Femme Fatale

by Pat Shipman

  For Mata Hari, the trap had been set, but she had not yet felt the snap of its teeth.

  16

  Caught in a Trap

  THINGS RAPIDLY DETERIORATED.

  The next morning she went to the Dutch consulate, where she sent a telegram to van der Capellan saying she had arrived in Paris and asking him to notify Anna. Later she wrote postcards to Anna and Vadime, the latter reading, “4 January. My dear, will I soon hear from you? Could you come [to Paris]? Kisses from your Marina.”

  She also went again to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain. Whether accidentally or intentionally, the police who had resumed shadowing Mata Hari as soon as she returned to Paris had lost her; they did not record her second visit to the Deuxième Bureau. There, she produced the pass Ladoux had given her so she could see him upon her return. After a wait, the pass was returned to her with the word “Absent” written on it. This was an appalling, unbelievable reception for a spy successfully returned from a dangerous mission, having gathered valuable information.

  She went back the next day and waited for an hour, only to be told to try again the subsequent day at 6 p.m. When she finally saw Ladoux, he was acting “bizarrely.” He said that Denvignes had seen him only briefly and had conveyed no information from her. She told him about the letter from Junoy and asked who had authorized Junoy’s questioning, which smacked of blackmail. Ladoux denied knowing anything about it. He had in fact abandoned her altogether, and said:

  In any case, you must never forget that you do not know me and I do not know you. It is certainly not we who have sent someone to the senator, and if an agent did this stupid thing, he will be sent to the front.

  Me: It is all the same to me, but I suppose that you have no interest in spoiling my work by the intervention of little secret agents. If a real French secret agent sees something that he does not understand, he runs to the embassy of France and not to the house of a Spanish senator. What’s more, I was astonished by the reception you gave me. Where are the thanks for the services I have rendered you?

  Him: What services? That about the Baron du Roland and the submarine?

  Me: You forget that about the radios, the aviator and the secret ink.

  Him: That is the first news of it I have heard!

  Me: What, the colonel told you nothing!

  Him: I repeat to you that he did nothing except pass through here. What! You say that they have the code for our radios. The military attaché is pulling your leg.

  Me: Is there not one chance in a hundred that his information is correct and that this would repay the pain of verifying it?

  Him: Evidently, but I am open-mouthed in astonishment [at the thought of it].

  Me: Me too.

  Ladoux, appalled at the information she had uncovered, improvised madly and asked her to remain in Paris until he could check out her story. However, he made no move to verify her report.

  The German cipher had first been broken by English cryptographers in 1914, but the Germans did not realize this until 1916, at which point they switched to a new code. Although the French radio listeners on the Eiffel Tower intercepted the messages in the new code and passed them on to the cryptographers, no one could read them until later that year when Dr. Edmond Locard managed to break the second code. Locard was the founder and director of the first scientific criminology laboratory. Known as the Sherlock Holmes of France, he had a formidable reputation. He had volunteered for duty as a cryptographer and was an excellent one. When he broke the second code, it gave the Allies a distinct advantage.

  Then, at the end of 1916, something very peculiar happened: messages intercepted at the Eiffel Tower having to do with Mata Hari began coming in, written in the old, broken code. If, as Mata Hari claimed, the Germans knew the French could read messages in this old code, why would they revert to it? Was it inconceivable carelessness? Or were the Germans using the broken code to feed false information to the French? Was Ladoux using the German messages to manufacture evidence against Mata Hari?

  Though he did not tell anyone for months, Ladoux later claimed he had been receiving messages intercepted at the Eiffel Tower—messages signed by Mata Hari’s former lover, Major Arnold Kalle, addressed to the headquarters in Berlin—since December 13, 1916, in the broken code. These intercepted messages referred explicitly to a new agent, H21. Whether this agent was male or female was unclear, because “he” and “she” are not distinguished in German. The first message, sent while Mata Hari was in Spain trying to pry information out of Kalle, contained nothing more than common gossip about Princess George of Greece, the general dislike of the French prime minister Briand, and a vague warning about a British offensive to occur in the spring. More messages about H21 followed, including one from Berlin on Christmas Day, instructing Kalle to give agent H21 3,000 francs (about $9,000 today). Kalle replied he had given H21 3,500 pesetas (roughly $12,500 today) and that the agent would request that additional funds be made available to his/her staff in Roermond (where Mata Hari’s servant, Anna Lintjens, lived). On December 28, Kalle sent a message that H21 would arrive in Paris “tomorrow” and would ask that 5,000 francs (approximately $15,000 in modern currency) be sent to her at once, naming Anna Lintjens and the Dutch consul in Paris, Bunge, as intermediaries. On December 29, Kalle sent another message confirming that H21 had left Madrid for Paris.

  Here was what Ladoux had been seeking: the solid proof that Mata Hari was actually a double agent working for Germany and known as H21. Or was it? Though Mata Hari had a servant named Anna Lintjens, who lived in Roermond, she did not leave Madrid for Paris until January 3, not prior to December 29 as the telegram of December 29 indicated. All of these incriminating messages were sent in the broken cipher, as if they were intended to be read by the French. Why would such specific information about the whereabouts of H21—not to mention the name of her servant and the town in which that servant lived—be disclosed in a telegram at all?

  If Ladoux believed these telegrams to be genuine, why hadn’t he ordered Mata Hari’s arrest immediately upon receiving them in decoded, translated form? Since the code was already broken, decoding and translating the messages would have taken very little time. Since Mata Hari had paid several visits to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain soon after her arrival in Paris, finding her to make an arrest would not have been difficult. Why had Ladoux avoided her rather than seizing her? And why had he not at least passed the information gleaned from the telegrams on to the army magistrate, in preparation for arrest? Ladoux’s behavior is puzzling at best, self-incriminating at worst.

  Frustrated by her interview with Ladoux, Mata Hari returned to the Hotel Plaza Athénée. Again she was followed on her usual round of shopping and visits to the hairdresser, the dressmaker, the manicurist, the jeweler, the dentist, and the pharmacy; again her telephone conversations were listened in on; again her mail was steamed open and sometimes withheld from her. She complained to Maunoury, who told her there was nothing to worry about.

  She expected to see Vadime on January 8, writing him a letter on the seventh that read: “Tomorrow evening—My God, it is your [Russian Orthodox] Christmas today. I hold you for a long time. See you soon, Your Marina.” But the next day, he did not appear and she was terribly worried. When no messages of explanation arrived from Vadime, she wrote to the Russian attaché Count Ignatieff begging for news of her lover. She visited a fortune-teller, hoping for promises of good news and happiness. She was seen weeping over her dinner in the hotel, sick with worry about Vadime.

  She wrote Vadime loving cards and letters almost daily and corresponded with Anna often, as she was once again in desperate need of money from the baron. She was also very anxious about her situation, for she was beginning to realize that things had started to go very wrong after she agreed to spy for Ladoux. Those who had once been so eager to see her and recruit her into spying now shunned her, denying knowledge of or responsibility for events that they must have known about, and offering no support or financial reward.

&nbs
p; On January 12 she went to the Dutch consulate and asked for advice and protection; she was received immediately, even though the consul Bunge was out with an illness. She complained that she was very worried about being tailed and spied upon. The attaché tried to reassure her and promised to come to the hotel to take tea with her soon, doubtless thinking she was a most attractive but silly woman. Mata Hari was much cleverer than many people realized. She sensed that some scheme against her was unfolding.

  At about this time, her shadows complained that she was taking many precautions, changing her routes and doubling back, crossing the street abruptly to take a taxi, and looking suspiciously around to see if someone was following her. She retired to her room early and sometimes had her meals sent there. The concierge handed over to the inspectors an incoming letter from Vadime on January 14, which she never received. On the fifteenth, she started out of the hotel but then returned precipitously. She complained to the concierge, pointing out a man who she thought was following her. She did not go out again that morning.

  According to Locard’s 1954 memoirs of the Mata Hari case, it was on or about January 15 that one of his colleagues brought to Ladoux’s attention the fact that the Germans had been using the original, broken code for the Mata Hari messages. It seems unlikely that such an important point would have gone unremarked for a month, but perhaps it is true. Possibly Ladoux was ignorant of this fact and its significance until mid-January. Possibly he knew about the broken code but did not want to acknowledge that the Germans might be planting disinformation through these messages. Finally, he may have been in fact the mastermind who planned the broken-code stratagem in order to divert suspicion from real spies to Mata Hari.

  Mata Hari decided it was time to demand answers to her questions. She wrote a letter to Ladoux, which she showed first to her lawyer and old friend, Edouard Clunet. As she recalled, the letter said: “What do you want of me? I am disposed to do all that you ask. I do not ask you your secrets and I do not wish to know your agents. I am an international woman. Do not discuss my methods, do not ruin my work with secret agents who cannot understand me. That I desire to be paid is legitimate, but I wish to go [leave Paris].”

  Clunet found her letter a little blunt and was shocked by her demanding payment, which sounded mercenary, almost indecent. Naïvely, he had never realized how often she had accepted money from men. She told him, “If I am not ashamed to accept money, then I must not be ashamed to say so.” She mailed the letter herself, rather than entrusting it to the concierge at the hotel. She was in terrible need of money. She had already moved from the Hotel Plaza Athénée to the Hotel Castiglione, which was cheaper. Then she moved again, to the Elysée Palace Hotel, which was cheaper still. According to Ladoux’s men, she was spending 500 francs a week—the equivalent of $1,610 today—though her hotel cost only 210 francs a week ($720). She had unpaid debts all over Paris.

  Finally, she received a letter from van der Capellan saying he had sent her 3,000 francs (about $8,000 today) through the Dutch consulate. She promptly picked it up. In the same letter, ominously, the baron told her he could not continue to keep up the house in The Hague if she was not going to return to it. Her long-suffering baron was finally fed up with paying for a mistress whom he never saw. As he had been the mainstay of her financial existence, this was indeed a serious threat. That, added to her uneasiness about the surveillance and Ladoux’s evasive manner, persuaded her she must leave Paris soon.

  Despite her own precarious situation, she sent Vadime 1,000 francs of the 3,000 she had just received.

  There is another inexplicable gap in the surveillance reports on Mata Hari from January 15, 1917, until her arrest on February 13. Ladoux had apparently called off Tarlet and Monier at about the time Locard informed him that the broken code was being used. In his book about Mata Hari, Léon Schirmann disputes this point, noting that both Police Commissioner Albert Priolet, in a report dated April 18, 1917, and Henri Maunoury, in his Police of the War (1937), asserted that she was tailed until the time of her arrest. If she was under surveillance during the last month before her arrest, what has become of the daily police reports? They are not in her file, which suggests their deliberate removal. What could the inspectors have seen that was more scandalous than the nights they had observed her going off with prominent French politicians?

  If their recollections are incorrect, and her surveillance was halted, the dubious decision to let a strongly suspected spy operate freely in Paris demands explanation. Perhaps Ladoux was disheartened to learn that the incriminating messages upon which he had hung so many of his accusations had been written in a broken cipher. Perhaps he was being pressured by his superiors to stop the expensive surveillance. Certainly the months of manpower and time had been a complete waste, yielding no evidence whatsoever of espionage and abundant evidence of the life of a courtesan in wartime Paris.

  Mata Hari never lacked for male admirers, even though she was nearing forty years old and even though she was in love with Vadime. From her perspective, she needed money and money meant lovers. From that of the officers she entertained, she was enchanting. An officer leaving the horrors of the battlefield and the dreadful responsibility of command to spend a few days or a week in Paris with Mata Hari entered a dream world. The life expectancy of those fighting on the western front could be measured in weeks, not years, and they knew it. To enjoy the attentions of a beautiful woman who was fashionably dressed, to take her to fine restaurants, and to make love to her with passionate abandon were the surest escapes from the realities that haunted these men. No wonder so many sought her company and savored every moment of it, knowing that the battlefield, that blood, death, and hardship, would be temporarily held at bay.

  Many of the men Mata Hari loved told very similar stories of their meetings. They encountered her in a garden, a tearoom, or some other public place. Drawn by her beauty, the men struck up a conversation with her, took her to tea or arranged to meet with her again. Sometimes these encounters were merely transient and pleasant; sometimes they led to a brief affair. A typical story was told by Paul Bourgeois, a military nurse, who recalled:

  The 6th or 7th of February, I cannot be precise about which of the two days, having permission, I went to Paris and in midafternoon found myself on the rue de Castiglione. I entered into the garden of the Tuileries to take photos of the snow. It was then that I saw, walking before me, a pretty young woman, extremely elegant, about thirty-two years old. I approached her and asked if she would pose for my photos to animate the scene. We fell into conversation and finally, we went together to take tea in a house in rue Caumartin, near the place de l’Opéra at the left, and going toward this street. I do not know the name of the place because I had never been there before. If I remember correctly, the facade is painted blue. My new friend, she seemed to know the house and it was she who chose it and we were directed to a table on the right that she seemed particularly fond of.

  There, we continued to chat about everything but not military matters. This woman posed not a single indiscreet question of that type, she never asked me where I was [stationed]. The conversation was very gay and mostly superficial. I wanted to see this young woman again and asked her if she would be my marrine [a female pen-pal or sweetheart] and naturally she accepted…. In leaving, I arranged a rendezvous with her for the next day.

  Mata Hari continued to entertain many soldiers and brought joy to their leave, but in the meantime she was growing frantic for word of Vadime. She knew that she might have to return to The Hague soon and would be unable to see him perhaps for months. She wrote letter after letter—sometimes several a day—and longed for his replies. She renewed her acquaintance with Adam Wieniawski, with whom she had worked on some of her theatrical performances. He was delegated to the Russian Red Cross, and she thought he might be able to get her information about Vadime. Wieniawski later testified:

  She showed me various photos [of herself] with this officer with extremely amorous dedications. Of al
l her questions, the only one that shocked me was when she asked, “Was Massloff grievously wounded at Verdun?” However, the Russian troops were never in that sector. I told her that her friend, as far as I knew, was simply bruised. And at her demand I gave my word to inform her if something serious happened to Massloff. I had promised also to recommend to his boss, General Netchvofodoff, to give him permission for a convalescent leave if he needed it. I had soon thereafter to telephone the general several times; he responded to me: “She is a tall, brown [skinned] woman, an exotic type? In that case, I counsel you to have nothing to do with her, I have had very bad reports of her….”

  At about this time, Madame Zelle found a way of telegraphing me at Chalons [his base]. I do not know how she had my address, I believe that she asked me for news of Massloff. I did not respond and have not heard further from her.

  Wieniawski’s remarks reveal two important points. First, Vadime’s superiors knew of his intense affair with Mata Hari and disapproved. Second, and more surprising, Wieniawski’s words reveal a vital facet of Mata Hari’s personality. Despite her devotion to Vadime and her ever-mounting anxiety about his well-being, she followed the war’s progress in such a cursory fashion that she did not know what battles his regiment was in, nor did she apparently know that the fighting at Verdun had ended some weeks earlier, in December of 1916. Since the newspapers reported daily on the war and the battles being fought by different military units, Mata Hari must have been totally disinterested in the war itself to be so ignorant.

  In mid-January—just after Mata Hari’s surveillance had ceased—Vadime finally obtained leave to go to Paris. He showed her a letter written by his colonel’s military attaché, forbidding him to marry her or even to have any further contact with her. The problem was that the colonel had received a report from Count Ignatieff at the Russian embassy in Paris, who in turn had been informed by an unnamed French officer that she was a “dangerous adventuress”: a “gold digger” in modern slang. Vadime had been warned not to associate with Mata Hari, and the strongly worded caution was reiterated shortly before he began his leave. But he had no intention of staying away from her, despite his commanding officer’s wishes, and instead showed her the letter against her.