by Pat Shipman
She also sent a note to Hallaure, probably to arrange their meeting the next day, and another to her couturier, asking if he would be so kind as to look after a trunk of hers while she took a brief trip to Vittel.
She returned to the prefecture of police on August 1, to pick up the copy of her registration paper. After an hour-and-a-half interlude with Hallaure during the middle of the day, she went to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain for the first time, apparently at Hallaure’s suggestion. The two government offices housed at that address were the Military Bureau for Foreigners and the headquarters of the Deuxième Bureau.
In 1916, Mata Hari fell deeply in love with a Russian captain eighteen years her junior, Vladimir de Massloff. She called him “Vadime” and he called her “Marina.”
All accounts except that of Hallaure himself concur that Hallaure deliberately sent Mata Hari directly to the third man who shaped her life: Captain Georges Ladoux, the head of the Deuxième Bureau, or French intelligence. It was Ladoux who had ordered Tarlet and Monier to tail Mata Hari; it was he who received the warning from the British that Mata Hari was under suspicion. And it was he who determined to bring Mata Hari down.
12
The Tangled Web
WHAT MATA HARI DID in the summer of 1916, and why, is difficult to unravel. There is much testimony and documentation about her activities, nearly all of it tainted by personal interest. The final truth is elusive, as is so much about her life.
Georges Ladoux, the man Mata Hari met at 282, boulevard Saint-Germain, was in a peculiar position. He had graduated from a prestigious military academy, Saint-Cyr, and was a friend of General Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, chief of staff of the French army. With his background, Ladoux might have expected by the age of forty-two to be in an important and powerful position. On August 4, 1914, Joffre had appointed Ladoux to be the head of the Deuxième Bureau of the Army Headquarters.
The agency formerly in charge of intelligence operations, the Intelligence Service, had been discredited because of its involvement in the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus. The taint lingered over the Deuxième Bureau, so Ladoux’s appointment was not the triumph that might have been expected. Spying was generally regarded as a dirty, underhanded endeavor carried out by the scum of society. It was seen as opportunistic, mercenary, and ill planned, of little true importance.
Ladoux’s outlook toward espionage was a bold departure from previous attitudes. He thought the threat of enemy espionage much greater than his predecessors did and envisioned a vast network of well-trained spies who moved at the highest levels of society, detecting secrets or simply undermining morale and military efforts. Ladoux took it as a personal challenge to make the military aware of the great danger of such spies.
In a letter to the minister of war and the minister of the interior on September 10, 1915, Ladoux had written: “Counterespionage is not today a simple task for the interior police [the Sûreté]. The enemy does not limit himself to spying the details of our military operations: he searches also to dissolve all our national defense forces. His action attacks establishments working for the State, in an attempt to destroy them, or tries to debauch the personnel. He tries to injure our credit or to drain our gold.”
Ladoux had his sights set on counterespionage as well as intelligence collection, though the Deuxième Bureau was technically responsible only for the latter. Counterespionage was the charge of the Sûreté. Like most of his peers, Ladoux made a clear connection between lax morals—debauchery—and spying, but his real aim was to obtain the power to run his unit in his own way. In his memoirs he remembers this power struggle lasting for eighteen months, until the end of 1915. From then on, he boasted, things had changed.
In 1916, when Ladoux encountered Mata Hari, he had won his administrative battles and was on a spy hunt. Having staked his reputation on capturing more of the foreign spies that he claimed were on every street corner, he needed to produce the proof. It was he who, acting on the vague communications from the British, ordered Mata Hari’s night-and-day tailing. Such a glamorous and notoriously immoral woman, who seemed to have an endless supply of money and military lovers from every nationality, was a juicy target.
Ladoux needed an attention-grabbing case; he wanted to capture a spy as a major victory. His need to succeed was strongly influenced by the war, which was going very badly for French troops. The slaughter at Verdun had begun in February of 1916 and showed no signs of letting up. The Battle of the Somme, intended to distract German attention and draw troops away from Verdun, had begun July 1 and was proving to be just as brutal. It would be heroic for Ladoux to catch a spy who could be blamed for the misery and death that bombarded the French population daily.
In fact, later developments would suggest that Ladoux may have had an even more sinister motive. He may well have been working as a double agent for Germany. If so, he needed a scapegoat to divert attention and suspicion from his own activities even more than he needed someone to blame for the French suffering.
Ladoux described his first meeting with Mata Hari:
It was in August 1916 that I first encountered Mata Hari, and I see her still as if it were yesterday, dressed, despite the summer, in a suit of somber color and sporting a straw hat with a large brim above which floated a gray plume. She entered into my office with the easy gait of an artist, habituated to walk into a scene, but she had in addition a graceful swing of the hips of a dancer.
There is no doubt her physical presence impressed him, as it did numerous other men. She was a beautiful woman with excellent taste, fashionably dressed.
As for Ladoux himself, he was far less impressive. Mata Hari described him as “a fat man with very black beard and very black hair, and spectacles…. He was tall and fat. Fatter than a man of 50 years…. He smokes all the time. He always has a little cigarette in his lips.”
As their relationship progressed, Mata Hari found Ladoux to be small-minded and coarse, a man of no imagination or grand vision. He regarded her as little better than a prostitute, money-grubbing and manipulative. Though she had a great need for money, Mata Hari had a grace and elegance combined with a charm and sophistication that either eluded Ladoux or that so disturbed him he had no option but to cover up his admiration by expressing scorn for her.
According to Ladoux, that fateful first interview proceeded along surprising lines. He wrote in his memoirs:
When I was slow to ask her to sit down, she approached a chair at my worktable and installed herself familiarly, as if she were already at home. “What do you wish of me?” she said to me in a French troubled only occasionally by a certain guttural inflection typical of her Oriental type.
“I don’t wish anything of you, but I hear from one of our mutual acquaintances that you intend to take the waters at Vittel, and as the spa is in the military zone, you must have a laissez-passer [permit] to go there. Now, it is I who gives them out and I am ready to oblige you.”
“Therefore, would you like to do a great service, which is to say to the gentlemen of the police who are downstairs and who don’t leave me any more than my shadow does, as it is very warm, will you authorize them to drink my health at the bistro across the street?”
“I have no authority to do so, Mata-Hari. But you are now under surveillance?”
“Yes, stupidly, and for several months, day and night. Every where I go, they follow me…and they use my absence from the hotel to search my luggage…. When I return, everything is upside-down…and you know that I have not the means to pay a ladies’ maid.”
The ice is broken, but not the charm, and I ask myself, at seeing my visitor’s tranquil assurance and self -control, if the English service which pesters me with notes about Mata-Hari, for more than a year, is not deceiving itself in telling us, without any proof, that she was a German agent.
Ladoux’s account is remarkable in several ways. The Mata Hari he portrays is audacious, cunning and bold in her acknowledgment of her surveillance and the searches of her rooms
, and yet so foolish as to almost dare him to suspect her. His words deliberately emphasize Mata Hari’s foreignness.
He also deviated from the truth. He had received two communiqués from the British about Mata Hari, which hardly amounts to pestering. A report from the British was sent to France in December 1915; its most damning words were “Although she was thoroughly searched and nothing incriminating found, she is regarded by Police and Military to be not above suspicion, and her subsequent movements should be watched.”
The second circular, issued February 22, 1916, said that if Mata Hari entered Britain, she was to be arrested and sent to Scotland Yard—a plain statement of suspicion but not a direct accusation of being a German spy.
Ladoux wrote his memoir to justify and dramatize his actions. He wanted to insure that his readers believed his plan was all along to entrap a known German spy rather than appearing to be an incompetent who tried to recruit a woman to spy for France who was already suspected of being a German spy. Ladoux wrote that he hinted he had tried to draw her to his office, using their mutual acquaintance Lieutenant Hallaure. He told her:
“We have often spoken of you with him and always good, I assure you. H[allaure]…does not believe that which our English friends say about you…that is to say, that you are—”
“A spy,” she interrupted. “But upon what do they base this accusation? Someone has followed me since I arrived. Has someone revealed something against me?”
“Absolutely nothing, it is why I will authorize you to go to Vittel.”
“Then, this stupid game needs to stop. Either I am dangerous, and then you will expel me, or I am nothing but a pretty little woman who, having danced all winter, wishes very much, now that the summer has come…to be left in peace.”
According to Ladoux’s memoir, he agreed to sign her permit to Vittel on the spot and did so. He expected her to come back to see him upon her return and asked only that she refrain from seducing pilots from the airfield near Vittel, at Contrexéville. “With fliers,” Ladoux claimed he said, cleverly, “you never know what can fall upon you from the sky.”
But Mata Hari told him she was in love and that she would not be seeing other men. Ladoux asked if it was Malsoff, a garbling of “de Massloff,” and from this Mata Hari deduced that it was Ladoux or his agents who had searched her room. Ladoux promised to stop such behavior, though of course he did not. Ladoux’s version of this incident closes with another assertion of his intuition that she was a German spy, though little in his behavior confirms that:
And the strange creature left with an even more supple allure than that with which she entered.
“Tate, the dossier of Mata-Hari!” I cried. And a few instants later, my faithful secretary, who was at the listening post in the bathroom where he transcribed night and day the most secret information, brought to me the collection of reports from the English police and French, a voluminous and useless packet where, during several months, we had been piling up the communications from the “Intelligence Service” and the reports of the surveillance by our agents.
I glanced through all the pieces once more. I reread the intercepted letters; most, moreover, were those exchanged by the dancer with her Russian captain at the front for several months; all had been submitted to a most minute examination and were cleared by all the chemical tests of our laboratory. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, which permitted another interpretation except a vague feeling!
For her part, Mata Hari described her first encounter with Ladoux somewhat differently, saying that Hallaure had advised her to go to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain:
There, I was received with more respect than the other visitors. An officer in uniform came to look for me on the ground floor and, taking my papers, led me to the second in an office where a gentleman in civilian clothes asked me to sit down facing him and received me very amiably. She, too, recounted the dialogue between herself and Ladoux:
Him: I see, madam, that you have asked to go to Vittel, but do you know it is in the military zone?
Me: It is a resort where I have gone before. I have even a note from a doctor.
Him: It is very difficult for foreigners to go there.
Me: If it is as difficult as that, I could go near Rome, to Fiuggi, where the waters are of the same nature.
Him: We need not refuse you, but it is necessary [first] to respond to certain questions, because you have been pointed out to us as a suspect.
After further questioning, Ladoux got down to important issues. He asked about her feelings for France.
Him: If you love all of France, you could render us a great service. Have you thought of it?
Me: Yes and no, but this is not the sort of thing for which one offers oneself.
Him: Would you do it?
Me: I have never thought it through.
Him: You would have to be very expensive.
Me: That, yes!
Him: According to you, what would it be worth?
Me: All or nothing. If one rendered you services as grand as you expect? Then that is worth a great deal; if one fails, that is worth nothing.
Him: Reflect upon it, see if you could do something for us. I will give you your pass for Vittel, only promise me that you will not seduce any French officers.
Me: There is no danger of it. I know a Russian [there] with whom I am much in love.
Him: I have seen you having lunch with him at Ambassadors. In any case, when you have reached a decision on the subject about which I have spoken to you, come back to see me.
Thus Ladoux enlisted Mata Hari as a spy for France.
The entire encounter with Ladoux was bizarre. If Mata Hari was indeed already a German spy at the time, as Ladoux claimed in his memoirs and at her trial, then he was most foolhardy to grant her a permit to enter the war zone.
If she was not a German agent, then she was a most peculiar choice to be a French one. Mata Hari was known by sight to thousands throughout Europe. Despite wartime austerity, her comings and goings, her rendezvous with important men, and her fashionable costumes were noticed and reported in the gossip columns and newspapers. Even those who did not recognize her as Mata Hari were magnetically drawn to her. Wherever she went, she was likely to be the center of attention. It is difficult to imagine a woman less likely to be able to go unnoticed or to be able to engage in clandestine activities than Mata Hari. She was a star, a celebrity in the modern sense of the word. While she was certainly seductive, which might be viewed as useful for a spy, she was never on any occasion invisible.
Exactly when this meeting between Ladoux and Mata Hari occurred has been a point of confusion. They both suggested it was near the end of August 1916, but the reports from Monier and Tarlet show that her first visit to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain occurred on August 1, at which time Ladoux began intercepting her mail.
After the extraordinary meeting with Ladoux, Mata Hari continued her life much as usual. Vadime was still in Paris. On August 2, Hallaure called again to see her, perhaps hoping to hear about her meeting with Ladoux. She preferred to spend her time with Vadime and asked the hotel to tell Hallaure she was resting and could not see him.
On August 3 her activities grew increasingly frenzied. Either Mata Hari did not trust Ladoux’s assurance that she would get her permit for Vittel, or else she was hesitant to become associated with the business of espionage. In either case, on August 3 she went first to the Prefecture of Police, Bureau of Aliens. She hoped they would grant her a permit to travel despite the first refusal from the Commissariat of Police on the rue Taitbout. Then she visited the commissariat twice, taking the copy of her registration paper to further her reapplication for the permit, despite its initial refusal.
Later that day, she and Nicholas Casfield went to meet Vadime at the Pavillon d’Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne. After about an hour, Casfield tactfully left them alone. The couple later returned to the Grand Hotel, where they dined and spent the night together. The next morning Mata Hari accom
panied Vadime to the station, where he boarded the train back to the front. She promised to come to Vittel as soon as she could. After Vadime’s departure, she asked anxiously at the hotel every day for any letters; she had received none from the time of her first visit to the Deuxième Bureau because Ladoux was having them intercepted. The letter from Vadime that arrived at the hotel on August 9 was similarly diverted to Ladoux.
For the rest of August she carried out her usual daily round of visiting hairdressers and manicurists and shopping for luxuries. She often went to the jewelry store Walewyk, which is probably where she bought a “gift of silver”—perhaps a cigarette case, photograph frame, or flask—for Vadime. She also visited several photographers, presumably to have the portraits taken that she gave to Vadime, and called several times at pharmacies. She did not cease meeting with and presumably having affairs with officers during this time.
She relentlessly pestered the police and various government offices about her permit to go to Vittel. She visited 282, boulevard Saint-Germain repeatedly (August 3, 5 twice, 7 twice, 8, 11, and 21) and sometimes stayed for several hours. There is no indication why she went so often to that address. Was she meeting further with Ladoux? Were the conversations that Ladoux and Mata Hari reported as being held at their first meeting conducted over a series of visits? And if Ladoux had signed her permit to go to Vittel on their first meeting—a point that is not supported by the date on the permit—why did she continue to make the rounds of the various other offices where she might be granted the permit? It seems that she continued to apply at both the Police Commissariat and the Prefecture of Police in hopes that one of them would produce a permit for Vittel.