by Pat Shipman
Hans Sagace is a name that never again figured in any document about Mata Hari, nor can he be traced. This alleged transaction vaguely resembled her dealing with Karl Kroemer, from whom she had received 20,000 francs. The report also remarked that it was suspicious that she received letters under the name of MacLeo [sic] and that she appeared to have two addresses in The Hague (one being where Colonel van der Capellan and his wife lived). Without any further evidence, the writer of the report concluded: “One suspects her of having gone to France on an important mission that will profit the Germans.”
Code-named T, Tinsley was not always a reliable agent. Ivone Kirkpatrick, a future permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office, found T “a liar and a first-class intriguer with few scruples.”
Two weeks later, another British report said that she had apparently succeeded in her mission and would now go to collect the money that the Germans had deposited for her in a bank. It also expressed concern that the story of Mata Hari’s life had been written in a book published by her father through the Veldt press, which was thought suspicious.
On February 22, 1916, a circular was sent by the British secret service to the French saying simply that if Mata Hari entered Great Britain, she was to be arrested and sent to Scotland Yard.
In May she received a new passport from the Dutch government. The French consulate issued her a visa; she hoped to stop in Britain on the way to France, but the British consulate would not issue her a visa. She went to the Foreign Office in The Hague for assistance, as she knew of no good reason the British should refuse her entry, and they sent a telegram to the Dutch ambassador in London, de Marees van Swinderen:
WELL-KNOWN DUTCH ARTIST MATA HARI, DUTCH SUBJECT WHOSE REAL NAME IS MACLEOD ZELLE, WANTS TO GO FOR PERSONAL REASONS TO PARIS WHERE SHE HAS LIVED BEFORE THE WAR. BRITISH CONSULATE ROTTERDAM DECLINES TO PUT VISA TO PASSPORT THOUGH FRENCH CONSUL HAS DONE SO. PLEASE BEG BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO GIVE ORDERS CONSUL ROTTERDAM THAT VISA MAY BE GRANTED. WIRE.
After consulting the Home Office, van Swinderen replied that the British had reason to consider the entry of Mata Hari into Britain “undesirable.” The notations in her security file from her previous questioning in Folkestone made her entry into Britain impossible. The Foreign Office decided not to reveal the contents of this reply to Mata Hari and apparently advised her to take another route.
She chose to sail on the S.S. Zeelandia, which left from Amsterdam. Her plan was to disembark at Vigo in Spain, for which she obtained a visa without difficulty, and then proceed to Madrid, where she could take a train to Paris.
Her trip was troubled by a bizarre occurrence involving a fellow passenger on the Zeelandia with the Dutch name of Hoedemaker. He was a salesman and was said to be a Jew—a highly derogatory term in those days—who regularly denounced German sympathizers to the British, so he claimed. Mata Hari was warned by a fellow passenger that Hoedemaker was claiming to have been in her cabin, implying he had had sex with her. Mata Hari demanded a confrontation. In front of all the passengers, she asked him if he had been in her cabin and he denied it but admitted to spreading a rumor to that effect. She slapped him, hard enough to draw blood, and she thought the matter was finished. But the consul of Uruguay, who was also on the ship, warned her that Hoedemaker was threatening to avenge himself for this humiliation. According to Mata Hari, she then said, “I shall wait for it. If he wishes, I will place a slap of the sort he has already received on the other cheek.” The consul suggested that Hoedemaker would speak against her to authorities and she would have difficulty at the border crossing. More immediately, he followed her after she disembarked from the ship and she asked two gentlemen to accompany her to Madrid, for protection. Though she obtained a visa from France without difficulty, as the consul had predicted, she was stopped and interrogated at the border at Hendaye. When she went to the consul of Holland, she found he was a Spanish wine merchant who could offer her little assistance.
Mata Hari wrote an indignant letter about this affair to the Dutch consul in Madrid, van Royen. His inquiries revealed that she was on a list of suspects in Britain and thus she had been refused entry into France. A letter of explanation was written to Mata Hari by van Royen’s assistant, telling her that “not even the intervention of the Minister could avail anything; neither [could] the declarations that your sympathies are pro-Ally.” She also wrote a letter to her lover Jules Cambon, who had been promoted to secretary-general of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When she returned to Hendaye the next day, apparently her self-assurance and threats to take matters to her lover intimidated the border guards, who decided not to challenge her further.
But who was Hoedemaker? And what was his role in Mata Hari’s increasingly frequent difficulties with French and British security? The name is not listed in the indices of the Public Records Office in London for this period. Of course, if he were indeed a spy or spy-catcher working for British counterespionage, he might have had numerous aliases. The British files on Mata Hari now kept by MI5 do not include anything that would suggest Hoedemaker was working for them or indeed that he was anything more than an ill-mannered blowhard. One source traced the fate of a Henry Hoedemaker, presumably the man on the Zeelandia in 1916, who told relatives he had been responsible for Mata Hari’s arrest and conviction. He committed suicide in 1921. Were his boasts and threats on that voyage simply indicative of the tenor of the times, of the way people perceived a woman like Mata Hari in 1916? Or was he something more sinister? These questions remain unanswered.
Once she arrived back in Paris on June 16, Mata Hari resumed as glamorous a life as was possible in wartime there. Early in 1916, Paris had been bombed by zeppelins, but the damage was comparatively minor. She lived at the Grand Hotel, still an excellent and luxurious establishment for those with money to spare. There were plenty of handsome men in Paris in the summer of 1916, and many of them were high-ranking officers. Mata Hari expected to have a good time.
Mata Hari must have known that the ferocious Battle of Verdun—which would become the longest in World War I—was being fought fewer than two hundred miles from Paris. All of the newspapers were full of battle stories. It was at Verdun that General Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of staff of the German army, had pledged to “bleed the French army white” with a massive attack. In response, the commander charged with holding Verdun, Henri-Philippe Pétain, vowed, “They shall not pass.” When the fighting at Verdun began, a valiant 200,000 Frenchmen expected to defeat 1 million Germans. Before the grueling battle ended in December 1916, both sides had fulfilled their grim goals. About 550,000 French and 434,000 German casualties were reported, of which about half died. The enormous death toll devastated French morale. Before the war, the French generals had sincerely believed that the spirit of the French soldier would make him more than a match for a much greater force of Germans. Deaths necessitated reinforcements, which rapidly increased the number of French involved until eventually 259 of the existing 330 French infantry regiments fought at Verdun. The diversion of an enormous number of farmers into the military caused food shortages and further depressed morale.
Yet there was still food and luxury for those who could afford it. The main effect of the war on Mata Hari was to increase the number of uniformed officers in Paris.
So used was she to having men look at her and follow her that it was a few days before she noticed that the same two men were following her everywhere she went. They were a pair of Paris inspectors, Tarlet and Monier. As soon as she noticed them, she complained to the bellboy of the hotel on June 21 that she was being followed. They noticed her noticing them but nonetheless resumed surveillance on June 24. The situation would have been an amusing French farce were the ultimate consequences not so serious. Tarlet and Monier followed her nearly continuously from morning until the lights went off in her room, from June 18, 1916, until January 13, 1917. For their pains, the inspectors received an unexpected education in the best hotels, restaurants, dressmakers, furriers, and j
ewelers of Paris. They steamed open her mail, questioned porters, waitresses, and hairdressers, and collected abundant evidence of her love life but not of espionage.
Tarlet and Monier were clearly out of their depth tailing Mata Hari. They remarked in an early report that she was “très élégante” and described her clothes and hat in some detail. Occasionally she managed to give them the slip, which they felt was deliberate. Sometimes she hailed taxis or carriages that made abrupt turns, so she could pass them going in the opposite direction and stare at them triumphantly. Tarlet and Monier filed stiff, formal reports detailing where she went, what she bought, whom she saw, whom she spoke to on the telephone, where she ate lunch and dinner and with whom, day after day.
The general pattern of her days was to go down to breakfast in the hotel at about 10 a.m., return upstairs afterward, and go out at about 11:00 or 11:30. Sometimes she stayed at the hotel, writing letters or performing invisible (to Tarlet and Monier) actions in her room until after she had her midday meal. In the afternoons, she shopped or visited boot- and shoemakers, dressmakers, hatmakers, furriers, florists, jewelers, parfumiers, hairdressers, manicurists, pharmacies, banks, bakeries, and purveyors of fine luggage, gloves, handkerchiefs, chocolates, paper, lingerie, or handbags. She took a great many taxis, which posed a problem for her policemen.
On July 11, she reserved a room next door to hers for her lover Fernand, the marquis de Beaufort, at the Grand Hotel. The marquis was a Belgian officer, forty-two years old, who was the commandant of the Fourth Belgian Lancers, Division of the Cavalry of the Army of the Yser. He was expected to arrive in a few days’ time. Yet that same evening she was seen in the company of a second lieutenant of the Eighth Chasseurs d’Afrique (African Hunters), a light cavalry regiment.
The next day, their report states that she had lunch with a military man in khaki, an unidentified adjutant or second lieutenant. She also visited the home of Madame Dangeville, a retired actress who entertained officers in her salon. The language of the inspectors’ report was plain but nonetheless conveyed their raised eyebrows. If she was waiting for her lover de Beaufort, why was she seeing these other men? Tarlet and Monier had not yet taken the measure of Mata Hari and had not become used to the constant parade of admirers who passed through her life.
When de Beaufort arrived, he and Mata Hari sequestered themselves in her room for a blissful twenty-four hours, having food and drink sent up to them. Over the next few days, they spent a great deal of time together. According to their reports, Tarlet and Monier somehow learned that Mata Hari wanted to go to Vittel, a fashionable spa town, to pass the season. They wrote drily in their report: “Suffering from pains, it is said. But one must be very skeptical about the point of the voyage. She has foreseen the difficulties that she will have to surmount to obtain a safe-conduct [pass] for this part of the war zone.”
This entry is interesting because there is no apparent reason why Mata Hari would want to go to Vittel unless it was simply her usual wanderlust. There is also no indication of how the inspectors obtained this vague information.
To the policemen’s evident disapproval, after de Beaufort left on the morning train on July 19, Mata Hari had dinner with another man, whom she also saw on the subsequent day: a purveyor of fine liquors, Bernard Antoine, who was traveling through Paris. After identifying him, they wrote: “We do not know on what terms the aforementioned [Mata Hari and Antoine] were together, because this encounter appears to be nothing more than a flirtation.”
During this time in Paris, Mata Hari met many men, but three would assume enormous importance in her life. Two were lovers, one a spymaster. Among them, they spun a web in which Mata Hari became fatally entrapped.
The first lover was Second Lieutenant Jean Hallaure, whom the inspectors did not name outright in their reports out of discretion but who was well known to them. After being wounded in battle, Hallaure had been moved to the Deuxième Bureau of the Ministry of War. He had met Mata Hari many years before, when she performed at Molier’s circus. In 1917 he was twenty-six years old, tall, handsome in his cavalry uniform, and wealthy. He saw her at the Grand Hotel and recognized her, despite—so he said—her having dyed her hair blond again. He sent her his card and an invitation to meet for coffee; Mata Hari was delighted to resume their acquaintance. They were observed together on July 21, 22, and 25.
Hallaure was infatuated with Mata Hari, although an ominous event occurred. “Around this time, my friend Capt. Christian de Mouchy…said to me one day, ‘My boy, in your place, I would not go around so often with this woman. You belong to the army, where the most unfortunate rumors circulate about her. She is an alien, she was [involved] with a German before the war, and I believe she is a suspect.’”
On July 27, Hallaure sent her a pneumatique, using a citywide system that delivered messages within Paris via pneumatic tubes. According to later testimony by Hallaure, the content of the pneumatique concerned Mata Hari’s request for the name of a physician who would attest to her poor health and her need to go to Vittel to take the waters, but this cannot be accurate. Mata Hari could not have known until July 31, when she applied at the Police Commissariat for a safe-conduct to go to Calais and Vittel in August, that such a request would be delayed or refused because both cities were in the war zone. Only after being refused would she need to seek advice from her lover in the Ministry of War, Hallaure. She did not know that her friendship with him was about to lead her into serious danger. Quite possibly, having been warned by his friend Captain de Mouchy, Hallaure himself was planning to entrap Mata Hari.
Mata Hari asked Hallaure what she must do to get a permit to go to Vittel; he apparently told her that perhaps a physician’s certificate attesting to her need to take the waters in Vittel would do. As Hallaure later recounted the story:
Abruptly, without my observing any change in her, Mata Hari told me she was suffering and had an urgent need to go to Vittel. She asked me how she might do it. At that time, it was essential in order to go into the armed zone, in which this station was, to go to the Military Bureau for Foreigners, 282, boulevard Saint-Germain.
That office referred her to the Deuxième Bureau [the French intelligence unit], which is directly upstairs from it…. I gave Mata Hari the address and I spoke of her to a little second lieutenant that I knew vaguely and that I knew was in the military bureau…. Then she left Paris without warning [me].
If their relationship was as casual as he says, there is no reason why Mata Hari would warn Hallaure that she was leaving Paris. Thus his testimony seems a blatant attempt to deny responsibility or intimacy with Mata Hari. Too, the reports of Tarlet and Monier reveal that he continued to see her frequently. He testified:
In the days which preceded her departure for Vittel, she was more and more distant with me. I went to see her at her hotel, but I found her less friendly, she saw all the world at the Grand Hotel, notably numerous officials from other countries. On the evening before her departure, she broke with politeness and, forgetting I had invited her to dinner, she dined with an English officer with whom I saw her in deep conversation.
I was supposed to accompany her to the station where she canceled on me under the pretext that her departure was delayed. She promised to meet with me on another date, but she did nothing and I heard nothing more from her.
In fact, Hallaure had seen Mata Hari more often than he wished to admit. He saw her on July 21, 22, 25, and 27 and on August 1; he called unsuccessfully to see her on August 2, corresponded with her that day and the next, visited her again on August 9 and 17, when he appeared to be “very animated,” and corresponded again on the eighteenth. On August 19, he took her around to look at apartments; they found one she liked, but according to Hallaure, “the proprietor refused her because in his opinion, she had on too much makeup and was too bleached blond.” Hallaure saw her again on August 30 and expected to dine with her the next night but found to his dismay that she was with another officer.
Most of their meeting
s followed a pattern: he would arrive at her hotel and stay for an hour or two in the early afternoon about once a week. This suggests a regular sexual encounter at a time of day when he was not required to be in his office. By the time he was officially questioned about his relations with Mata Hari, he probably wished to distance himself from association with her. Although she fell truly and deeply in love in the summer of 1916, the blossoming of this affair did not prevent Mata Hari from seeing many other men, so it is unlikely that it caused her to become aloof with Hallaure.
The second lover to influence the rest of Mata Hari’s life was Vladimir de Massloff, a Russian officer whom she had met at Madame Dangeville’s salon probably on July 29; they were introduced by de Massloff’s colleague, Second Lieutenant Nicholas Casfield. De Massloff was even younger than Hallaure—twenty-one to Mata Hari’s thirty-nine years—and a captain in the Special Imperial Russian Regiment of the First Brigade. By all accounts, it was a fervent affair. She called him “Vadime”; he called her “Marina”—a pet name to mark another important stage in her life.
On July 30, Vadime and Mata Hari struck up a conversation in the Grand Hotel and then went for a promenade in the Bois de Boulogne. After that, they dined at the very chic Pavillon d’Armenonville, where she had been taken by de Beaufort. The restaurant was within the Bois in a romantic setting. After another lengthy stroll, they returned to the Grand Hotel.
It was the very next day, July 31, after spending the night with Vadime, that Mata Hari first went to the Police Commissariat on the rue Taitbout to apply for permission to go on August 7 to Calais and Vittel, vaguely near Mailly, where Vadime was stationed at the western front. She was told that her permit was refused because both Calais and Vittel were in the war zone. After all, Vittel was not far from the front line. It was hardly a time to allow civilians—much less a woman of foreign nationality—to visit the area. Nonetheless, she determinedly went to the prefecture of police to request a copy of her French registration paper to append to her permit application.