by Pat Shipman
Could Ladoux have arranged for messages incriminating Mata Hari as a German agent to be sent? He could indeed, if he was a double agent.
While waiting for money from the baron to arrive, Mata Hari also attempted to contact a Diego de Léon, who had promised her a commission for acting as his broker in the sale of some paintings in Paris. She was told he was in Tortoza on the coast; how convenient for de Léon to be out of town when a creditor came calling.
Days passed and Mata Hari had no word from Ladoux and no money from van der Capellan or de Léon. Needing money urgently, she telegraphed Cazeaux, asking where the Russian was who wanted her to spy for him; he had been supposed to meet her in her hotel. She was told to keep waiting, that the Russian was in Switzerland.
Mata Hari still believed that Ladoux was in Paris awaiting her big coup, with a million francs to pay for it. She decided to improvise, which was much more to her taste than careful planning anyway. She could not get to General von Bissing or the crown prince, since she was stranded in Madrid, so she would have to obtain military secrets from the Germans at her disposal in Madrid. Who were they? She took up the diplomatic list helpfully provided by the hotel and searched for a high-ranking German whom she might contact. She selected an army attaché listed as captain and wrote asking for an appointment to meet him. She slipped into the envelope one of her visiting cards, which referred to her as Vrouwe Zelle-MacLeod—an aristocratic title—and which had an embossed crown on it. In later testimony, she consistently referred to Kalle as von Kalle, awarding him (as she had herself ) an aristocratic title to which he had no right.
Kalle gave her an appointment to meet him at home on Saturday, December 23, at 3 p.m. Mata Hari’s account of their meeting and conversation shows that she used a clever ploy, pretending she had come to demand why she was arrested for being Clara Benedix. By asking such a question, she implied that she knew he was connected with German intelligence, as indeed he was. He at first took her for an intelligence agent but pointed out that such a person would not address him as captain, as she had, because his enemies knew very well of his promotion to major. She had written to him in French, the diplomatic language, but finding that she spoke fluent German, Kalle used that language. Mata Hari’s account sounds like a script for the stage:
Him (in German): Why do you come to see me?
Me (in German): I was held 4 days in England; I was stopped and taken for German during the voyage, it would appear, with a false Dutch passport. They wished very much that I was Clara Benedix, what is the full story?
Him (without responding directly): How well you speak German! How is that?
Me: I lived 3 years in Berlin!
Him: You must know some officers [there].
Me: Yes, many.
Him: Give me some names.
Me: I give him some and I add: I was the mistress of Alfred de Kiepert.
Him (smiling): Now I know who you are. You are the woman of whom Alfred was so jealous. That reminds me. I saw you at dinner with him at the Carlton Hotel. You had come from the Silesian maneuvers.
Me: It is easier for you to recognize me than for me to recognize you.
Him: I will tell you. What happened to you on your trip was not my concern. I am not occupied with such things since the king personally asked me to abstain [from espionage affairs]. What was done was ordered at Barcelona, but I went immediately to ask for the explanations from the Baron du Roland.
Becoming more and more intimate, Kalle offered me cigarettes and the conversation turned to life in Madrid. I made myself very attractive. I played with my feet. I did that which a woman may do in such circumstances when she wished to make a conquest of a man and I knew that von Kalle was mine. At one moment, he said to me, as I lay on the chaise, “I am tired. I concern myself for the moment with the disembarkation of a submarine of German officers and Turks and munitions on the coast of Morocco, in the French zone. That takes all my time and my brain.”
I did not judge that it was appropriate to pursue any further during this first interview and, after several instants of conversation on miscellaneous topics, I left von Kalle after conquering him.
That night Mata Hari triumphantly wrote to Ladoux, telling him she had made contact with a high-placed German official, who had told her that there had been a submarine landing in Morocco and had identified Baron de Roland as the head of German intelligence in Barcelona. Either of these, she thought, was a significant piece of information that ought to earn her a substantial reward. Because she believed Kalle to be completely infatuated with her—“I can do what I wish with my informant”—she asked for further instructions from Ladoux.
The next Sunday she dined at the Palace Hotel with one of the attachés from the Dutch legation, Mr. G. de Wirth. De Wirth presented her to Colonel Joseph Denvignes, an attaché of the French embassy in Madrid, a most distinguished man, with a slight limp and the Legion of Honor decoration. Denvignes was much taken with her beauty and grace, seeking her out the next evening at a gala ball at the Ritz Hotel, which she attended on the arm of yet another attaché. “Madam,” she remembered him saying, “I have never seen anything more breathtaking than your entrance yesterday at the Palace Hotel.” He so monopolized her company that Mata Hari was slightly embarrassed.
Under the warmth of Denvignes’s attention, Mata Hari recounted the remarkable tale of her travels, the arrest and questioning in England, and her return to Spain. He grew a little agitated and asked her what the point of her visit to Madrid was. Realizing his anxiety was caused by the whiff of espionage in her story, Mata Hari tried to reassure him, saying with a smile and a naïve degree of trust:
“My colonel, calm down, I am one of yours.” He took my hand. I added: “If I had known you one day earlier, I would not have had to go to the trouble of sending my information to Paris, I could give you the letter yourself and that would have been quicker.”
“What information?” he questioned. In a moment, I gave him all the details, including the name of von Kalle. I added that I had found the last a little unwell, but sweet as a lamb.
Denvignes was intrigued, both by the woman and by the information. With her remarkable simplicity, Mata Hari did not consider that it might be unwise to confide her espionage secrets to a man she had just met, on the strength of his being with the French embassy.
The next day she lunched with de Léon and then found the colonel waiting for her in a jealous fit in the hotel reading room. He demanded to know with whom she had been dining and what their connection was. He also urged her to obtain more specific information about the landing place in Morocco; where was it? Thinking this would not be too difficult a point to pin down, she went again to see Kalle. Her pretext was that she was planning on returning to Holland via Switzerland and Germany but knew things were very difficult at the border. Could Kalle not facilitate that part of her journey, as a favor to her? He regretted he could not assist her but again offered her cigarettes.
She accepted, seeing that Kalle was nerve-wracked and exhausted. She said sympathetically:
[Me:] Well, always tired, always ill, always the thoughts in your head?
[Him:] Do not speak to me of them…I cannot be relaxed when you do.
Me: But it must be so very difficult to disembark troops from a submarine on the coast of Morocco. Where do you have to bring off this coup?
Him: Beautiful women must not ask too much.
She wisely decided to let the matter drop for the time being.
When Denvignes came to see her at the hotel late that afternoon, she told him he had forced her to make a false step and arouse Kalle’s suspicions. She indicated she preferred to operate on her intuition in the future, rather than following directives. She had apparently completely adopted Denvignes as both her spymaster and admirer. For his part, he was deeply enamored. He took her to lunch and dinner the next day, pursuing her very publicly. The day after that, he came again to see her and to tell her that he regrettably must go to Paris. He asked f
or a bouquet of violets she wore on her bodice and her handkerchief as romantic souvenirs. He also asked if he could do something for her while he was in Paris.
She asked him to go to see Ladoux—who had still not answered her letters—and his superior, Colonel Goubet. “Tell them,” she instructed, “what sort of woman they are dealing with [how well I have done] and ask them to treat me more nicely and more openly.” Denvignes advised her to write a letter containing all her new information and leave it with his replacement, the marquis de Paladines, at the embassy. Denvignes would see that it reached the minister of war. This may have been as much a warning not to trust Ladoux as Denvignes’s attempt to commandeer any important secrets she discovered for his own credit.
Amusingly, as soon as Denvignes left, Kalle immediately invited Mata Hari to come see him. Her account of their meeting provides a fascinating insight into the way she seduced so many men. At first Kalle made some peculiar remarks that she did not understand, and then he grew angry. She supposed he was jealous—a common occurrence in her life.
Him: Come here into the light. You have certainly repeated what I told you, for the French send their radio messages everywhere asking where the officers will alight [in Morocco].
Me: They might easily know from another source than me. And then, the radio messages! How do you know what they are telegraphing?
Him: We have the key [cipher] to their radio!
Me: Ah, that is something else! How clever you are.
Seeing Kalle was beginning to soften, I redoubled my sweetness with him.
The conversation continued:
Him: With a beautiful woman [such as you] all is forgiven, but if they knew it was me who told you, it would cost me a great deal in Berlin.
Seeing him become again submissive, I precipitated things: “My word, never mind,” I said to myself. “Let’s go!” And I let him do what he wanted.
His gushing over, he began again to speak to me in these terms: “This war will perhaps lead elsewhere. There are among us some officers who are brutes.” He spoke sincerely, wishing to confess to me? I don’t know, but I never reply directly to him. I have even said to him that he must not denigrate his army. Germany has the most handsome men, and I insist that this army has many very brave men.
Him: But the French do also. The aviators notably. They have one right now who flies over our lines and deposits among us a passenger that we must search for. But we are informed and one of these days we will see him. We know everything; we have agents in France who are very well informed.
Me: How do they warn you?
Him: There are many means.
Me: Well, that astonishes me very much. I have traveled a good deal during this war and judging by the inspections to which I have been subjected, I ask myself how one could pass the frontiers with secret things. One cannot even pass with a hatpin. In England, they checked the ribbons on my chemises.
Him (caressing me): But it is surely not with women like you that one transports such things. That would be the biggest stupidity in the world. We use people who are a little dirty, those whom one doesn’t notice. They carry ink formed into little white balls under their fingernails and in their ears.
Me (totally naturally): My God, what inventions!
Like a dutiful spy, Mata Hari wrote all this new information down in a twelve-page letter to Denvignes that evening: the aviator who had dropped a spy, the secret ink, and above all, the breaking of the French radio code. She did not mention that Kalle had given her 3,500 francs, the equivalent of about $11,000 today. She regarded this as the usual “gift” her gentlemen friends gave her. She went to the French embassy but, not finding the marquis de Paladines as instructed, left her letter with another attaché of her acquaintance, asking him to see that it reached Colonel Denvignes.
The situation with encoded messages had grown complex. According to Ladoux, the French had broken the German cipher and were intercepting German messages at the Eiffel Tower. He hoped—or planned—to find evidence that Mata Hari was a German spy thereby. But as Mata Hari had learned from Kalle, the Germans had in their turn broken the French code: the Germans knew that the French could read intercepted German messages. Thus the Germans could send messages in the broken code, which would seem to be genuine secret messages but which would be planted disinformation. Probably both Ladoux and Kalle appreciated that false messages from Berlin offered a clever way of implicating Mata Hari and taking pressure and suspicion off of others. Both regarded her as expendable—even a loose cannon—with her demands for money, her not-so-subtle questions, her habit of drawing attention to herself, and her naïve trust in anyone French.
Feeling she had completed her spying mission, Mata Hari prepared to return to Paris to collect her reward. A few days before leaving on January 3, she received a timely warning from Senator Emilio Junoy. Junoy had been a lover of Mata Hari’s, as is shown by the coy and sexual content of a letter he wrote her later, on March 1, 1917. The letter warned her that he had been visited by a French secret agent who had questioned him about his relations with her. The agent described her as “a person known to be hostile to the Allies.” Outraged, Mata Hari went to the French embassy to demand an explanation; finding it closed, she went to the home of the marquis de Paladines. The marquis, not surprisingly, disavowed both responsibility for and knowledge of this questioning.
Mata Hari did not understand that Ladoux was working against her. She had not heard from him at all since arriving in Spain and of course did not know that he had denied she was his agent to the English. She was annoyed with Ladoux, but assumed that Denvignes had taken matters over Ladoux’s head since (in her view) Ladoux was a “little man” incapable of understanding the sort of funding and cooperation she needed to carry out her mission, even though she was meeting with great success.
As soon as she reached Paris on January 3, she settled into the Hotel Plaza Athénée and then went to have her hair tinted, to cover up the gray. She also wrote a letter to Vadime, asking the hotel how long it would take to reach Verdun; she did not realize his regiment was not at Verdun. Since Vadime’s safety was a major worry, Mata Hari’s ignorance of the whereabouts of his regiment shows how little the war concerned her. The First Special Imperial Russian Regiment—like all of the Russian units on the western front—was in the department (similar to a county) of Champagne, not Vosges, more than one hundred miles from Verdun. Besides, the battle of Verdun had ended on December 19, 1916, some weeks earlier.
Her first priority was to meet with Denvignes, who had been besotted with her to the point of pestering her just a short time before. She was certain he had been very impressed with her espionage coup and would have everything arranged for her triumphal reception. But when she telephoned the hotel where Denvignes had told her he would be staying—the hotel where he had promised to meet her and had given every indication of expecting to have sex with her—the hotel denied knowing him. She telephoned the Ministry of War and received the same answer: Denvignes was unknown. This was not possible. She addressed a letter to him at the Ministry of War but, dissatisfied, made another attempt to locate him. She went to the Deuxième Bureau at 282, boulevard Saint-Germain and was turned away again. Finally, an officer who was leaving the Deuxième Bureau took pity on her and said, “Ah, yes, the military attaché, but he leaves this evening for Madrid.”
The subsequent events are best told by Mata Hari herself:
Wishing desperately to see the colonel, I took myself at 9 P.M. to Orsay station. The ticket collector forbade me access to the platforms. I went then to the office of the conductors of the wagon-lits company and I wrote a little note to the colonel in which I said that I wanted urgently to see him and I begged him to stand at the door of the carriage at Austerlitz where I would go. An employee, whom I tipped, gave the porter my letter and I, I left in a taxi for the station of Austerlitz where I could pass onto the platform with a suburban ticket. The train entered the station, but the colonel was not at the door. I
called a conductor and begged him to ask the military attaché of France to come speak to me. Colonel Denvignes appeared then at the door of a carriage. He had a very embarrassed air. I saw another man than the one who had made so many advances to me in Madrid.
Me: And so this is the way you leave, my colonel, without warning me. And our business! Have you seen Captain Ladoux?
Him (in a very small voice): I have seen him very little, but I have seen his chief, Colonel Goubet. He told me that your information, especially the first, interested him very much and that you are an intelligent woman.
Me: That’s all?
Him: He asked me also if my relationship with you was current and I told him no.
Me: Why have you lied?
Him (in a plaintive voice): My little one! My little one!
That was all, the train left and the employees asked me to take myself off. I remained dumbfounded on the platform.
Mata Hari had been betrayed by Denvignes. Possibly never before had a lover treated her so badly. Usually her lovers and former lovers helped her and did favors for her; it was how she managed her world. A man rarely parted from Mata Hari without a smile on his face; most remembered her with great fondness, admiration, and affection. And yet, Denvignes had let her down over a matter of great importance. Despite the hints and warnings—the lack of response from Ladoux, the lack of money, the breakdown of the message transmission through the marquis de Paladines, the letter from Junoy—she never expected such treatment.
After Mata Hari’s own conviction, Denvignes was arrested on espionage charges. After some months of imprisonment and interrogation, he was acquitted, but he was also demoted, suggesting that he was not completely cleared of the charge. Was he actually a double agent, trying to divert suspicion from himself to Mata Hari? This is yet another unanswerable question.