- Margaretha Geertruida Zelle aka Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and a courtesan to many important high-ranking military officials. She was executed in France at the age of 41 for espionage for Germany during World War I. However several decades after her death, it was found that there weren't any substantiative evidences to support the allegations leveled against her.
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| Margaretha Geertruida Zelle aka Mata Hari |
She was already pushing 30 when she got into the exotic dance game, with a failed May-December marriage behind her from what a wag might call her first sexual bargain, to get out from under the thumb of her family and see the world. In Paris in the belle epoque, there were assuredly dancers younger, prettier. Margaretha, who here debuted the show name by which history would know here, surpassed them with showmanship.
She exploited her exotic olive-toned looks — there were rumors of Javanese or Jewish blood even in her childhood — and claimed to be an Indian princess; her talent for repackaging oriental exoticism with just the right amount of otherness combined with her willingness to push boundaries of eroticism made her an instant sensation. Naturally gregarious and unprudish, she segued into the courtesan biz on the side with dashing officers and wealthy industrialists.
Not bad for a thirty-something mother of two.
She comes at the start of our own era: sensual postcards and posed photos of Mata Hari were at once her pitch and her product; celluloid was just coming online, and 14 years after her death, she’d be portrayed by silver screen femme fatale Greta Garbo:
That’s her with the last object of her affections, a Russian aviator young enough to be her son, and a reminder that the birth of Greta Garbo’s era was also the death of Mata Hari’s own.
She was aging, for one thing. For another, of course, war shattered Europe. Famous, decadent, polyglot … those things that had been her passport suddenly became her liabilities. Globetrotting travel? Payoffs from a multinational cast of officers for her companionship?
There’s no take here on whether she was really, as convicted, a German spy of any variety at all — she seems to have been approached, to have tried her hand clumsily or to have been set up by either French or German intelligence, or simply to have behaved indiscreetly. Once she was caught up against events, her maneating reputation did her no favors.
Spying, she was terrible at. Commanding men’s attention? As a British correspondent reported, Margaretha Zelle owned her role to the very last.
The first intimation she received that her plea had been denied was when she was led at daybreak from her cell in the Saint-Lazare prison to a waiting automobile and then rushed to the barracks where the firing squad awaited her.
Never once had the iron will of the beautiful woman failed her. Father Arbaux, accompanied by two sisters of charity, Captain Bouchardon, and Maitre Clunet, her lawyer, entered her cell, where she was still sleeping – a calm, untroubled sleep, it was remarked by the turnkeys and trusties.
The sisters gently shook her. She arose and was told that her hour had come.
‘May I write two letters?’ was all she asked.
Consent was given immediately by Captain Bouchardon, and pen, ink, paper, and envelopes were given to her.
She seated herself at the edge of the bed and wrote the letters with feverish haste. She handed them over to the custody of her lawyer.
Then she drew on her stockings, black, silken, filmy things, grotesque in the circumstances. She placed her high-heeled slippers on her feet and tied the silken ribbons over her insteps.
She arose and took the long black velvet cloak, edged around the bottom with fur and with a huge square fur collar hanging down the back, from a hook over the head of her bed. She placed this cloak over the heavy silk kimono which she had been wearing over her nightdress.
Her wealth of black hair was still coiled about her head in braids. She put on a large, flapping black felt hat with a black silk ribbon and bow. Slowly and indifferently, it seemed, she pulled on a pair of black kid gloves. Then she said calmly:
‘I am ready.’
The party slowly filed out of her cell to the waiting automobile.
The car sped through the heart of the sleeping city. It was scarcely half-past five in the morning and the sun was not yet fully up.
Clear across Paris the car whirled to the Caserne de Vincennes, the barracks of the old fort which the Germans stormed in 1870.
The troops were already drawn up for the execution. The twelve Zouaves, forming the firing squad, stood in line, their rifles at ease. A subofficer stood behind them, sword drawn.
The automobile stopped, and the party descended, Mata Hari last. The party walked straight to the spot, where a little hummock of earth reared itself seven or eight feet high and afforded a background for such bullets as might miss the human target.
As Father Arbaux spoke with the condemned woman, a French officer approached, carrying a white cloth.
‘The blindfold,’ he whispered to the nuns who stood there and handed it to them.
‘Must I wear that?’ asked Mata Hari, turning to her lawyer, as her eyes glimpsed the blindfold.
Maitre Clunet turned interrogatively to the French officer.
‘If Madame prefers not, it makes no difference,’ replied the officer, hurriedly turning away. .
Mata Hari was not bound and she was not blindfolded. She stood gazing steadfastly at her executioners, when the priest, the nuns, and her lawyer stepped away from her.*
The officer in command of the firing squad, who had been watching his men like a hawk that none might examine his rifle and try to find out whether he was destined to fire the blank cartridge which was in the breech of one rifle, seemed relieved that the business would soon be over.
A sharp, crackling command and the file of twelve men assumed rigid positions at attention. Another command, and their rifles were at their shoulders; each man gazed down his barrel at the breast of the women which was the target.
She did not move a muscle.
The underofficer in charge had moved to a position where from the corners of their eyes they could see him. His sword was extended in the air.
It dropped. The sun – by this time up – flashed on the burnished blade as it described an arc in falling. Simultaneously the sound of the volley rang out. Flame and a tiny puff of greyish smoke issued from the muzzle of each rifle. Automatically the men dropped their arms.
At the report Mata Hari fell. She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back.
Instead she seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.
A non-commissioned officer, who accompanied a lieutenant, drew his revolver from the big, black holster strapped about his waist. Bending over, he placed the muzzle of the revolver almost – but not quite – against the left temple of the spy. He pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore into the brain of the woman.
Mata Hari was surely dead.
* Inevitably, a story got around that she’d opened her funereal coat to the firing squad, revealing no clothing beneath it.
- Many historians consider her more as a victim than a women with any vicious motives.
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| Marlene Dietrich |
- German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich was also accused of espionage. She was a German citizen until 1937 and was popular for her anti-Nazi stance. Although the FBI had her under surveillance until after the World War II, they were no proofs for any clandestine activities.
- Russian spy Anna Chapman, who was involved in a high-profile spy swap with the US, has now become a celebrity. She has her own TV show and has appeared in a modeling shoot for Maxim magazine.
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| Anna Chapman |
- Anna was part of a 10-person Russian spy ring nabbed by the FBI last year. Russia traded four imprisoned Western agents in a spy swap in July - and Anna returned with her comrades to Moscow.
Anna Chapman is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian with an IQ of 162, a diplomat father and a taste for the high life.
She also has a romantic streak, having married her British boyfriend within a few months of meeting him.
With such attributes it is hardly surprising that she has been called a real-life Bond girl.
And last weekend she was arrested in New York on suspicion of spying for Russia.
Anna Kushchenko, to use her maiden name, was born in the industrial southern Russian city of Volgograd, then Stalingrad, to a maths teacher mother, Irene, and a diplomat father, Vasily.
She does not appear to have had an especially gilded youth, having suffered from scoliosis - curvature of the spine - as a child and having lived with her grandmother there.
When she was 13 her father was posted to the Russian embassy in Kenya, but she remained at home.
Her medical condition qualified her to attend a creative arts school in Volgograd, where she studied for a short period in 1996 and 1997.
There she won a prize for a project on Soviet unity - an early indication of her political leanings, or at least those instilled in her by her father? After school she studied for a masters in economics at the People's Friendship University in Moscow, one of the top Soviet-founded colleges, graduating with first-class honours in 2004.
In the summer of 2001, during her first summer break, like so many well-to-do young Russians she went travelling. London was top of her list.
During a night at an underground rave in Docklands, the 19-year-old redhead caught the eye of Alex Chapman, a Berkshire public schoolboy, Mr Chapman, who was 21 at the time and working for a recording studio, described her as "the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in my life". He recalled: "I plucked up some courage and went over to her and said, 'I'm sorry, but you're the most gorgeous girl I've ever seen.' She turned around and looked at me and said, 'My God, so are you'." He described the encounter as "love at first sight".
They talked the night away but Anna was due to return to Russia two days later. Shortly afterwards Mr Chapman, now a 30-year-old trainee psychologist, arranged to visit her in Russia, where he proposed.
They were married at a registry office in Moscow in March 2002 without even telling their parents.
Was this a period of rebellion against her father, a man Mr Chapman said "she would have done anything for"?
If Mr Chapman's account is true, Anna's strong allegiance to her father and Mother Russia appears to have won out in the end.
Mr Chapman said the "scary" Vasily Kushchenko never took to the polite young Englishman.
"He didn't trust anyone," he said. "He asked me why I had chosen a Russian bride and what business I had in Russia. I had none."He added: "Anna told me her father had been high up in the ranks of the KGB. She said he had been an agent in 'old Russia'. Her father controlled everything in her life."
During his visit to Russia Mr Chapman said his father-in-law never introduced him to other Russians and always seemed surrounded by security, travelling in a blacked-out Land Rover which was top-and-tailed by other vehicles.
Nonetheless, Mr Kuskchenko paid for the couple's 2002 honeymoon to Egypt and Zimbabwe, where he was serving as a diplomat.
Later that year Mr and Mrs Chapman loved back to London, renting a small flat in Stoke Newington.
There they set up a charity called Southern Union, enabling Zimbabwean ex-pats to wire money home at a competitive exchange rate, which was financed by a South African friend of Mr Kushchenko.
For the first two years she would shuttle back and forth between London and Moscow to finish her degree, after which she secured a number of short-term but well-paid jobs in London.
Mr Chapman described his ex-wife as "an extremely passionate, caring and loving woman" with an IQ of 162 "and it showed, because she was able to juggle so much at once and make them a success".
However, it appears a talent for exaggeration was one of her attributes, according to her unreliable CV covering the two-year period between 2004 and 2006.
First she took a temporary secretarial job with NetJets Europe, later claiming on her CV that she had spent almost a year "selling private jets" to Russian clients. In fact she only worked as an "executive assistant" to the sales team from May to July 2004. In a recent video, she said she had been working closely with Warren Buffett, who owns NetJets, but one employee of the firm dismissed that as highly unlikely.
After working in the small business banking division of Barclays for six months in 2004 and 2005, she claimed to have moved to Navigator Asset management, which she said was a London hedge fund. To date no record has emerged for such a fund ever existed. In 2005 the marriage faltered, with Mr Chapman saying she started to become "very secretive, going for meetings on her own with 'Russian friends'.
These meetings apparently transformed her, he said, from someone who had never been "materialistic" into someone "with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting". She became "arrogant and obnoxious," he claimed, and they divorced in 2006. Despite telling him that she disliked Americans, she then moved there after a brief spell at home in Russia, saying she intended to make her fortune in New York
There she threw herself into the party scene, shopping at Prada and Gucci, going to "flashy clubs" and picking up a rich, much older Russian boyfriend, according to neighbours.
She has also been romantically linked with a New Jersey millionaire called Michael Bittan, 60, after meeting at a Manhattan nightclub, said friends.Models in clubs such as Tenjune and Pink Elephant were so convinced by the way the immaculately turned-out Anna acted, that they thought she was a millionaire.But in reality the internet property business she had founded, called Property Finder Ltd, was "always in the red", according to Mr Chapman.
Then last year "in the space of a few weeks she was employing 50 people and the business was flourishing", he said she told him be email.
He added: "Clearly a lot of money had been pumped into the business from somewhere, but I couldn't work it out."
The FBI believes she was sent to America to join a spy ring and infiltrate political circles.
She and nine other alleged Russian spies have been arrested. According to the indictment, she was caught communicating with the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, using a computer attached to a wireless network at a Starbucks coffee shop in January, and two months later from a bookshop.Chapman was later approached by an FBI agent posing as a Russian who told her: "My name is Roman, I work in the consulate."
He told her to give a false passport to another agent and that she was to introduce herself her by saying: "Excuse me but haven't we met in California last summer?" The other agent was to reply: "No, I think it was in the Hamptons."
A prosecutor has described her as a "practised deceiver" and she has been denied bail.
Family and friends have denied she is a spy.
- Confederate spy Belle Boyd is seen in an undated photo provided by the Berkeley County, W.V., Historical Society. Boyd was a brave lady who showed no fear to face the bullets. She used to mingle with the Union Officers, pick up their military secrets, and pass them on to the Confederate officials.
Maria Isabella "Belle" Boyd was born on May 4, 1844. She was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia. On July 4, 1861, a band of drunken Union soldiers broke into her home in Martinsburg, intent on raising the union flag over her house. When one of the soldiers insulted her mother, Belle shot and killed him with a pistol. Belle was 17 years old. A board of inquiry cleared her of all charges, but soldiers were posted around the house and officers kept close track of her activities. She profited from this arrangement, charming at least one of the officers, Daniel Keily, into revealing military secrets. "To him," she wrote later, "I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information." Belle conveyed those secrets to Confederate officers.
One evening in May of 1862, Union General James Shields and other officers gathered in the parlor of a local hotel. Belle hid upstairs, listening through a knothole in the floor. She learned that Shields had been ordered east, a move that would reduce the Union Army's strength at Front Royal. That night, Belle rode through Union lines and reported the news to a Confederate Scout. She then returned to town. When the Confederates advanced on Front Royal on May 23, Belle ran to greet General Stonewall Jackson's men, braving enemy fire that put bullet holes in her skirt. She urged an officer to inform Jackson that "the Yankee force is very small. Tell him to charge right down and he will catch them all." Jackson did and that evening penned a note of gratitude to her: "I thank you, for myself and for the army, for the immense service that you have rendered your country today."
Belle was betrayed by one of the Union Soldiers who had been providing her with information. She was arrested on this day (July 29th) in the year 1862. She was imprisoned in the Old Capital Prison in Washington DC.
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