In part two of this mini-series, we’ll explore the fascinating life of Mata Hari, the Dutch dancer accused of being a German spy during World War I.
Her tale is one of luxury, seduction, and betrayal, but was she truly a spy or merely a scapegoat in a world gone mad with spymania?
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part mini-series on unusual characters from World War I.
[00:00:29] In part one, we learned about the British army officer who fought alongside Arabian tribes, T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, as he was better known.
[00:00:41] In part three, the next episode, we’ll learn about Manfred von Richthofen, the so-called Red Baron.
[00:00:48] And in today’s episode, we will be talking about Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer accused of being a German spy.
[00:00:57] It is an amazing story of luxury, poverty, seduction, spycraft, betrayal, and more.
[00:01:05] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] The 15th of October 1917 was a particularly cold and frosty morning in Paris.
[00:01:19] The sun was just starting to come up.
[00:01:23] Earlier that morning, a 41-year-old woman had been dragged from her cell in Paris’ Saint Lazare prison and bustled into a car.
[00:01:34] She was driven a few kilometres east, to the castle at Vincennes.
[00:01:40] She was frogmarched out of the car and taken to a secluded area of the castle grounds, where she was placed against a pole.
[00:01:52] A prison guard attempted to put a bandage over her eyes; she refused it.
[00:01:58] She looked straight at the men pointing their rifles at her.
[00:02:03] Similarly, she refused for her hands to be tied.
[00:02:07] She knew the fate that awaited her. She would meet it head on.
[00:02:13] One account even has her blowing kisses at the men, one last performance for a woman who had lived her life on the stage.
[00:02:25] The men pulled their triggers, and she fell to the floor in a heap.
[00:02:32] Her body, this body that had played no small part in making her one of the most famous and desirable women in Europe, was sent to the Paris medical school to be used as dissection practice by students.
[00:02:48] This was the fate of Mata Hari, a woman once called "arguably the greatest female spy of the 20th century."
[00:02:57] Now, to understand how things came to this and, indeed, to answer the question of whether she was even a spy, we need to go all the way back to the start.
[00:03:09] She was born Margaretha Zelle in 1876 in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands.
[00:03:17] Her father was a rich man, and owned a successful hat business.
[00:03:23] Her early life was one of affluence and luxury; She was taught the piano, she took dance lessons, she learned multiple languages, and she went to a fancy school.
[00:03:35] But when she was 13 years old, things came crashing down.
[00:03:42] Her father had made some speculative, and clearly very bad, investments in the oil industry and was forced to declare bankruptcy.
[00:03:51] Her parents divorced, and her mother died a year later.
[00:03:57] The young Margaretha was sent to live with an uncle in a small town nearby, and encouraged to train to become a school teacher.
[00:04:08] But the life of a small-town schoolteacher was somewhat different to what she had in mind.
[00:04:15] She was confident, outgoing, and not particularly good at following the rules.
[00:04:22] She was also developing into a beautiful young woman.
[00:04:26] Tall, striking, with dark brown hair and almost East Asian features, she naturally drew attention.
[00:04:36] At the teacher-training school, she caught the eye of the school principal, a middle-aged man whose behaviour, by most accounts, crossed inappropriate boundaries.
[00:04:47] What exactly happened remains unclear—some say she flirted back, others that she was simply caught up in his advances—but the result was the same: she was caught in a compromising situation, a scandal erupted, and she was soon removed from the school.
[00:05:08] Seeking adventure, or at least seeking anything that might take her away from the small Dutch town in which she felt suffocated, one day her eyes were drawn to an advert in a newspaper.
[00:05:22] It was from a 38-year-old wealthy army captain who was looking for a wife.
[00:05:30] Without much to lose, the 18-year-old Margaretha Zelle answered, and within a week, the pair were engaged to be married.
[00:05:41] His name was Rudolf MacLeod, and almost immediately, they went back to the Dutch East Indies–modern day Indonesia–where MacLeod was stationed.
[00:05:53] Although the young Margaretha might have felt that she was finally free and off on a wonderful adventure, her marriage was unhappy from the outset.
[00:06:05] MacLeod was hot-tempered, jealous and alcoholic.
[00:06:11] He wanted his wife to stay at home, appear at social events only when he approved them, and be a good little colonial wife who obeyed her husband’s every wish.
[00:06:24] Margaretha, now Margaretha MacLeod, had other ideas.
[00:06:29] She thrived in the limelight, she enjoyed the attention of the other officers, she revelled in the exotic nature of her new colonial life.
[00:06:39] Both she and MacLeod had multiple lovers, and it is here where it gets a little unpleasant.
[00:06:46] MacLeod caught syphilis, which he passed to his wife.
[00:06:52] The pair had had two children in quick succession, a boy and a girl.
[00:06:59] And shortly after the birth of the second child, both of their children became very ill.
[00:07:07] And the boy, who was only two years old, sadly died.
[00:07:12] Now, the reason for the illness and the poor boy’s death is still not completely clear.
[00:07:19] Magaretha and her husband said an angry servant had poisoned them, and there was even a rumour that a rival army officer had poisoned the children’s food.
[00:07:32] It seems more probable that they got mercury poisoning.
[00:07:36] At the time, toxic mercury was thought to be a helpful treatment for syphilis, and both children were passed syphilis from their mother during pregnancy.
[00:07:49] They were given mercury as a treatment for the disease, but these mercury pills most probably killed Margaretha’s son.
[00:07:59] Distraught, they moved back to the Netherlands, and the pair separated on their return.
[00:08:07] After the divorce was finalised, Margaretha was legally awarded custody of their daughter, but her violent, alcoholic and abusive husband refused to pay any form of child support.
[00:08:22] Without any way of supporting herself and her daughter financially, she gave in, and sent her daughter to go and live with her father.
[00:08:32] Margaretha had now lost not one but two children.
[00:08:38] This was 1903, and she was only 27 at the time.
[00:08:44] She did what she would later say she thought every runaway wife did, and that was to go to Paris.
[00:08:52] She had no connections, no money, no nothing, but she was determined to make something of herself. Her primary concern at this point was getting back on her feet and getting into a situation that would allow her to get her daughter back.
[00:09:11] Initially, she tried more traditional routes to earn a living: as a German teacher, teaching the piano, even working as a model in a department store.
[00:09:23] It was a way to eke out a living, but it was not enough.
[00:09:29] She returned to the Netherlands, but there she came to the realisation that she was never going to get her daughter back.
[00:09:38] Now, with all ties to her previous life severed, she returns to Paris.
[00:09:45] And it is here that she creates the character she will become known for: Mata Hari, which means “eye of the day” in Malay.
[00:09:56] In early 1905, she starts to perform this exotic dance act in which she wears an elaborate hairdress and exotic jewellery.
[00:10:07] And not much else, I should add, she was practically naked.
[00:10:12] This dance routine, with the stunningly beautiful Mata Hari, was soon the talk of the town.
[00:10:20] She created this aura of mystique. The name, the jewellery, the music, the explicit nature of the performance.
[00:10:30] She was a master of what we would now call PR, and she carefully curated her image, feeding the press stories about being a Javanese princess trained in the ancient, sacred art of temple dancing.
[00:10:46] It was, of course, nonsense; she was Dutch, had never been royalty, and her so-called sacred dances were largely improvised, she made them up there and then.
[00:10:58] But nobody cared.
[00:11:01] Or rather, it provided a convenient excuse.
[00:11:05] The men weren’t paying to see a striptease; they weren’t paying to watch a woman take her clothes off; they were paying to witness some fascinating exotic dance from the east.
[00:11:17] Or at least, that’s what people told themselves.
[00:11:20] Audiences were mesmerised. The more the newspapers wrote about her, the more people wanted to believe the fantasy.
[00:11:28] She masterfully manipulated the press, ensuring that stories about her were printed in the biggest papers in Europe. She cultivated journalists, gave them juicy details, and let them build the legend of Mata Hari.
[00:11:45] And soon, it wasn’t just Paris.
[00:11:48] She performed across Europe’s grandest stages: at the Scala in Milan, in Madrid, in Vienna, in Berlin.
[00:11:57] Everywhere she went, she was the centre of attention.
[00:12:02] She was paid a reported 10,000 francs per show, which is the equivalent of around €40,000 in today’s money.
[00:12:12] To state the obvious, this turned her into a very wealthy woman, but perhaps more importantly, and certainly more importantly for the rest of this story, it made her one of the most sought-after women in Paris.
[00:12:28] She became the mistress of some of the richest and most powerful men in Europe: politicians, generals, diplomats. She seemed to have a particular preference for men in the military.
[00:12:42] And her lovers showered her with diamonds, fur coats, and lavish apartments.
[00:12:49] She was no longer Margaretha Zelle, the poor Dutch girl, or Margaretha MacLeod, divorcée.
[00:12:56] She was Mata Hari, the most desired woman in Europe.
[00:13:02] But fame is fleeting, and by the early 1910s, she had somewhat fallen out of favour, as a dancer at least. There were younger women doing a similar thing, and Mata Hari found herself leaning more on her wealthy lovers than on her dancing career.
[00:13:21] And then in 1914, everything changed.
[00:13:25] When war broke out, the world of glamour and excess vanished almost overnight.
[00:13:32] Suddenly, being an international woman with connections to powerful men in multiple countries, men who were now officers in an enemy army, was not intriguing in a good way; it was intriguing in a very bad way indeed.
[00:13:49] Spymania broke out in France, with authorities monitoring anyone who they believed might have links to foreign powers and who might be tempted to pass along secrets.
[00:14:02] And Mata Hari soon realised she would be a prime target for such advances.
[00:14:09] In 1915, when in The Hague, she was approached by a German official.
[00:14:15] He offered her 20,000 francs—a huge sum—for information on French military movements.
[00:14:23] Her code name was to be H21.
[00:14:27] Mata Hari accepted the money, saying, “Sure thing”.
[00:14:32] But whether she actually intended on passing on any secrets is up for debate.
[00:14:38] According to most historians, she had no intention of doing so.
[00:14:43] She took the money, just as she had always taken money from men who offered it to her.
[00:14:49] Perhaps she considered it a kind of severance package. She had been in Germany when war was declared, and large amounts of her property had been confiscated, so this was one way to make up for it, in her mind at least.
[00:15:06] And in any case, she had spent the past 10 years accepting large sums of money from men on the understanding that she might do something in the future.
[00:15:16] Why should this be any different?
[00:15:19] But once she had accepted the money, the line was blurred.
[00:15:24] The Germans now had her on record as accepting money from them.
[00:15:30] And whether she meant to spy or not, that receipt of payment would later be used against her.
[00:15:37] Now, this was in 1915, and shortly after, something happened to her that had never happened before.
[00:15:46] She fell in love.
[00:15:48] Yes, she'd been married, and she had had many lovers who had no doubt declared their love for her, but it wasn’t until she met a young Russian officer, 20 years her junior, that she ever felt quite the same way.
[00:16:04] His name was Vladimir de Masloff.
[00:16:07] Shortly after they met, he was sent to the front lines and was badly wounded, losing an eye.
[00:16:14] Desperate to see him and ensure he was safe, she needed permission to travel, and that required a favour from the French military.
[00:16:25] It was at this moment that French intelligence saw their opportunity.
[00:16:30] Although they didn’t know about the meeting with the German and her acceptance of the 20,000 francs, they had been watching her like a hawk.
[00:16:41] She spoke multiple languages, travelled around Europe, had many military officers as lovers, and was prepared to bend the rules of society, for a fee of course.
[00:16:53] She ticked all the boxes the French authorities had for “characteristics of a spy”.
[00:17:01] So, when she arrived at the French intelligence agency to ask for a permit to go and visit her wounded Russian lover, she was surprised to find the head of French counterintelligence, Georges Ladoux, make her an offer.
[00:17:17] He asked her if she was interested in becoming a spy for France.
[00:17:24] Her role would be to travel to Belgium, seduce German army officers, find valuable information about German military plans, and pass these back to France.
[00:17:37] Various sums were discussed.
[00:17:40] Mata Hari negotiated and was offered a reported one million francs, something like 4 million Euros in today’s money. The fee would be paid on the successful completion of the mission.
[00:17:55] She needed the money, and this could be her “last hurrah”, her opportunity to marry her Russian lover and set herself up for life, without ever having to worry about money again.
[00:18:09] She accepted Ladoux’s offer.
[00:18:12] But importantly, she never told him about accepting the 20,000 Francs from the Germans a year beforehand.
[00:18:21] This would come back to bite her.
[00:18:24] She tried to get to Belgium to get started on her task, but found herself caught up in Spain.
[00:18:32] She tried to contact Ladoux for instructions on how to proceed, but never received a response.
[00:18:40] Taking matters into her own hands, and keen to get the job done so she could be paid, she found a German army officer in Madrid, and seduced him.
[00:18:52] In a bid to get him to reveal information, she told him that she was a German spy and her code name was H21.
[00:19:03] He then sends a telegram back to the German intelligence service, letting them know that he has made contact with Agent H21 and informing them about what she has told him. But, and here's where things start to get a little complicated, he sends the telegram in a code that he almost certainly knows the French have cracked, suggesting that he wants her identity to be discovered.
[00:19:31] Sure enough, the French intercept the telegram, decrypt the letter, and read the extensive descriptions of “agent H21”.
[00:19:42] Unmistakably, it is Mata Hari.
[00:19:46] On her return to Paris, in February 1917, she was arrested.
[00:19:52] She was interrogated for months, held in the grim Saint-Lazare prison, and subjected to intense questioning.
[00:20:02] The trial was a show trial.
[00:20:04] She was accused of being responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers—despite zero concrete evidence that she had ever passed on a single useful secret.
[00:20:17] The press, once her ally, turned against her. Her life as a dancer and a courtesan, her divorce, her promiscuous lifestyle, this was all used as proof of guilt.
[00:20:32] In her prime, she had used the press to build up her image, knowing that the story she told was more important than the veracity of its details.
[00:20:43] Now, the press used exactly the same avoidance of the truth to tear her down.
[00:20:50] She was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death.
[00:20:56] And so we return to that cold morning in October 1917, in the castle of Vincennes.
[00:21:03] She was marched to the pole, refusing the blindfold, staring her executioners in the eye.
[00:21:10] The executioners fired, she fell to the floor, and her body was sent to be chopped up by medical students.
[00:21:19] It is now more than 100 years since her death, and there are still plenty of question marks as to whether this woman, named by her accusers as “the greatest female spy of the 20th century”, ever did any spying at all.
[00:21:35] Yes, she accepted money, but there is no evidence that she passed any information.
[00:21:42] And if she was a spy, she was a very bad one. She never attempted to hide her encounters, she never wrote in code, everything she did, she did in plain sight.
[00:21:54] Indeed, on the 100th anniversary of her death, in 2017, the French government released a bunch of new evidence about her life and trial, which seemed to confirm what many had long suspected.
[00:22:10] She was a useful scapegoat. France was not doing well in the war, and if you could point the finger at a woman who had lived outside of the norms of society, a woman who looked and behaved like a spy, well, she made an easy target.
[00:22:28] In fact, you have already met the real spy earlier in this episode, someone who perhaps was a lot more of a spy than Mata Hari.
[00:22:38] George Ladoux, the head of the French Intelligence agency and the man who tricked and then arrested Mata Hari, was himself arrested on the charge of being a double agent.
[00:22:51] After the war was over, the charges were quietly dropped, and he lived the rest of his life a free man.
[00:23:01] Mata Hari was not quite so lucky.
[00:23:06] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Mata Hari, the exotic dancer, courtesan, and most probably not a spy.
[00:23:16] As a reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on unusual characters from World War I.
[00:23:23] In the last episode, we had Lawrence of Arabia, and next up we will have Manfred von Richthofen, the dead-eye German pilot better known as The Red Baron.
[00:23:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part mini-series on unusual characters from World War I.
[00:00:29] In part one, we learned about the British army officer who fought alongside Arabian tribes, T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, as he was better known.
[00:00:41] In part three, the next episode, we’ll learn about Manfred von Richthofen, the so-called Red Baron.
[00:00:48] And in today’s episode, we will be talking about Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer accused of being a German spy.
[00:00:57] It is an amazing story of luxury, poverty, seduction, spycraft, betrayal, and more.
[00:01:05] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] The 15th of October 1917 was a particularly cold and frosty morning in Paris.
[00:01:19] The sun was just starting to come up.
[00:01:23] Earlier that morning, a 41-year-old woman had been dragged from her cell in Paris’ Saint Lazare prison and bustled into a car.
[00:01:34] She was driven a few kilometres east, to the castle at Vincennes.
[00:01:40] She was frogmarched out of the car and taken to a secluded area of the castle grounds, where she was placed against a pole.
[00:01:52] A prison guard attempted to put a bandage over her eyes; she refused it.
[00:01:58] She looked straight at the men pointing their rifles at her.
[00:02:03] Similarly, she refused for her hands to be tied.
[00:02:07] She knew the fate that awaited her. She would meet it head on.
[00:02:13] One account even has her blowing kisses at the men, one last performance for a woman who had lived her life on the stage.
[00:02:25] The men pulled their triggers, and she fell to the floor in a heap.
[00:02:32] Her body, this body that had played no small part in making her one of the most famous and desirable women in Europe, was sent to the Paris medical school to be used as dissection practice by students.
[00:02:48] This was the fate of Mata Hari, a woman once called "arguably the greatest female spy of the 20th century."
[00:02:57] Now, to understand how things came to this and, indeed, to answer the question of whether she was even a spy, we need to go all the way back to the start.
[00:03:09] She was born Margaretha Zelle in 1876 in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands.
[00:03:17] Her father was a rich man, and owned a successful hat business.
[00:03:23] Her early life was one of affluence and luxury; She was taught the piano, she took dance lessons, she learned multiple languages, and she went to a fancy school.
[00:03:35] But when she was 13 years old, things came crashing down.
[00:03:42] Her father had made some speculative, and clearly very bad, investments in the oil industry and was forced to declare bankruptcy.
[00:03:51] Her parents divorced, and her mother died a year later.
[00:03:57] The young Margaretha was sent to live with an uncle in a small town nearby, and encouraged to train to become a school teacher.
[00:04:08] But the life of a small-town schoolteacher was somewhat different to what she had in mind.
[00:04:15] She was confident, outgoing, and not particularly good at following the rules.
[00:04:22] She was also developing into a beautiful young woman.
[00:04:26] Tall, striking, with dark brown hair and almost East Asian features, she naturally drew attention.
[00:04:36] At the teacher-training school, she caught the eye of the school principal, a middle-aged man whose behaviour, by most accounts, crossed inappropriate boundaries.
[00:04:47] What exactly happened remains unclear—some say she flirted back, others that she was simply caught up in his advances—but the result was the same: she was caught in a compromising situation, a scandal erupted, and she was soon removed from the school.
[00:05:08] Seeking adventure, or at least seeking anything that might take her away from the small Dutch town in which she felt suffocated, one day her eyes were drawn to an advert in a newspaper.
[00:05:22] It was from a 38-year-old wealthy army captain who was looking for a wife.
[00:05:30] Without much to lose, the 18-year-old Margaretha Zelle answered, and within a week, the pair were engaged to be married.
[00:05:41] His name was Rudolf MacLeod, and almost immediately, they went back to the Dutch East Indies–modern day Indonesia–where MacLeod was stationed.
[00:05:53] Although the young Margaretha might have felt that she was finally free and off on a wonderful adventure, her marriage was unhappy from the outset.
[00:06:05] MacLeod was hot-tempered, jealous and alcoholic.
[00:06:11] He wanted his wife to stay at home, appear at social events only when he approved them, and be a good little colonial wife who obeyed her husband’s every wish.
[00:06:24] Margaretha, now Margaretha MacLeod, had other ideas.
[00:06:29] She thrived in the limelight, she enjoyed the attention of the other officers, she revelled in the exotic nature of her new colonial life.
[00:06:39] Both she and MacLeod had multiple lovers, and it is here where it gets a little unpleasant.
[00:06:46] MacLeod caught syphilis, which he passed to his wife.
[00:06:52] The pair had had two children in quick succession, a boy and a girl.
[00:06:59] And shortly after the birth of the second child, both of their children became very ill.
[00:07:07] And the boy, who was only two years old, sadly died.
[00:07:12] Now, the reason for the illness and the poor boy’s death is still not completely clear.
[00:07:19] Magaretha and her husband said an angry servant had poisoned them, and there was even a rumour that a rival army officer had poisoned the children’s food.
[00:07:32] It seems more probable that they got mercury poisoning.
[00:07:36] At the time, toxic mercury was thought to be a helpful treatment for syphilis, and both children were passed syphilis from their mother during pregnancy.
[00:07:49] They were given mercury as a treatment for the disease, but these mercury pills most probably killed Margaretha’s son.
[00:07:59] Distraught, they moved back to the Netherlands, and the pair separated on their return.
[00:08:07] After the divorce was finalised, Margaretha was legally awarded custody of their daughter, but her violent, alcoholic and abusive husband refused to pay any form of child support.
[00:08:22] Without any way of supporting herself and her daughter financially, she gave in, and sent her daughter to go and live with her father.
[00:08:32] Margaretha had now lost not one but two children.
[00:08:38] This was 1903, and she was only 27 at the time.
[00:08:44] She did what she would later say she thought every runaway wife did, and that was to go to Paris.
[00:08:52] She had no connections, no money, no nothing, but she was determined to make something of herself. Her primary concern at this point was getting back on her feet and getting into a situation that would allow her to get her daughter back.
[00:09:11] Initially, she tried more traditional routes to earn a living: as a German teacher, teaching the piano, even working as a model in a department store.
[00:09:23] It was a way to eke out a living, but it was not enough.
[00:09:29] She returned to the Netherlands, but there she came to the realisation that she was never going to get her daughter back.
[00:09:38] Now, with all ties to her previous life severed, she returns to Paris.
[00:09:45] And it is here that she creates the character she will become known for: Mata Hari, which means “eye of the day” in Malay.
[00:09:56] In early 1905, she starts to perform this exotic dance act in which she wears an elaborate hairdress and exotic jewellery.
[00:10:07] And not much else, I should add, she was practically naked.
[00:10:12] This dance routine, with the stunningly beautiful Mata Hari, was soon the talk of the town.
[00:10:20] She created this aura of mystique. The name, the jewellery, the music, the explicit nature of the performance.
[00:10:30] She was a master of what we would now call PR, and she carefully curated her image, feeding the press stories about being a Javanese princess trained in the ancient, sacred art of temple dancing.
[00:10:46] It was, of course, nonsense; she was Dutch, had never been royalty, and her so-called sacred dances were largely improvised, she made them up there and then.
[00:10:58] But nobody cared.
[00:11:01] Or rather, it provided a convenient excuse.
[00:11:05] The men weren’t paying to see a striptease; they weren’t paying to watch a woman take her clothes off; they were paying to witness some fascinating exotic dance from the east.
[00:11:17] Or at least, that’s what people told themselves.
[00:11:20] Audiences were mesmerised. The more the newspapers wrote about her, the more people wanted to believe the fantasy.
[00:11:28] She masterfully manipulated the press, ensuring that stories about her were printed in the biggest papers in Europe. She cultivated journalists, gave them juicy details, and let them build the legend of Mata Hari.
[00:11:45] And soon, it wasn’t just Paris.
[00:11:48] She performed across Europe’s grandest stages: at the Scala in Milan, in Madrid, in Vienna, in Berlin.
[00:11:57] Everywhere she went, she was the centre of attention.
[00:12:02] She was paid a reported 10,000 francs per show, which is the equivalent of around €40,000 in today’s money.
[00:12:12] To state the obvious, this turned her into a very wealthy woman, but perhaps more importantly, and certainly more importantly for the rest of this story, it made her one of the most sought-after women in Paris.
[00:12:28] She became the mistress of some of the richest and most powerful men in Europe: politicians, generals, diplomats. She seemed to have a particular preference for men in the military.
[00:12:42] And her lovers showered her with diamonds, fur coats, and lavish apartments.
[00:12:49] She was no longer Margaretha Zelle, the poor Dutch girl, or Margaretha MacLeod, divorcée.
[00:12:56] She was Mata Hari, the most desired woman in Europe.
[00:13:02] But fame is fleeting, and by the early 1910s, she had somewhat fallen out of favour, as a dancer at least. There were younger women doing a similar thing, and Mata Hari found herself leaning more on her wealthy lovers than on her dancing career.
[00:13:21] And then in 1914, everything changed.
[00:13:25] When war broke out, the world of glamour and excess vanished almost overnight.
[00:13:32] Suddenly, being an international woman with connections to powerful men in multiple countries, men who were now officers in an enemy army, was not intriguing in a good way; it was intriguing in a very bad way indeed.
[00:13:49] Spymania broke out in France, with authorities monitoring anyone who they believed might have links to foreign powers and who might be tempted to pass along secrets.
[00:14:02] And Mata Hari soon realised she would be a prime target for such advances.
[00:14:09] In 1915, when in The Hague, she was approached by a German official.
[00:14:15] He offered her 20,000 francs—a huge sum—for information on French military movements.
[00:14:23] Her code name was to be H21.
[00:14:27] Mata Hari accepted the money, saying, “Sure thing”.
[00:14:32] But whether she actually intended on passing on any secrets is up for debate.
[00:14:38] According to most historians, she had no intention of doing so.
[00:14:43] She took the money, just as she had always taken money from men who offered it to her.
[00:14:49] Perhaps she considered it a kind of severance package. She had been in Germany when war was declared, and large amounts of her property had been confiscated, so this was one way to make up for it, in her mind at least.
[00:15:06] And in any case, she had spent the past 10 years accepting large sums of money from men on the understanding that she might do something in the future.
[00:15:16] Why should this be any different?
[00:15:19] But once she had accepted the money, the line was blurred.
[00:15:24] The Germans now had her on record as accepting money from them.
[00:15:30] And whether she meant to spy or not, that receipt of payment would later be used against her.
[00:15:37] Now, this was in 1915, and shortly after, something happened to her that had never happened before.
[00:15:46] She fell in love.
[00:15:48] Yes, she'd been married, and she had had many lovers who had no doubt declared their love for her, but it wasn’t until she met a young Russian officer, 20 years her junior, that she ever felt quite the same way.
[00:16:04] His name was Vladimir de Masloff.
[00:16:07] Shortly after they met, he was sent to the front lines and was badly wounded, losing an eye.
[00:16:14] Desperate to see him and ensure he was safe, she needed permission to travel, and that required a favour from the French military.
[00:16:25] It was at this moment that French intelligence saw their opportunity.
[00:16:30] Although they didn’t know about the meeting with the German and her acceptance of the 20,000 francs, they had been watching her like a hawk.
[00:16:41] She spoke multiple languages, travelled around Europe, had many military officers as lovers, and was prepared to bend the rules of society, for a fee of course.
[00:16:53] She ticked all the boxes the French authorities had for “characteristics of a spy”.
[00:17:01] So, when she arrived at the French intelligence agency to ask for a permit to go and visit her wounded Russian lover, she was surprised to find the head of French counterintelligence, Georges Ladoux, make her an offer.
[00:17:17] He asked her if she was interested in becoming a spy for France.
[00:17:24] Her role would be to travel to Belgium, seduce German army officers, find valuable information about German military plans, and pass these back to France.
[00:17:37] Various sums were discussed.
[00:17:40] Mata Hari negotiated and was offered a reported one million francs, something like 4 million Euros in today’s money. The fee would be paid on the successful completion of the mission.
[00:17:55] She needed the money, and this could be her “last hurrah”, her opportunity to marry her Russian lover and set herself up for life, without ever having to worry about money again.
[00:18:09] She accepted Ladoux’s offer.
[00:18:12] But importantly, she never told him about accepting the 20,000 Francs from the Germans a year beforehand.
[00:18:21] This would come back to bite her.
[00:18:24] She tried to get to Belgium to get started on her task, but found herself caught up in Spain.
[00:18:32] She tried to contact Ladoux for instructions on how to proceed, but never received a response.
[00:18:40] Taking matters into her own hands, and keen to get the job done so she could be paid, she found a German army officer in Madrid, and seduced him.
[00:18:52] In a bid to get him to reveal information, she told him that she was a German spy and her code name was H21.
[00:19:03] He then sends a telegram back to the German intelligence service, letting them know that he has made contact with Agent H21 and informing them about what she has told him. But, and here's where things start to get a little complicated, he sends the telegram in a code that he almost certainly knows the French have cracked, suggesting that he wants her identity to be discovered.
[00:19:31] Sure enough, the French intercept the telegram, decrypt the letter, and read the extensive descriptions of “agent H21”.
[00:19:42] Unmistakably, it is Mata Hari.
[00:19:46] On her return to Paris, in February 1917, she was arrested.
[00:19:52] She was interrogated for months, held in the grim Saint-Lazare prison, and subjected to intense questioning.
[00:20:02] The trial was a show trial.
[00:20:04] She was accused of being responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers—despite zero concrete evidence that she had ever passed on a single useful secret.
[00:20:17] The press, once her ally, turned against her. Her life as a dancer and a courtesan, her divorce, her promiscuous lifestyle, this was all used as proof of guilt.
[00:20:32] In her prime, she had used the press to build up her image, knowing that the story she told was more important than the veracity of its details.
[00:20:43] Now, the press used exactly the same avoidance of the truth to tear her down.
[00:20:50] She was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death.
[00:20:56] And so we return to that cold morning in October 1917, in the castle of Vincennes.
[00:21:03] She was marched to the pole, refusing the blindfold, staring her executioners in the eye.
[00:21:10] The executioners fired, she fell to the floor, and her body was sent to be chopped up by medical students.
[00:21:19] It is now more than 100 years since her death, and there are still plenty of question marks as to whether this woman, named by her accusers as “the greatest female spy of the 20th century”, ever did any spying at all.
[00:21:35] Yes, she accepted money, but there is no evidence that she passed any information.
[00:21:42] And if she was a spy, she was a very bad one. She never attempted to hide her encounters, she never wrote in code, everything she did, she did in plain sight.
[00:21:54] Indeed, on the 100th anniversary of her death, in 2017, the French government released a bunch of new evidence about her life and trial, which seemed to confirm what many had long suspected.
[00:22:10] She was a useful scapegoat. France was not doing well in the war, and if you could point the finger at a woman who had lived outside of the norms of society, a woman who looked and behaved like a spy, well, she made an easy target.
[00:22:28] In fact, you have already met the real spy earlier in this episode, someone who perhaps was a lot more of a spy than Mata Hari.
[00:22:38] George Ladoux, the head of the French Intelligence agency and the man who tricked and then arrested Mata Hari, was himself arrested on the charge of being a double agent.
[00:22:51] After the war was over, the charges were quietly dropped, and he lived the rest of his life a free man.
[00:23:01] Mata Hari was not quite so lucky.
[00:23:06] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Mata Hari, the exotic dancer, courtesan, and most probably not a spy.
[00:23:16] As a reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on unusual characters from World War I.
[00:23:23] In the last episode, we had Lawrence of Arabia, and next up we will have Manfred von Richthofen, the dead-eye German pilot better known as The Red Baron.
[00:23:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part mini-series on unusual characters from World War I.
[00:00:29] In part one, we learned about the British army officer who fought alongside Arabian tribes, T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, as he was better known.
[00:00:41] In part three, the next episode, we’ll learn about Manfred von Richthofen, the so-called Red Baron.
[00:00:48] And in today’s episode, we will be talking about Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer accused of being a German spy.
[00:00:57] It is an amazing story of luxury, poverty, seduction, spycraft, betrayal, and more.
[00:01:05] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] The 15th of October 1917 was a particularly cold and frosty morning in Paris.
[00:01:19] The sun was just starting to come up.
[00:01:23] Earlier that morning, a 41-year-old woman had been dragged from her cell in Paris’ Saint Lazare prison and bustled into a car.
[00:01:34] She was driven a few kilometres east, to the castle at Vincennes.
[00:01:40] She was frogmarched out of the car and taken to a secluded area of the castle grounds, where she was placed against a pole.
[00:01:52] A prison guard attempted to put a bandage over her eyes; she refused it.
[00:01:58] She looked straight at the men pointing their rifles at her.
[00:02:03] Similarly, she refused for her hands to be tied.
[00:02:07] She knew the fate that awaited her. She would meet it head on.
[00:02:13] One account even has her blowing kisses at the men, one last performance for a woman who had lived her life on the stage.
[00:02:25] The men pulled their triggers, and she fell to the floor in a heap.
[00:02:32] Her body, this body that had played no small part in making her one of the most famous and desirable women in Europe, was sent to the Paris medical school to be used as dissection practice by students.
[00:02:48] This was the fate of Mata Hari, a woman once called "arguably the greatest female spy of the 20th century."
[00:02:57] Now, to understand how things came to this and, indeed, to answer the question of whether she was even a spy, we need to go all the way back to the start.
[00:03:09] She was born Margaretha Zelle in 1876 in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands.
[00:03:17] Her father was a rich man, and owned a successful hat business.
[00:03:23] Her early life was one of affluence and luxury; She was taught the piano, she took dance lessons, she learned multiple languages, and she went to a fancy school.
[00:03:35] But when she was 13 years old, things came crashing down.
[00:03:42] Her father had made some speculative, and clearly very bad, investments in the oil industry and was forced to declare bankruptcy.
[00:03:51] Her parents divorced, and her mother died a year later.
[00:03:57] The young Margaretha was sent to live with an uncle in a small town nearby, and encouraged to train to become a school teacher.
[00:04:08] But the life of a small-town schoolteacher was somewhat different to what she had in mind.
[00:04:15] She was confident, outgoing, and not particularly good at following the rules.
[00:04:22] She was also developing into a beautiful young woman.
[00:04:26] Tall, striking, with dark brown hair and almost East Asian features, she naturally drew attention.
[00:04:36] At the teacher-training school, she caught the eye of the school principal, a middle-aged man whose behaviour, by most accounts, crossed inappropriate boundaries.
[00:04:47] What exactly happened remains unclear—some say she flirted back, others that she was simply caught up in his advances—but the result was the same: she was caught in a compromising situation, a scandal erupted, and she was soon removed from the school.
[00:05:08] Seeking adventure, or at least seeking anything that might take her away from the small Dutch town in which she felt suffocated, one day her eyes were drawn to an advert in a newspaper.
[00:05:22] It was from a 38-year-old wealthy army captain who was looking for a wife.
[00:05:30] Without much to lose, the 18-year-old Margaretha Zelle answered, and within a week, the pair were engaged to be married.
[00:05:41] His name was Rudolf MacLeod, and almost immediately, they went back to the Dutch East Indies–modern day Indonesia–where MacLeod was stationed.
[00:05:53] Although the young Margaretha might have felt that she was finally free and off on a wonderful adventure, her marriage was unhappy from the outset.
[00:06:05] MacLeod was hot-tempered, jealous and alcoholic.
[00:06:11] He wanted his wife to stay at home, appear at social events only when he approved them, and be a good little colonial wife who obeyed her husband’s every wish.
[00:06:24] Margaretha, now Margaretha MacLeod, had other ideas.
[00:06:29] She thrived in the limelight, she enjoyed the attention of the other officers, she revelled in the exotic nature of her new colonial life.
[00:06:39] Both she and MacLeod had multiple lovers, and it is here where it gets a little unpleasant.
[00:06:46] MacLeod caught syphilis, which he passed to his wife.
[00:06:52] The pair had had two children in quick succession, a boy and a girl.
[00:06:59] And shortly after the birth of the second child, both of their children became very ill.
[00:07:07] And the boy, who was only two years old, sadly died.
[00:07:12] Now, the reason for the illness and the poor boy’s death is still not completely clear.
[00:07:19] Magaretha and her husband said an angry servant had poisoned them, and there was even a rumour that a rival army officer had poisoned the children’s food.
[00:07:32] It seems more probable that they got mercury poisoning.
[00:07:36] At the time, toxic mercury was thought to be a helpful treatment for syphilis, and both children were passed syphilis from their mother during pregnancy.
[00:07:49] They were given mercury as a treatment for the disease, but these mercury pills most probably killed Margaretha’s son.
[00:07:59] Distraught, they moved back to the Netherlands, and the pair separated on their return.
[00:08:07] After the divorce was finalised, Margaretha was legally awarded custody of their daughter, but her violent, alcoholic and abusive husband refused to pay any form of child support.
[00:08:22] Without any way of supporting herself and her daughter financially, she gave in, and sent her daughter to go and live with her father.
[00:08:32] Margaretha had now lost not one but two children.
[00:08:38] This was 1903, and she was only 27 at the time.
[00:08:44] She did what she would later say she thought every runaway wife did, and that was to go to Paris.
[00:08:52] She had no connections, no money, no nothing, but she was determined to make something of herself. Her primary concern at this point was getting back on her feet and getting into a situation that would allow her to get her daughter back.
[00:09:11] Initially, she tried more traditional routes to earn a living: as a German teacher, teaching the piano, even working as a model in a department store.
[00:09:23] It was a way to eke out a living, but it was not enough.
[00:09:29] She returned to the Netherlands, but there she came to the realisation that she was never going to get her daughter back.
[00:09:38] Now, with all ties to her previous life severed, she returns to Paris.
[00:09:45] And it is here that she creates the character she will become known for: Mata Hari, which means “eye of the day” in Malay.
[00:09:56] In early 1905, she starts to perform this exotic dance act in which she wears an elaborate hairdress and exotic jewellery.
[00:10:07] And not much else, I should add, she was practically naked.
[00:10:12] This dance routine, with the stunningly beautiful Mata Hari, was soon the talk of the town.
[00:10:20] She created this aura of mystique. The name, the jewellery, the music, the explicit nature of the performance.
[00:10:30] She was a master of what we would now call PR, and she carefully curated her image, feeding the press stories about being a Javanese princess trained in the ancient, sacred art of temple dancing.
[00:10:46] It was, of course, nonsense; she was Dutch, had never been royalty, and her so-called sacred dances were largely improvised, she made them up there and then.
[00:10:58] But nobody cared.
[00:11:01] Or rather, it provided a convenient excuse.
[00:11:05] The men weren’t paying to see a striptease; they weren’t paying to watch a woman take her clothes off; they were paying to witness some fascinating exotic dance from the east.
[00:11:17] Or at least, that’s what people told themselves.
[00:11:20] Audiences were mesmerised. The more the newspapers wrote about her, the more people wanted to believe the fantasy.
[00:11:28] She masterfully manipulated the press, ensuring that stories about her were printed in the biggest papers in Europe. She cultivated journalists, gave them juicy details, and let them build the legend of Mata Hari.
[00:11:45] And soon, it wasn’t just Paris.
[00:11:48] She performed across Europe’s grandest stages: at the Scala in Milan, in Madrid, in Vienna, in Berlin.
[00:11:57] Everywhere she went, she was the centre of attention.
[00:12:02] She was paid a reported 10,000 francs per show, which is the equivalent of around €40,000 in today’s money.
[00:12:12] To state the obvious, this turned her into a very wealthy woman, but perhaps more importantly, and certainly more importantly for the rest of this story, it made her one of the most sought-after women in Paris.
[00:12:28] She became the mistress of some of the richest and most powerful men in Europe: politicians, generals, diplomats. She seemed to have a particular preference for men in the military.
[00:12:42] And her lovers showered her with diamonds, fur coats, and lavish apartments.
[00:12:49] She was no longer Margaretha Zelle, the poor Dutch girl, or Margaretha MacLeod, divorcée.
[00:12:56] She was Mata Hari, the most desired woman in Europe.
[00:13:02] But fame is fleeting, and by the early 1910s, she had somewhat fallen out of favour, as a dancer at least. There were younger women doing a similar thing, and Mata Hari found herself leaning more on her wealthy lovers than on her dancing career.
[00:13:21] And then in 1914, everything changed.
[00:13:25] When war broke out, the world of glamour and excess vanished almost overnight.
[00:13:32] Suddenly, being an international woman with connections to powerful men in multiple countries, men who were now officers in an enemy army, was not intriguing in a good way; it was intriguing in a very bad way indeed.
[00:13:49] Spymania broke out in France, with authorities monitoring anyone who they believed might have links to foreign powers and who might be tempted to pass along secrets.
[00:14:02] And Mata Hari soon realised she would be a prime target for such advances.
[00:14:09] In 1915, when in The Hague, she was approached by a German official.
[00:14:15] He offered her 20,000 francs—a huge sum—for information on French military movements.
[00:14:23] Her code name was to be H21.
[00:14:27] Mata Hari accepted the money, saying, “Sure thing”.
[00:14:32] But whether she actually intended on passing on any secrets is up for debate.
[00:14:38] According to most historians, she had no intention of doing so.
[00:14:43] She took the money, just as she had always taken money from men who offered it to her.
[00:14:49] Perhaps she considered it a kind of severance package. She had been in Germany when war was declared, and large amounts of her property had been confiscated, so this was one way to make up for it, in her mind at least.
[00:15:06] And in any case, she had spent the past 10 years accepting large sums of money from men on the understanding that she might do something in the future.
[00:15:16] Why should this be any different?
[00:15:19] But once she had accepted the money, the line was blurred.
[00:15:24] The Germans now had her on record as accepting money from them.
[00:15:30] And whether she meant to spy or not, that receipt of payment would later be used against her.
[00:15:37] Now, this was in 1915, and shortly after, something happened to her that had never happened before.
[00:15:46] She fell in love.
[00:15:48] Yes, she'd been married, and she had had many lovers who had no doubt declared their love for her, but it wasn’t until she met a young Russian officer, 20 years her junior, that she ever felt quite the same way.
[00:16:04] His name was Vladimir de Masloff.
[00:16:07] Shortly after they met, he was sent to the front lines and was badly wounded, losing an eye.
[00:16:14] Desperate to see him and ensure he was safe, she needed permission to travel, and that required a favour from the French military.
[00:16:25] It was at this moment that French intelligence saw their opportunity.
[00:16:30] Although they didn’t know about the meeting with the German and her acceptance of the 20,000 francs, they had been watching her like a hawk.
[00:16:41] She spoke multiple languages, travelled around Europe, had many military officers as lovers, and was prepared to bend the rules of society, for a fee of course.
[00:16:53] She ticked all the boxes the French authorities had for “characteristics of a spy”.
[00:17:01] So, when she arrived at the French intelligence agency to ask for a permit to go and visit her wounded Russian lover, she was surprised to find the head of French counterintelligence, Georges Ladoux, make her an offer.
[00:17:17] He asked her if she was interested in becoming a spy for France.
[00:17:24] Her role would be to travel to Belgium, seduce German army officers, find valuable information about German military plans, and pass these back to France.
[00:17:37] Various sums were discussed.
[00:17:40] Mata Hari negotiated and was offered a reported one million francs, something like 4 million Euros in today’s money. The fee would be paid on the successful completion of the mission.
[00:17:55] She needed the money, and this could be her “last hurrah”, her opportunity to marry her Russian lover and set herself up for life, without ever having to worry about money again.
[00:18:09] She accepted Ladoux’s offer.
[00:18:12] But importantly, she never told him about accepting the 20,000 Francs from the Germans a year beforehand.
[00:18:21] This would come back to bite her.
[00:18:24] She tried to get to Belgium to get started on her task, but found herself caught up in Spain.
[00:18:32] She tried to contact Ladoux for instructions on how to proceed, but never received a response.
[00:18:40] Taking matters into her own hands, and keen to get the job done so she could be paid, she found a German army officer in Madrid, and seduced him.
[00:18:52] In a bid to get him to reveal information, she told him that she was a German spy and her code name was H21.
[00:19:03] He then sends a telegram back to the German intelligence service, letting them know that he has made contact with Agent H21 and informing them about what she has told him. But, and here's where things start to get a little complicated, he sends the telegram in a code that he almost certainly knows the French have cracked, suggesting that he wants her identity to be discovered.
[00:19:31] Sure enough, the French intercept the telegram, decrypt the letter, and read the extensive descriptions of “agent H21”.
[00:19:42] Unmistakably, it is Mata Hari.
[00:19:46] On her return to Paris, in February 1917, she was arrested.
[00:19:52] She was interrogated for months, held in the grim Saint-Lazare prison, and subjected to intense questioning.
[00:20:02] The trial was a show trial.
[00:20:04] She was accused of being responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers—despite zero concrete evidence that she had ever passed on a single useful secret.
[00:20:17] The press, once her ally, turned against her. Her life as a dancer and a courtesan, her divorce, her promiscuous lifestyle, this was all used as proof of guilt.
[00:20:32] In her prime, she had used the press to build up her image, knowing that the story she told was more important than the veracity of its details.
[00:20:43] Now, the press used exactly the same avoidance of the truth to tear her down.
[00:20:50] She was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death.
[00:20:56] And so we return to that cold morning in October 1917, in the castle of Vincennes.
[00:21:03] She was marched to the pole, refusing the blindfold, staring her executioners in the eye.
[00:21:10] The executioners fired, she fell to the floor, and her body was sent to be chopped up by medical students.
[00:21:19] It is now more than 100 years since her death, and there are still plenty of question marks as to whether this woman, named by her accusers as “the greatest female spy of the 20th century”, ever did any spying at all.
[00:21:35] Yes, she accepted money, but there is no evidence that she passed any information.
[00:21:42] And if she was a spy, she was a very bad one. She never attempted to hide her encounters, she never wrote in code, everything she did, she did in plain sight.
[00:21:54] Indeed, on the 100th anniversary of her death, in 2017, the French government released a bunch of new evidence about her life and trial, which seemed to confirm what many had long suspected.
[00:22:10] She was a useful scapegoat. France was not doing well in the war, and if you could point the finger at a woman who had lived outside of the norms of society, a woman who looked and behaved like a spy, well, she made an easy target.
[00:22:28] In fact, you have already met the real spy earlier in this episode, someone who perhaps was a lot more of a spy than Mata Hari.
[00:22:38] George Ladoux, the head of the French Intelligence agency and the man who tricked and then arrested Mata Hari, was himself arrested on the charge of being a double agent.
[00:22:51] After the war was over, the charges were quietly dropped, and he lived the rest of his life a free man.
[00:23:01] Mata Hari was not quite so lucky.
[00:23:06] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Mata Hari, the exotic dancer, courtesan, and most probably not a spy.
[00:23:16] As a reminder, this is part two of a three-part mini-series on unusual characters from World War I.
[00:23:23] In the last episode, we had Lawrence of Arabia, and next up we will have Manfred von Richthofen, the dead-eye German pilot better known as The Red Baron.
[00:23:34] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:39] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
