Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  En route back to The Hague, Mata Hari was again detained and questioned by Scotland Yard when the ship she was travelling in docked at Falmouth. This time she was accused of being a German agent, Clara Benedix. During a number of interviews, Mata Hari denied being Benedix, suggesting various high-profile friends who would bear witness to her innocence and finally admitted that she was indeed a spy but for France, not Germany, and described her meetings with Ladoux. Her story was not believed and when Scotland Yard contacted Ladoux, he denied the arrangement, implying that she was actually working for the Germans and suggesting she be sent to Spain.

  Once in Spain, Mata Hari, who continued to believe that she was still working for Ladoux, made contact with the German naval attaché in Madrid, Major Arnold Kalle. Pretending she was working for the Germans, she obtained information about German submarine activity, which she sent to Ladoux; they also gossiped about the progress of the war. She had a subsequent liaison with Kalle, who by now had also become suspicious of Mata Hari and assumed that she was a spy for France. He provided her with some misinformation and paid her a sum of money, which she assumed was for sexual favours.

  From here on events moved quickly. Mata Hari returned to Paris in January 1917, had one inconclusive meeting with Ladoux who refused to believe her information, and in February 1917 was arrested and taken to Saint-Lazare prison for women, previously used mainly for prostitutes but now also used to imprison women spies. The conditions were appalling. Over the next four months, Mata Hari was interviewed fourteen times, mainly by Captain Pierre Bouchardon, chief investigating officer, who from the outset accused Mata Hari of being a German agent, probably an agent known as H21 who had been trained in the German spy school at Antwerp. Throughout the many interrogations, Mata Hari, although she often produced contradictory evidence and was vague about dates and events, continued to maintain her innocence as well as pleading for bail and better conditions, protesting that she was a citizen of a neutral country.

  During her subsequent court case she returned to this theme, probably somewhat naively saying: ‘I am not French so what is to prevent my having friends of any nationality I choose? If I wrote to high-ranking Germans it was only because they wrote to me and I returned their endearments, but nothing more.’

  In the climate of the time, with the French army mutinying on the Western Front, low morale among soldiers and spy paranoia raging out of control, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. On 24 July 1917 Mata Hari was brought to trial. The hearing was closed to the public and the evidence called was almost entirely circumstantial and uncorroborated. The prosecution referred to her relationships with military officers, claimed that she had used her sexuality to obtain military secrets, that she was in the pay of the Germans – the payment from Kalle was cited – that she had given valuable secrets to the Germans, and that her actions had caused the deaths of thousands of Allied soldiers. In his final statement, the prosecutor said: ‘The evil that this woman has done is unbelievable. This is perhaps the greatest woman spy of the century.’ In her defence, Mata Hari continued to state that she was innocent and had always remained neutral. The following day she was found guilty on eight charges of passing information to the German naval attaché, Arnold Kalle, and condemned to death. On 15 October, wearing a pearl-grey dress, stockings, long-buttoned gloves, ankle boots and a tricornered felt hat, and refusing a blindfold, Mata Hari was executed by firing squad.

  ‘The Third War Council has condemned me to death and it is nothing but a grave error… I have truly not done any espionage in France, it is really terrible that I cannot defend myself.’

  (Mata Hari, letter to Dutch legate, Ridder van Stuers, 22 September 1917)

  The following day an announcement appeared in The Times:

  ‘Mata Hari, the dancer, was shot this morning. She was arrested in Paris in February and sentenced to death by Court-martial… for espionage and giving information to the enemy. Her real name was Marguerite [sic] Gertrude Zelle. When war was declared she was moving in political, military and police circles in Berlin, and had her number on the rolls of the German espionage services. She was in the habit of meeting notorious German spy-masters outside French territory and was proved to have communicated important information to them, in return for which she had received several large sums of money since May 1916.’ (The Times, 16 October 1917)

  Mata Hari’s trial and execution received an extraordinary amount of publicity even though there really was not much hard proof at all; some months later Ladoux himself was accused of espionage. But given the climate of the time, Mata Hari’s execution met a profound need: to expose and punish a decadent woman, and warn others who might be the ‘enemy within’. Extraordinary rumours circulated after her death: that she had gone to death naked under her coat, that she had blown kisses at her executioners, even that she had escaped and was still alive. The truth was more prosaic: she was executed and because her body was unclaimed, it was taken to a dissecting room in the University of Paris medical school. Even so rumours continued that she was still alive; even as late as the 1920s the Daily Mail claimed that a woman’s body washed up on a beach was that of Mata Hari.

  Since her death, Mata Hari has been the stuff of legends and fantasies; in 1931 Greta Garbo starred in a popular film, Mata Hari, which was largely fictional, and numerous books have been written about her, some of them very scholarly works. The question of her guilt or innocence has been hotly debated. In 1929 the head of German counter-espionage during the First World War denied absolutely that Mata Hari had ever worked for the service and in 1932 the French government admitted that there was ‘no tangible… irrefutable evidence’ of her guilt. When the dossier on Mata Hari was finally opened, it confirmed that the prosecution’s case was very flimsy, which together with other evidence, led one of her leading biographers, Russell Howe, to conclude that she was innocent. But whether guilty or innocent, Mata Hari more than any other woman spy, became an icon and household name; she was and remains the archetypal female spy seductress. As Julie Wheelwright has stated in her book The Fatal Lover, Mata Hari ‘brought together fears about the enemy alien, the wayward woman and sexual decadence’; in the climate of the time whether Mata Hari was a spy or not, such a notorious and flamboyant woman, who lived on the margins of society, was a threat and once charged with treason, had to die. Her image as spy seductress has remained the stereotype for female spies ever since.

  Fraulein Doktor

  ONE OF THE MOST intriguing stories in the history of women spies of the First World War is that of the ‘Fraulein Doktor’, also known as Tiger Eyes, the Queen of Spies, the Blond Lady and various other pseudonyms. There are few absolute facts about the Fraulein Doktor and it is possible that she never existed, although it is generally agreed that she probably was a German secret agent who ran the German spy school in Antwerp during the First World War, training up German agents to infiltrate England and France. She disappeared when the war ended and to this day no one knows her real identity with absolute certainty.

  According to the German physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirschfield, who wrote a sexual history of the First World War, which included a chapter on ‘Amatory Adventures of Female Spies’, the ‘legendary’ Fraulein Doktor, whom he described as ‘a woman with nerves of steel, a cold, logical engine for a mind, well-controlled sexuality, a fascinating body and demoniac eyes’, was Annemarie Lesser. She came from Berlin and during the First World War trained German agents, using merciless and unscrupulous methods that drove some of her trainees to suicide, and worked in the field as an agent herself, using her sexuality to seduce and obtain information from various French officers. She adopted various disguises, managed to evade capture on several occasions, until finally escaping into Switzerland, after shooting three men. She was said to be a cocaine addict and apparently had a complete mental breakdown after the war.

  Another theory is that the Fraulein Doktor was Elizabeth (or Elsbeth) Schragmuller, a highly educated woman who had o
btained a doctorate in philosophy from Frieburg University in 1913. Recruited into the German Secret Service by her lover, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Nicolai, head of German army intelligence, she initially worked in the censorship department and was subsequently moved to the Antwerp bureau. There she ran the spy school, training German agents with an iron discipline that, according to some accounts, bordered on the sadistic. Apparently she insisted that her trainees wore masks during their training so their identities were never known. At one point she was running more than forty agents. When the war ended, she returned to Germany and obscurity. During the 1930s a woman was admitted to a Swiss sanatorium suffering from drug addiction and it has been suggested that this may have been Elizabeth Schragmuller.

  Despite doubts about her actual identity, the so-called Fraulein Doktor fascinated spymasters and the media of the time. Vernon Kell of the British Secret Service believed she did exist and thought she must have been a very able woman, and in December 1919 The Times newspaper ran an article entitled ‘The “Blond Lady”’, stating that a colonel in the French counter-espionage service had been able to provide more details about her life. According to his accounts, the ‘Frau Doktor’ had lived in a hotel in Antwerp, was a ‘blond-haired lady’, who ‘spoke French without a trace of foreign accent’ and, according to the colonel’s account, ‘used to address her “tools” [agents] with a French cigarette between her lips, leaning back seductively in a large armchair.’ She lived there with two men, one of whom posed as an foppish Englishman, complete with monocle, and a high-ranking German officer, Keffer. The ‘blond-haired lady, besides using part of her time in beguiling poor unfortunates into betraying their countrymen,’ also collected information that she forwarded to Germany.

  Whoever she was, the image of the Fraulein Doktor was of a beautiful, powerful, sexualized and dangerous woman, a spy in the mould of Mata Hari but more dangerous because she was never caught. Her supposed personality and exploits continued to exert a fascination long after the war. Fictional representations of the Fraulein Doktor featured in various spy novels and she was the subject of a number of films, including Under Secret Orders (1937), staring Dita Parlo and Erich von Stroheim. Her character may also have been loosely adapted for two quite different female characters in two of the James Bond films: Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice (1971) and Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love (1963).

  Chapter 3

  Spying Under Occupation

  ‘The greatest spy organization of the War.’

  HENRY LANDAU

  Operating as a spy in occupied territory is by definition extremely dangerous, carrying risks of capture, imprisonment, torture and often death. Nevertheless throughout the First World War thousands of courageous women and men in occupied territories ran escape networks for Allied soldiers and spied for the British Secret Service, gathering and transmitting invaluable military information. The British public was unaware of their existence and even to this day they have never received the same attention as those who did so during the Second World War.

  La Dame Blanche

  One remarkable secret agent network, which operated in occupied Belgium and Northern France was La Dame Blanche (The White Lady). A few patriotic Belgians, headed by an engineer named Dieudonné Lambrecht, had formed a small espionage network in the early months of the war. They set up train-watching posts at Liège, Namur and Jemelle and from these provided information about German troop movements to British military intelligence, including information about German preparations for the attack on Verdun. However, in January 1916 Lambrecht was caught and in April was executed. Determined to keep the network going, in June 1916 one of Lambrecht’s cousins, Walthère Dewé, the chief engineer with the Liège phone and telegraph network, Chauvin, a professor of physics, and Father Des Oynes founded what was initially called the Service Michelin and later La Dame Blanche, after a legendary phantom that was said to foretell the fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

  A patriotic Belgian banker had provided funding for the network but the men knew they needed to attach themselves to an Allied intelligence service and, after working first with Belgian and French intelligence, in 1917 La Dame Blanche attached itself to British intelligence. From then on and until the end of the war, La Dame Blanche worked directly with and was funded by the British War Office; their chief or director of operations, based in Rotterdam, being Captain Henry Landau, a South African and member of the British intelligence corps, who in 1935 published an account of the organization entitled Secrets of the White Lady.

  From its beginnings La Dame Blanche was an extraordinarily successful espionage organization; Landau described it as the ‘greatest spy organization of the War’. Its organizers had no illusions about the dangers they faced; about fifty spies had already been shot in Liège alone, and hundreds of suspect Belgian or French citizens had been arrested. To ensure maximum security and efficiency, La Dame Blanche would need to be well organized and run as efficiently as possible. One of the conditions the organizers demanded before agreeing to be attached to British intelligence was that all members of La Dame Blanche, whether male or female, should be enrolled as soldiers. This was unprecedented and fraught with legal and technical difficulties. Nevertheless, Landau agreed to the condition and from then on La Dame Blanche was effectively run as a military organization. The organizers divided Belgium into four regions, each with a lead agent heading operations, and three battalions were created with centres at Liège, Namur and Charleroi. Each battalion was divided into companies, of which there were nine, and companies were divided into thirty-eight platoons. The size of each platoon varied; the Hirson Platoon, for instance, had about fifty members. One in every four platoons had the responsibility for collecting intelligence reports from the other three, and for getting them to a designated ‘letter box’ from where reports went to the organization headquarters in Liège. Special couriers took reports to the Belgian-Dutch frontier, sometimes hidden in specially-made hollow canes and from there agents smuggled them into Holland, which was no easy task as the frontier was guarded by a high-voltage electric fence and numerous sentries. For extra security, couriers and ‘letter boxes’ rarely knew each other so that if caught, an agent could not betray his or her colleagues. The members of La Dame Blanche were referred to as ‘soldiers’ or ‘agents’ rather than spies. Moreover, La Dame Blanche created its own counter-espionage section specifically to watch the German secret police, whose agents were everywhere and who not only attempted to infiltrate La Dame Blanche but also made use of disaffected local citizens as informants or stool pigeons.

  Once recruited all members – men and women – took the following oath of allegiance, swearing loyalty to the organization and agreeing not to work with any other espionage organization or to engage in other activities, such as running escape networks for Allied refugees:

  ‘I declare that I have engaged myself as a soldier in the Military Observation Corps of the Allies until the end of the War. I swear before God to respect this engagement; to accomplish conscientiously the duties which are entrusted to me; to obey my superior officers; not to reveal to any one whomsoever, without formal permission, anything concerning the Service, not even if this should entail for me or mine the penalty of death; not to join any other espionage service, nor to undertake any work extraneous to the Service, which might either cause an inquiry or my arrest by the Germans.’

  On joining La Dame Blanche, members were given a lead disc engraved with their name, date and place of birth and a number. The discs were buried and were to be dug up after the war. Although the British provided funds for expenses, members were not paid.

  The soldiers

  Recruiting agents for La Dame Blanche was not difficult. Despite the dangers involved in spying for Britain under the noses of the Germans, hundreds of Belgian men and women were prepared to risk their lives to do whatever they could to oppose the German occupation and help the Allies. Just over a thousand mainly Belgian but also French civilians of
all ages and social classes worked for La Dame Blanche, which eventually had agents operating throughout the whole of Belgium and most of occupied France. About 30 per cent of the total were women. Their ages ranged from 16-82 and they included working-class women and aristocrats, teachers, farming women, shopkeepers, midwives and unemployed women. Many nuns also worked for La Dame Blanche, including two Frenchwomen, Sister Marie Mélanie and Sister Marie-Caroline, whose convent in Belgium was used as a hospital by the Germans. With the permission of their Mother Superior, the two nuns enrolled in La Dame Blanche and passed on invaluable information about German armaments and troops which they obtained from talking with wounded German soldiers.

  Women ran the same risks as men. They operated as agents, observed trains and troop movements, compiled coded reports, couriered intelligence reports and acted as ‘letter boxes’, provided drop-off points for intelligence and passed on information to the next courier. Most worked in the interior in either Belgium or Northern France, while a few operated at the frontier. Getting information – or agents – across the frontier into Holland was particularly dangerous. The leaders of La Dame Blanche tended to be men but women ran the same risks and, unusually for intelligence operations, had equal status with men. One of the La Dame Blanche battalions was headed by a woman, Laure Tandel, who, with her sister Louise, also a member of La Dame Blanche, ran a school in Brussels. Given the ever-present possibility that the many stool pigeons operating in Belgium and France could betray leaders, or that German agents might infiltrate the organization, certain women were briefed to take over as leaders if necessary. Women also recruited agents, set up train-watching posts, and helped to set up platoons.