Mata Hari, Sinister Salome?

Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and a courtesan, but today she's known more for her work as a spy. In this podcast, Katie and Sarah take a look at the extraordinary life of Mata Hari -- and whether the French intelligence community used her as a scapegoat.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. Oh and Sarah.
Before we start the podcast, I just thought we should
probably talk about tonight's plans. Uh. Tonight, I dine with

(00:25):
Count A and tomorrow with Duke B. And if I
don't have to dance, I make a trip with Marquis C.
I avoid serious liaisons. I satisfy all my caprices. M M, Katie,
that doesn't really sound that much like you. It sounds
a lot like Mata Harri though. Are you sure you're
not confusing your lives? Ding ding ding. She's her subject

(00:47):
for today. Mata Harri was an exotic dancer, and we
do mean exotic and a courtesan. But we know her
best for her reputation as a glamorous, beautiful spy and
snaring high powered military hairy men with her charms and
her talents. So who was this sinister salom A as
the newspapers called her, and what exactly was she guilty of? Well, unsurprisingly,

(01:12):
her birth name was not Mata Harri. I'm so surprised
it was Margaretta Gertruda Zel and she entered the world
in the Netherlands on August seven, eight seventy six, and
she was the spoiled little princess daughter of a hatter,
incredibly spoiled. I don't know what you're talking about, Sarah,
because I too had my own phaeton drawn by goats

(01:35):
when I was a child, So perhaps yours is just
a little deprived. Well maybe you both just had princess
like childhoods. But she was abandoned in her teens when
her father goes bankrupt and her mother dies, and from
that point on she has an affair with the headmaster.
It's her baby, her first entry into this scandalous world.
She was looking for a way out of the Netherlands,

(01:58):
and she found it in a guy who she met
through his personal ad Captain Rudolph McLeod of the Dutch
Colonial Army. They were engaged in six days and married
in the bride wore yellow, and according to one article
I read, he was extravagantly mustachioed. He was also older,

(02:18):
a drinker, a gambler, and a jealous man, so in short,
adornly and he beat her and threatened her with guns
and swords, and he verbally abused her, describing her as
the scum of the lowest kind. And he also had syphilis,
which he called diabetes, lossing the same thing, glossing over
that she wasn't a great wife, though she said that

(02:41):
she had inclinations that made it impossible for a woman
like me to be a good housewife. And it's also
probable that she was sleeping around with other military men
that he knew. Married life was definitely not for her,
but it wasn't for him either. He kept up his womanizing.
He just expected her to stay home and not the same.
She had two children with McLeod, a boy and a girl,

(03:04):
and tragically both children became very very ill, and her
son died at age two. And it's possible that she
had contracted civil as from her husband and passed it
on to her children. Maybe they sickened due to a
doctor's attempt to cure the infection with mercury, but other
rumors were that they were poisoned by a nanny or
a servant, and her husband's thought she might have done

(03:25):
it and admitted that he wanted to kill her. So
their marriage deteriorates, and as it becomes more violent and
more unhappy. They returned to the Netherlands and they separate
and he leaves her penniless, and she gives him custody
of their daughter. And what's she gonna do. She doesn't
have any money, she doesn't have a job, so she

(03:48):
goes to Paris and finds a way to survive, acting
as a nude artist model, being a circus rider, and
acting as a prostitute. But then she began dance, saying
first in private homes and then in public and Lady McCloud,
the name she went by then, was five ten and gorgeous,

(04:08):
with olive skin, dark hair and eyes. She looked a
bit exotic, and so she concocted a style of dance
to match it, which was vaguely reminiscent of Javanese dance
from her life there with the Captain, and definitely sexy.
She called these dances sacred dances, and they tied together religion,
art and nudity. You wish, Lady Gaga, And there were

(04:32):
lots of religious statues and veils, mainly veils dropping to
the floor as she became more and more nude and
writhed around in front of figurines of someone's gone classy classy,
and in the early nineteen hundred she emerges as Mata Harri,
which means the eye of the day in this beaded

(04:53):
metal brazier with a tiger like or sometimes people describe
it as serpent like move that she'd show off with. Yes,
this belly dancer would like to see these moves. And
reading accounts from the papers at the time is hilarious
because they're just falling all over themselves to try to
find words to describe just how sexy she is without

(05:15):
actually saying that, so over being able to print it. Oh, yes,
she's tiger like, and you know, talking about her serpentine
moves and how she does a simple dance when she
becomes more and more simple, meaning she drops more and
more veils until there's not a whole lot left. Well,
her dance maybe simple, but her life definitely isn't. Her

(05:36):
backstory isn't. It's this elaborate, made up story. She talks
about how her mother was an Indian princess and how
she sneaked into Hindu temples to learn the dances of worshippers,
just this off the wall stuff. And so she's this beautiful,
lying naked woman and was a smash hit in Paris,
more exciting than the Mula rouge. Collette went to see

(05:59):
her dance the detail I liked, and her newfound fame
brought her many new lovers. She did love her military men,
she said once, I have never loved any that officers.
So are things that Matahari loves include making up stories, dancing,
being naked, and having sex with military men. But we

(06:19):
cannot leave one thing offul list. That's spending money. She's
very extravagant, and it's how she eventually ends up at
the fully Berger, which is a downgrade compared to where
she was performing before. So how did she end up
shot by a firing squad on espionage charges? Was she
betting these military officers for nefarious purposes? That she didn't

(06:41):
see that one coming. They're a big shocker And the
answer to that depends on who you ask. The curator
of the Modahari exhibit at the Freeze Museum, Evert Cramer,
says that she's definitely guilty, that she definitely offered to
spy for the Germans, and she offered to spy several
times for the friend. But the Historian Leon Sherman and

(07:02):
biographer Pat Shipman maintained that her trial and execution was
more about scapegoating that she might have been a double agent,
but she was an incredibly inept one. She just wanted
money that she was offered. She didn't actually really pay
attention to the idea of the assignment. So now that
we've mentioned two possible judgments, we are going to give
you story. She was in Germany dancing at the Metropole

(07:26):
when World War One broke out, and she was Dutch
of the Netherlands, super neutral, but she's spent so much
time in France that the Germans considered her a French citizen.
They took everything she owned except for the clothes she
was wearing, and sent her out of town on a train,
presumably a scanty outfit, I would imagine, perhaps an elegant suit.
So she makes her way to Amsterdam in an old

(07:48):
lover and it's there that she possibly began her downfall.
She wanted restitution for the things that had been taken
from her, and the German consulate wouldn't give it to her,
but they did offer her another deal, and that was
money in exchange for spy work. So she takes the money.
But did she take the job. This is the big
question about Mota Harry. Did she do the work? She

(08:11):
did get assigned a code name H twenty one, which
is not nearly as good as Mata Harry, But everything
else during this period is very muddled. Some accounts have
her betraying both the Germans and the French, working for
both and screwing them both over. One account says that
she admitted to giving the Germans information, but just outdated information,

(08:32):
so not so bad, Please don't execute me, and another
one says that she came into contact with French intelligence
while she was trying to make her way to a
lover in Fiddle, and they later sent her to Belgium
on a mission, but she couldn't get there. Instead, she
got together with a German captain who told her German secrets.
According to her account, according to French intelligence, she was

(08:55):
passing French secrets on to the Germans. Of course, you
could look at it either way, because none of us
were there. And another says that French intelligence actually came
to her asking her to spy, to prove that she
wasn't spying for Germany. I knew that sounds counterintuitive, but basically,
if you'll do this work for us, well we'll know
that you're okay. And she takes money for clothes and

(09:19):
maybe again didn't perform her duties. So we have no
idea what actually happened during this period, or we have
little bits and pieces, but they don't ever come together
to form a cohesive picture of what happened. Trust me,
I've read account after account after account, but she definitely
had contact with German and French officers and with French

(09:41):
and German intelligence. It's simply uncertain what the extent of
that contact was. Was it just sex and money or
secrets or some delicious combination of the three. But whether
she did it or not, it's certainly true that her
reputation as a spend thrift, sexually promis scuous woman colored

(10:01):
people's perceptions of her and worked against her during her trial. Yeah,
the British were very against matter. Harry. For example, they
stopped her on one of her trips and searched her,
and despite not finding anything, they still declared her a
person of suspicion. She was attractive and multi lingual, She's
this beautiful woman traveling alone, and they described her as bold,

(10:24):
which is probably a code word for her sex life.
I mean, you can just imagine her in a movie,
somebody who just seems suspicious, well, and you can see
her and that that glamorous depiction in the movies. But
in real life she sounds pretty terrible. And we were
talking about this before the podcast, how she sounds like
she would be an absolute pain if you're actually there

(10:47):
talking to her, but she's so fascinating. She was arrested
February thirteenth, nineteen seventeen, and she's said to have handed
out chocolates to her arrestors. And she was tried in
a military court, which some called a kangaroo court July,
and the French chief inquisitors said of her, just to
give you an idea of what kind of trial this was, feline,

(11:11):
supple and artificial, used to gambling everything and anything, without scruple,
without pity, always ready to devour fortunes, leaving her ruined
lovers to blow their brains out. She was a born spy,
and well, I don't see how any of those qualities
add together to form spy. I perhaps just lack the
inquisitor's imagination. I think that would be the dialogue to

(11:33):
open up the movie too, maybe as she's riding on
the train. But she is convicted and she's sentenced to
die by firing squad. And October fifteenth, nineteen seventeen, she
goes to face her death. She wears this nice gray
suit and a hat and refused to be tied to
the stake. And she also refused a blindfold thing that

(11:53):
won't be necessary, so she has a good death considering
and again and we come to our question was she
a spy? It's been proposed that the French simply needed
a scapegoat. The war was going badly, so many men
are dying, morale was very low, and here we have, uh,
you know, a little miss sexy sex and her piles

(12:16):
of money, which just didn't seem right to them. The
papers were saying that she bathed in milk when French
children didn't even have milk to drink, so you can
see why she would be easy to hate well, and
that the money is being exchanged to buy things like
clothes that just makes it so much work instead of
contributing to the war effort. Right, And it's also been
suggested that some of the documents used in her trial

(12:37):
were altered by the French and surprise twist that the
French head of intelligence may have been a German spy
himself and was trying to deflect attention and distracting them
with Mona Harre. So was Mata Harri a victim or
was she really a criminal? Was she this cunning double
crosser and a fem fatale or was she somebody who

(13:00):
it was convenient to blame, a woman who was easy
to fear and easy to hate. I'm more of the
second opinion, to be honest, it doesn't really sound like
she would be capable of the former. A little dim yeah,
to be executing really high level double crossing, double agents

(13:22):
to someone who cared much more about sex and money
than she did about any sort of political ambitions. But
we are uncertain, and we probably will be until the
French declassified documents related to her case in so we'll
catch up with you in well, so in the meantime
we'll talk listener mail. Our first email is from Caroline

(13:48):
and she wrote, I guess as a Canadian, I wasn't
really the right audience for the bombardment of Baltimore episode,
as I was rooting for the other guys, I'm a
proud Hallegonian living across the street from our beauty, a
full citadel fort, which, by the way, would have been
more than prepared for an American attack, not the cake
walk Jefferson imagined. Also, General Robert Ross is buried about

(14:10):
two blocks from my apartment in the city's oldest and
prettiest cemetery. While he was killed in the States and
was Scottish and not from here, the tall tale I've
always heard was that Ross's body was shipped this far
in a barrel of whiskey and intended to be put
on a ship across the ocean, but there were delays,
so they didn't bother and just drank the whiskey, and

(14:30):
Bury came here. Bury the body saved the whiskey. The
good sentiment to have, I guess. Our second email is
from Aaron in Texas, and she wrote regarding the bombardment
of Baltimore podcasts. And in that podcast we talked a
little bit about the star Spangled banner and how little
pieces of it had been snipped up and given off

(14:51):
to people worst the family as gifts, and the flag
ends up cursing the family exactly, And she wrote that
she had a similarly his doric flag in her own family,
And a few years ago her parents were visiting her
grandmother when her dad found what she called a little
piece of history tucked away in a family photo album.

(15:11):
And he finds two small squares of fabric, one red,
one white, and the following letter addressed to his grandmother's grandmother.
And it's from December twenty one, eighteen sixty, Madam, I
have presumed sufficiently upon my acquaintance with Mr Andrews to
send you by him a souvenir of the past, the
piece of General R. E. Lee's battle flag after the

(15:34):
surrender had been determined upon. The officers of the General
staff determined that the glorious old flag, which had floated
in triumph over so many bloody fields, should never be
desecrated by Yankee hands. And the letter goes on like this.
But once her dad realized the importance of what he
had found, he and this writer's grandmother decided to send

(15:56):
the pieces off to the Appomatics Courthouse, National Historic Ark
so that it could be properly preserved, and so that
they could avoid a family flag feud of their own.
We loved both of these emails if you'd like to
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dot com. But we try to make it easy for
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(16:17):
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(16:37):
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