled to earn a living and tried every means to earn money respectably, giving piano lessons, teaching German, applying to work as a ladies’ companion and as a model a department store. But, eventually she posed as an artist's model for Montmartre painters such as Edouard Bisson, Octave Denis Victor Guillonnet and Fernand Cormon. This led her to important theatrical contacts.

The next year, Mata began to win fame as an exotic dancer by performing her "temple dance" she created by drawing on cultural and religious symbolism that she had picked up in the Indies. She billed herself as a Hindu artist. She would drape herself in veils and then drop them from her body until she wore just a jeweled breastplate and some ornaments upon her arms and head.

Mata's career went into decline after 1912. On March 13th 1915, she performed in what would be the last show of her career. 

Mata had relationships with government and military men often for financial gain. Her liaisons with powerful men frequently took her across international borders. This was during World War I and she had some freedom of movement as a citizen of neutral Holland. Mata's travels attracted attention from British and French intelligence, who put her under surveillance.

Mata was nearing 40-years-old when she fell in love with Captain Vadim Maslov. He was a 23-year-old Russian pilot serving with the French and part of the 50,000 strong Russian Expeditionary Force sent to the Western Front in the spring of 1916.

That summer, Maslov was shot down and badly wounded during a dogfight with the Germans, losing his sight in both eyes. When Mata asked for permission to visit the love of her life at the hospital near the front lines, agents from the Deuxième Bureau told her that she would only be allowed to see Maslov if she agreed to spy for France.

The Deuxième Bureau believed Mata might be able to obtain information by seducing the  Crown Prince Wilhelm for military secrets, who'd she had preform for before. He was the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II and nominally a senior German general on the Western Front. In reality, the Crown Prince did not have much to do with the running of Army Group Crown Prince or the 5th Arm. He was practically a playboy and him being an highly involved great leader was propaganda. Mata's contact with the Deuxième Bureau was Captain Georges Ladoux, who was later to emerge as one of her principal accusers.

Mata planned to use her connections to seduce her way into the German high command, get secrets and hand them over to the French. She met a German attaché and began tossing him bits of gossip, hoping to get some valuable information in return. General Walter Nicolai, the chief IC (intelligence officer) of the German Army, wasn't happy with the information he was getting from Mata and decided to terminate their relationship by exposing her as a spy to the French.  

On February 13th,1917, Mata Hari was arrested in her room at the Hotel Elysée Palace on the Champs Elysées in Paris. She was put on trial on July 24th, accused of espionage, and consequently causing the deaths of at least 50,000 soldiers. She was thrown into Prison Saint-Lazare, where she was allowed to see only her elderly lawyer, Édouard Clunet, who happened to be a former lover.

During lengthy interrogations by Captain Pierre Bouchardon, a military prosecutor, Mata confessed that a German diplomat had once paid her 20,000 francs to gather intelligence on her frequent trips to Paris. She insisted she only passed on to the Germans trivial information and that she remained faithful to France.

Mata's trial came when a time when France had been badly shaken by the Great Mutinies of the French Army. Real or imagined spies were convenient scapegoats for explaining military losses. Captain Georges Ladoux, made sure the evidence against her was constructed in the most damning way and even resorted to evidence tampering.

Mata wrote several letters to the Dutch Ambassador in Paris, claiming her innocence. The most terrible and heartbreaking moment for Mata during the trial occurred when her lover Maslov, declined to testify for her, telling her he couldn't care less if she was convicted or not. After hearing this, Mata fainted.

Clunet was denied permission either to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses or to examine his own witnesses directly.

The military tribunal deliberated for less than 45 minutes before returning a guilty verdict.

Mata was 41-years-old when she was executed by firing squad of 12 French soldiers on October 15th, 1917. Dressed in a blue coat, a tri-corner hat and white gloves. She had arrived with a minister and two nuns and, after bidding them farewell, walked briskly to the designated spot. She was not bound and she had refused a blind fold. Mata turned to face the firing squad and blew the soldiers a kiss just before the shots rang out. A non-commissioned officer then walked up to her body, pulled out his revolver, and shot her in the head to make sure she was dead.

Mata's was not claimed by any family members and was accordingly used for medical study. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris along with her body. From there it disappeared, allegedly sometime in the 1950's. To this day the whereabouts of Mata's remains are unknown.

Mata's sealed trial and related other documents were scheduled to have been declassified by the French Army in 2017.