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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (17 page)

BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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While en route from Holland to France soon after, Mata Hari had to pass through Britain to avoid the Germans. She gave a British security officer conflicting reasons for her trip, which instantly raised alarms. Initially she said that she was going to perform, but when questioned further, she told a different story, that she was going to join her lover Baron van der Capellan. A notation was placed in her file that she was now considered “undesirable” and should be refused permission to return to the U.K. From that moment on, Mata Hari was under constant surveillance by British intelligence.
It was Mata Hari’s love for a Russian officer named Vladimir de Massloff that led her to the man who would be her downfall. At twenty-one de Massloff was eighteen years her junior. From the moment they met in July 1916, they developed a deep relationship; she called him Vadime, and he called her Marina. Mata wanted to settle down with Vadime; she was tired of the years of travel and sleeping with other men for money. When she went to see Georges Ladoux to get a pass to travel to Vittel to see Vadime, she unknowingly walked into a trap.
Georges Ladoux was the head of the Deuxième Bureau, the military office of espionage and counterespionage. He already knew that the British considered Mata Hari to be dangerous and possibly a German spy. It was on his orders that she was being tailed. He was in a tricky situation. France was not doing well in the war, and arresting a high-profile spy would do wonders for morale and restore French pride. In his memoirs, Ladoux implied that it was his intent from the start to entrap Mata Hari. She was a juicy target; she was glamorous with a steady supply of lovers. He admitted to her at their initial meeting that she was under suspicion. He then asked her to spy for France. Mata Hari didn’t agree right away. On her return from Vittel, she agreed but asked to be paid one million francs, believing that this money would set her and Vadime up after the war.
The entire encounter with Ladoux was strange. If indeed Mata Hari was a German spy, giving her a pass to a war zone was foolhardy to say the least. And then telling her at their next meeting that he believed her to be a German spy, how could he trap her? And why would she now agree to spy for France?
Mata Hari traveled to Holland to await Ladoux’s instructions, not knowing that she was playing into his hands. On her way to the war, Mata Hari again had to pass through Britain. She was detained once again, under suspicion that she was a spy named Clara Benedix. Mata Hari told the arresting officer that she had been recruited by Ladoux to spy for the French; unbeknownst to her, Ladoux informed the British that contrary to what she had told them, she was suspected of being a German spy, just not the one they were looking for.
Mata Hari was released but she was not allowed to enter Holland. Instead she was sent to Spain, where she waited for word from Ladoux. Stuck with no money, Mata Hari decided to improvise. She made the acquaintance of a German military attaché named Arnold Kalle. Mata Hari took the opportunity presented in front of her to do a little spying for France. “I was my most charming self, I played with my feet and did everything a woman does when she wants a man to fall for her and I knew that Kalle had fallen,” she later told the investigating magistrate Pierre Bouchardon. She managed to discover that the Germans knew that the French had finally broken their second code. In exchange, Mata Hari fed him some gossip that she’d gleaned from the newspapers. Writing all the information down that she was given by her new lover, she took the information to the French consulate in Madrid to be sent to Ladoux. Back in Paris, Mata Hari was ready to reap the reward for all her hard work. Instead, Ladoux refused to see her. When she finally did see him, he was amazed at the information she had been able to uncover, but he made no move to verify it. To Mata Hari’s shock, instead of being rewarded for her work, she was arrested in February 1917 as a German spy. She was brought in front of Captain Pierre Bouchardon, who was an investigative magistrate of the Third Council of War.
At first, Mata Hari didn’t realize the seriousness of what she was being charged with, and she waived the right to counsel. Naturally flirtatious, she thought that she could just charm her way out of the interview. But Bouchardon was not inclined to be merciful. Sending her to one of the worst prisons in France, Saint-Lazare, Bouchardon continued to interrogate Mata Hari repeatedly, trying to break her, but she stuck to her story that she was a spy for France. But the dismal conditions inside the prison began to break her spirit. After years of luxury, first-class accommodations, and a fastidious detail to her personal hygiene, Mata Hari couldn’t cope with the freezing cell and dirty conditions that she was forced to accept. She wrote repeatedly to Bouchardon to be released or at least moved to better accommodations.
The investigators were stuck. They had examined her accounts, her jewelry, and even her makeup (to see if she had anything that could be turned into invisible ink). Fifty-three officers whom Mata Hari had “entertained” were called in for questioning but every single one told the investigators that she had never asked them about anything regarding the war or the military. They read the reports of the surveillance on her, but they still had no evidence that Mata Hari was a spy for the Germans.
Finally Ladoux revealed the contents of messages that had been transmitted from the German military attaché in Madrid to Berlin, concerning the spy known as H21, later identified as Mata Hari. Remarkably, 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 by Ladoux to implicate Mata Hari.
The fact that she had been in custody for two months before these cables were given to Bouchardon was highly suspect. It seems likely that either the Germans threw Mata Hari into the mix to deflect suspicion away from the double agents that they had working for them or Ladoux faked the cables as an act of unbridled ambition. Ladoux claimed that it was Mata Hari who offered to spy for France, not the other way around. Whatever the case, Mata Hari was doomed from that point on. Her subsequent admission that Kroemer had given her money to spy for Germany and that she had kept the money as payment for her stolen furs and clothing added to her supposed guilt. Even her own country, Holland, didn’t seem to care what happened to her. When the government learned of Mata Hari’s arrest, it remained largely silent.
Her trial in July 1917 was a travesty. Her lawyer was out of his depth defending Mata Hari in court, and it never seems to have occurred to either one of them to try to find another attorney who had experience with espionage trials. Only one of her lovers, Henry de Marguerie, came forward to defend her. Of the eight charges brought against her, Mata Hari was found guilty of every single one, despite the lack of evidence that she had caused the deaths of fifty thousand soldiers.
On October 15, the day of her execution, at barely five o’clock in the morning, Mata Hari dressed carefully in a pearl gray dress, a long black velvet cloak, and a tricorned hat with gloves. She wrote three letters, one to her daughter, Jeanne, the others to intimate friends, but they were never sent. Accompanied by two nuns from Saint-Lazare and her lawyer, she was taken by automobile to the barracks where the firing squad awaited her. When she saw the firing squad she whispered cheekily to one of the nuns, “All these people! What a success.” She refused to be tied to the stake or to wear a blindfold, impressing everyone with her courage. She was forty-one years old. After the final bullet was put into her brain, a sergeant major declared, “By God, this lady knows how to die.”
Rumors flew that she hadn’t died, that she’d been whisked away by a mysterious stranger, that she’d tried to dazzle her executioners by opening her coat to reveal her naked body. None of it was true, but it no longer mattered. She had now passed into legend. No criticism of the execution was allowed in the papers. The official line was that France had been saved by Mata Hari’s death. Four days after her execution Ladoux was arrested for being a double agent. He was eventually acquitted of the charges of espionage but his career was effectively over. He later wrote a book about Mata Hari, a highly colored tale of how he brought down the most infamous spy in World War I.
It wasn’t until 2000 that some of the files pertaining to her arrest and trial were released that proved that Mata Hari was innocent of espionage. The rest of the files will not be released until 2017. Despite the new evidence, the myth of Mata Hari continues to hold sway. After her death, stories abounded that she had blown a kiss to her executioners, that she had appeared naked before the firing squads. Books and films perpetuated the myth of the sexy, sultry spy luring men to their doom. So who really was Mata Hari? Perhaps she explained it best herself. At her trial, Mata Hari made the distinction that there was Margaretha Zelle MacLeod and then there was Mata Hari. But the woman who was once called “an orchid in a field of dandelions” was much more than a promiscuous courtesan who loved officers too well. She was a woman who, after fleeing a bad marriage, managed to reinvent herself, whose ambition and talent took her to the top and contributed to her downfall.
FOUR
 
Crusading Ladies
 
 
Anne Hutchinson
 
1591-1643
 
A woman of a haughty fierce carriage, a nimble wit and an active spirit, and has a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.
—JOHN WINTHROP ON ANNE HUTCHINSON
 
 
On a chilly November day in 1637, the meetinghouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was packed as Anne Hutchinson, declared Public Enemy No. 1 by the founders of the colony, was led into the dimly lit room to stand trial. At the time, Anne was forty-six, the mother of twelve living children, a grandmother, and pregnant with her fifteenth child. She was well known in the community, as a midwife and nurse.
In the three years since her arrival in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne had managed to piss off a lot of powerful people, specifically the clergy. Her “crime” was holding weekly meetings at her home to discuss scriptures and theology. At first her meetings were only attended by women, who couldn’t wait to hear her unique take on the latest Sunday sermon. Ironically Anne had been chastised for not joining in at these meetings when she first arrived in the colony.
9
To the women, Anne was like Oprah and Billy Graham wrapped up in one package. She was witty and genuinely wanted to help other women, whether by medical care or by spiritual counseling. Her gift to them was her surety about her faith and salvation.
The women soon convinced their husbands to attend her meetings. The meetings became so popular that she had to add an additional day to accommodate the demand, and they began attracting powerful men, such as Sir Harry Vane, soon to be governor. Vane was the son of one of Charles I’s Privy Council, sent to the colony for “seasoning.”
10
Her stand against the war with the Pequot Indians influenced her male followers not to fight.
Anne’s chief nemesis was the most powerful man in the colony, five times governor John Winthrop. He described her in his journal as “a woman of a haughty fierce carriage, a nimble wit and an active spirit and has a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.” And those were the nice things. He also called her “an instrument of Satan,” “enemy of the chosen people,” and “this American Jezebel.” John Winthrop had been keeping an eye on her both figuratively and spiritually since the Hutchinson family got off the boat in 1634. He conveniently lived across the street from them in Boston, where he had a bird’s-eye view of the comings and goings at the Hutchinson house. Winthrop began making a long laundry list of what he considered to be her “errors.” It eventually came to one hundred items.
It was a crucial moment in the fledgling colony. Having fled England to escape religious intolerance, the Puritans then proceeded to impose religious uniformity on others. Like Abraham Lincoln 230 years later, Winthrop believed that a house divided against itself could not stand. Dissension had to be stopped before it destroyed Winthrop’s “holy city on the hill.” Roger Williams
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and Anne’s own brother-in-law John Wheelwright had already been exiled for their unorthodox beliefs. The bickering got so bad that Harry Vane resigned as governor of the colony (which opened the door for Winthrop’s return to power), claiming he had to return to England for “personal reasons.” The division also came down along class lines. Winthrop’s supporters were those who had been landed gentry in England and conservative. Anne’s supporters were the merchants and other professionals, the rising middle class.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
5.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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