Mata Hari



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

- A French journalist, circa 1905

"A harlot? Yes, but a traitoress, never!"

- Phrase attributed to Mata Hari during her trial

Mata Hari (Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod, 7 August 1876-15 October 1917) was an exotic dancer from the Netherlands convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I, and executed by firing squad.

The oldest of the four children of an affluent Dutch businessman, Margaretha Zelle spent much of her childhood in lavish surroundings and was sent to exclusive schools. However, staring in 1889 the family was shattered and shook by a series of events: her father went bankrupt, her parents divorced, her mother died, her father remarried, and her new family subsequently fell apart. Margaretha spent most of the remainder of her teens living first with her godfather and then her uncle.

In 1895, at age 19, she married Captain Rudolf MacLeod of the Dutch Colonial Army after replying to an advertisement he had placed in a Dutch newspaper for a Mail Order Bride a year earlier. She moved to Java with him and bore him two children -- a son, who died young and a daughter who died at age 21. The marriage was not a happy one and ultimately ended in divorce in 1906, but while she lived in Java she studied the native culture intensely and joined a local dance company. It was here, too, that she found and embraced the name history knows her by: "Mata Hari", the word for "sun" (more literally, "eye of the day") in Malay.

After returning to the Netherlands from Java, Zelle moved to Paris in 1903, where after stints as a circus horse rider and an artist's model, she began to gain notice as an exotic dancer. This was not simply a euphemism for "stripper", although her act certainly included disrobing -- Zelle was, along with Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, considered one of the leaders of the early Modern Dance movement. However Zelle -- now performing as "Mata Hari" -- exploited her casual sensuality and flirtatiousness as well as her studies of Javanese culture to create a style and act that gained her great attention and acclaim while diverging from the "mainstream" of the Modern Dance movement, and essentially created the reputation Paris would have in later years for sensuality and excess.

Upon the premiere of her act in 1905 she was an overnight success, but by 1910 a flood of imitators diluted the uniqueness of Mata Hari's performances and critics had begun suggesting there was nothing special about her or her act. It didn't help that her famed beauty had begun to fade as she aged into and through her thirties. She eventually transitioned from being a stage performer to a courtesan, having relationships with many high class officials, politicians, and military officers. These relationships frequently required her to travel across borders, which she could do freely as a citizen of the neutral Netherlands, but this travel brought her to the attention of the French military intelligence agency known as the Deuxième Bureau.

In 1916 Mata Hari was in an intense relationship with Vadim Maslov, a young Russian pilot serving with the French, whom she called the love of her life. After he was wounded in a dogfight, she requested permission to visit him near the front where he was station, where citizens of neutral nations were not normally permitted. The Deuxième Bureau contacted her and offered to let her see Maslov if she would agree to spy for France. This offer was made because she had a history with the German Crown Prince Wilhelm and the Deuxième Bureau believed she could obtain critical military secrets by seducing him. (The Deuxième Bureau was unaware that Wilhelm was not the strong military commander painted by German propaganda, but in fact a hard-drinking playboy who had been deliberately kept away from serious military business.)

Late in 1916 she met with German military attaché Major Arnold Kalle in Madrid, and asked if he could arrange a meeting with Crown Prince Wilhelm. At the same time it appears she offered to share French secrets for cash, although whether this was an incentive for Kalle to arrange the meeting with Wilhelm or out of simple greed is unclear. Rather than arrange a meeting, though, Kalle instead sent messages to Berlin in a code known to have been broken by the French, effusively praising the work of a Double Agent code-named "H-21" whose transmitted biography was a one-for-one match with Mata Hari's.

At the same time, the Deuxième Bureau was apparently having doubts about having recruited her. A few weeks before the "H-21" transmissions, they leaked the name of six Belgian agents for the Germans to Mata Hari, one of whom was suspected of being an outright Double Agent. When after she had visited Madrid again the suspected double agent was arrested and executed by the Germans, the Deuxième Bureau decided it had proof that she had passed the names to the Germans. This combined with the "H-21" messages clearly prompted the Bureau to act. On February 13, 1917, Mata Hari was arrested, and five months later, in July of 1917, was put on trial. She was accused of spying for Germany and being directly responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers.

After a Kangaroo Court trial in which her defense counsel was denied the right to actively pursue her defense in any way (he wasn't even permitted to examine his own client and witnesses) and the simple fact that she was female was used as evidence against her, Mata Hari was convicted and sentenced to death. She was executed by a firing squad before dawn on October 15, 1917.

All in all, Mata Hari was a spy (regardless of side) for no more than eight months between 1916 and 1917. Historians have noted that she had never been an important spy and hadn't passed to the Germans "anything that you couldn’t find in the local newspapers in Spain", as British historian Julie Wheelwright put it. Other historians have made the case that she was prosecuted and the trial given such a high profile to make her The Scapegoat for the French Military's humiliating defeats on the battlefield in 1916 and the subsequent 1917 French Army mutinies. And sealed state secrets released a century after her execution in fact revealed she was innocent of being a double agent anywhere on the scale for which she had been convicted.

Her life was later fictionalized into a story of her being an irresistible master spy, and the idea stuck, giving birth to the modern Seductive Spy trope, for which she is the former Trope Namer.

For a more detailed exploration of her life, accomplishments, and death, see Wikipedia's page on her.


 * A-Cup Angst: She was self-conscious about her small breasts, which is why she never bared them in her act.
 * Black Like Me: Although she didn't look at all Southeast Asian, at the start of her career she presented herself as a Javanese princess of priestly Hindu birth, trained in sacred Indian dance as a child. In this she was no doubt helped by the studies she made of Javanese culture and dance during her marriage to Rudolf MacLeod, as well as Western Europeans' general ignorance of Indonesia at the time.  This "deception" was used as evidence against her during her trial.
 * Bluff the Eavesdropper: Done by Major Arnold Kalle as part of a deliberate plan to expose Mata Hari as a Double Agent to her employers in the Deuxième Bureau. Using a code the Germans knew France had broken, he sent effusively gushing messages to Berlin about the activities of a German spy codenamed "H-21", describing H-21 in so much detail that it was obvious that they and Mata Hari were supposed to be the same person.  When the Deuxième Bureau deciphered the messages, they made the intended deduction.
 * Double Agent: Accused by the French government (and convicted) of being one for Germany.
 * Facing the Bullets One-Liner: She is reported to have blown a kiss to the firing squad just before her execution.
 * Feed the Mole: After decoding the "H-21" messages, the Deuxième Bureau let her learn the names of six Belgian agents believed to be working in some manner for the Germans, one of whom was an outright Double Agent.  Two weeks later, the double agent was executed, which the Deuxième Bureau took as proof that she had passed the names to the Germans.
 * Femme Fatale: After her death she gained a reputation as one, but as even a casual perusal of this page will indicate, she wasn't, not really.
 * Follow the Leader: By 1910 dozens of Mata Hari imitators had appeared in Europe, diluting the uniqueness of her act and prompting critics to suggest that her success was due entirely to exhibitionism and was without any artistic merit. It's probably no coincidence that her dance career began to fade not long afterward.
 * Frame-Up: While Mata Hari was indeed a recruited spy and apparently did at least offer to sell French secrets to Germany, she was -- as the documents released a century after her death revealed -- innocent of anything of the scale that she was accused of.  The "H-21" messages were clearly intended to "expose" her to French intelligence after the Germans discovered she had nothing of any value to provide them, and the French Military took advantage of this to make her a scapegoat for their defeats on the battlefield and the subsequent 1917 French Army mutinies.
 * Gay Paree: Paris of the early 1900s was the home base for her entire dance career, and she still was based there as she transitioned from dancer to courtesan.
 * High-Class Call Girl: In her later years she was known more as a courtesan, since her dance/striptease career had basically ended after 1912.
 * Hot Mom: She was 28 and the mother of two when she began her career as an exotic dancer.  Unfortunately she didn't stay a Hot Mom.
 * I Was Quite a Looker: By her late 30s her physical beauty had begun to fade and her famed willowy figure had disappeared under a noticeable weight gain.  However, by that time she had become a successful courtesan, known for her skill and eroticism rather than for her beauty.
 * Kangaroo Court/Hanging Judge: Her conviction in a show trial. Her defense attorney, for example, was not allowed to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses or even examine his own witnesses.
 * Mail Order Bride: At age 18, she answered a newspaper advertisement for a bride placed by Captain Rudolf MacLeod of the Dutch Colonial Army, who was stationed in what is now Indonesia.  She married him in 1895; the marriage was not a happy one and ended in divorce in 1906.
 * The Mistress: To French industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet for many years.
 * Person as Verb: The extremely common act of describing a Seductive Spy as "a Mata Hari".
 * Really Gets Around: Was quite carefree and open about her promiscuity in an era when Victorian mores were still present in the cultural pool.  Even in France she was seen as unusually sexually active.
 * The Scapegoat: Was convicted of and executed for being a Double Agent for Germany as a way of shifting the blame for French military failures in World War I away from the French government.
 * Seductive Spy: The former Trope Namer.
 * Shot At Dawn: The manner of her execution, performed by twelve French soldiers just before dawn on October 15, 1917.
 * Stage Names: "Mata Hari".
 * Vindicated by History: Records released a hundred years after her execution revealed her innocence.  Even before that, though, historians had been challenging the official record on her guilt.
 * You Can Leave Your Hat On: Became famous for a striptease act that ended with her wearing only a headdress, a "breastplate" (effectively a bikini top decorated with gold and jewels) and jewelry.  Wikipedia has a photo. (NSFW!)

Anime and Manga

 * Nancy Makuhari in Read or Die

Film

 * Mati Herring from You Nazty Spy, a classic Three Stooges film, is an obvious parody.
 * Mata Hari, die rote Tänzerin (Mata Hari: The Red Dancer), a 1927 German film starring Magda Sonja in the title role.
 * Greta Garbo played her in the 1931 pre-Hays Code film Mata Hari.  Although Garbo's most successful film, it only survives in a heavily-censored version released after the imposition of the Code.
 * In 1985, Golan-Globus produced their own Mata Hari film, described as an "erotic biography" and featuring Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel in the title role.
 * In 1977, David Carradine began making a film about Mata Hari starring his daughter Callista (then 15) who would portray her from childhood to adulthood; he continued filming it on and off over the next twenty-five years and in 2004 claimed to be "just about done". It has yet to be released as of 2022.
 * Mata Hari, Agent H21, a 1964 French-Italian spy film starring Jeanne Moreau.
 * The spoofy 1967 Casino Royale film includes in its cast of characters Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the original James Bond. (So as not to throw a downer into the middle of the comedy, the fate of her mother is never mentioned.)
 * In the 1968 Spanish comedy Operación Mata Hari, Mata Hari retires, but her Spanish maid Guillermina ends up impersonating her in an espionage comedy-of-errors.
 * Zsa Zsa Gabor portrays her in the 1972 British comedy film Up the Front.
 * Mata Hari: The Naked Spy was a Documentary/Biography released on the one-hundredth anniversary of her execution in 2017. Notable for, among other things, actress Florence Rapati's stunning resemblance to the actual Mata Hari.
 * She appears as one of the Sheperd's agents in the 2021 film The King's Man.

Literature

 * Harriet Welch idolizes Mata Hari in Harriet the Spy.

Live-Action TV

 * Mata Hari, a 1981 dramatic miniseries from the Netherlands in which she recounts her life during the interrogation before her trial.
 * Young Indiana Jones: Apparently Henry Jones Junior lost his virginity to Mata Hari during World War I.
 * Mata Hari, a 2017 Russian-Portuguese series starring Vahina Giocante, which ran for one season and twelve episodes.

Music

 * There have been at least two songs about Mata Hari entered into the Eurovision Song Contest.

Theatre

 * There have been at least five musicals inspired by her life. Among them:
 * Mata Hari, a 1967 musical drama which after receiving scathing reviews during its pre-Broadway tryout was reworked and ran for a disappointing fifteen performances off-Broadway under the title Ballad for a Firing Squad. (Variety  magazine described its opening night as having gone down in Broadway lore as "one of the great theatrical disasters" and described it as "a musical as ill-fated as its heroine".) In 1996 it was revived under its original title to somewhat (but not much) more success.
 * Mata Hari at the Moulin Rouge was a 2016 musical that premiered in South Korea and also had a run in Japan.
 * In February 2016, the Dutch National Ballet premiered a two-act ballet called Mata Hari.
 * An opera, also called Mata Hari, premiered in 2017 at New York's Prototype Festival and was later also produced by the West Edge Opera.

Video Games

 * Margarete from Shadow Hearts is Mata Hari.
 * The adventure game Mata Hari is based on her. Reviews have been mixed, but the general consensus is it's So Okay It's Average.

Western Animation

 * Hatta Mari from the Looney Tunes Wartime Cartoon "Plane Daffy."

Other Media

 * In 1978 Bally released a Mata Hari pinball machine, but it had little do with anything historical, and at least one version of the game had anachronistic World War II references worked into its design.