The Spy

·

PARIS, OCTOBER 14, 1917

Dear Mata Hari,

Although you do not yet know it, your request for pardon was denied by the president. Therefore, early tomorrow morning I will go to meet you and this shall be the last time we will see each other.

I have eleven long hours before me and I know I will not be able to sleep a single second tonight. Therefore, I am writing you a letter, which will never be read by the person for whom it was intended, but I plan to present it as a final piece of evidence in the investigation; even though this may be absolutely useless from a legal standpoint, I hope to at least recover your reputation while I am still alive.

I do not intend to prove my incompetence with this defense, because I was not in fact the terrible lawyer that you often accused me of being in your many letters. I just want to relive—if only to absolve myself of a sin I did not commit—my ordeal of the past few months. It is an ordeal that I have not lived alone; I was in every way trying to save the woman I once loved, though I never admitted it.

This is an ordeal that is being lived by the entire nation; these days there is not a single family in this country who has not lost a son at the battlefront. And because of that, we commit injustices, atrocities, things I never imagined happening in my country. As I write this, several battles with no end are being waged just two hundred kilometers from here. The biggest and bloodiest of them began with a naïveté on our part; we thought two hundred thousand brave soldiers would be able to defeat more than a million Germans who marched with tanks and heavy artillery toward the capital. But despite having resisted bravely, despite massive bloodshed and thousands of dead and wounded, the war front remains exactly where it stood in 1914, when the Germans initiated the hostilities.

Dear Mata Hari, your biggest mistake was having found the wrong man to do the right thing. Georges Ladoux, the head of counterespionage, who contacted you as soon as you returned to Paris, was a marked man by the government. He was one of those responsible for the Dreyfus case, a miscarriage of justice that still shames us today—condemning an innocent man to degradation and exile. After he was unmasked, he tried to justify his actions by saying his work “was not limited to knowing the enemy’s next steps, but preventing him from undermining the morale of our friends.” He sought a promotion, which was denied. He became a bitter man who urgently needed a cause célèbre to make him well regarded once again in government halls. And who better for that than a well-known actress, envied by officers’ wives and hated by the elite who, years before, used to deify her?

The people cannot think only of the deaths taking place in Verdun, Marne, Somme—they need to be distracted by some kind of victory. And Ladoux, knowing this, began to weave his degrading web the moment he first saw you. He described your first meeting in his notes:

In other words, even though you were guilty, they could find nothing to incriminate you. The agents continued to file their daily reports; when you went to Vittel with that Russian boyfriend blinded by mustard gas in one of the German attacks, the collection of “reports” bordered on the ridiculous.

And that was when, my dear Mata Hari, the vilest blow of all was struck. You were also being followed by the Germans—who were more discreet and more efficient. From the day of your visit to Captain Ladoux, they had come to the conclusion that you intended to be a double agent. While you strolled about in Vittel, Consul Kramer, who had recruited you in The Hague, was under interrogation in Berlin. They wanted to know about the twenty thousand francs spent on a person whose profile could not be more different than that of a traditional spy—usually discreet and virtually invisible. Why had he called on someone so famous to help Germany in its war effort? Was he also in cahoots with the French? How, after so long, had agent H21 not produced a SINGLE report? “Every now and then she was approached by an agent—usually in public transport—who asked for at least one piece of information, but she would smile seductively and say she had not yet obtained anything.”

In Madrid, however, they managed to intercept a letter you sent to the head of counterespionage, that wretched Ladoux, which recounts in detail a meeting with a German high official who had finally managed to circumvent their surveillance and approach you.

The Germans’ suspicions were finally confirmed. We don’t know what happened to Consul Kramer, but Mata Hari was definitely a double agent who, until then, had not provided any such information. We have a radio surveillance post at the top of the Eiffel Tower, but most of the information that is exchanged between them is in encrypted form, and impossible to read. Ladoux seemed to read their reports and not believe anything; I never knew if he sent someone to check on the arrival of ammunition on the shores of Morocco. But suddenly a telegram was sent from Madrid to Berlin in a code they knew had been already deciphered by the French, and it became the centerpiece of the prosecution, even though it said nothing beyond your nom de guerre.

Ladoux now had all the evidence he needed to incriminate you. But I was not so foolish as to think a simple telegram could convince the military tribunal of your guilt, especially since the Dreyfus affair was still fresh in everyone’s imagination; an innocent man had been convicted because of a piece of writing, unsigned and undated. So other traps would be needed.

·

What made my defense practically useless? In addition to the judges, witnesses, and accusers that had already formed an opinion, you did not help much. I cannot blame you, but this propensity to lie ever since arriving in Paris has led you to be discredited in each of your statements made to the magistrates. The prosecution brought concrete data proving you were not born in the Dutch East Indies or trained by Indonesian priests, that you were not single, and that you had falsified your passport to appear younger. In times of peace, none of this would be taken into account, but inside the War Tribunal you could already hear the sound of bombs brought in by the wind.

So every time I argued something like “She sought out Ladoux as soon as she arrived here,” he contested, saying that your only objective was to get more money and seduce him with your charms. This displays unforgivable arrogance; the captain, short and twice your weight, thought you deserved it…that you intended to turn him into a puppet in the hands of the Germans. To reinforce that fact, he brought up the zeppelin attack that had preceded your arrival—a failure on the part of the enemy, as it did not hit any strategic location. But for Ladoux, it was evidence that could not be ignored.

You were beautiful, known worldwide, always envied—though never respected—in the concert halls where you appeared. Liars, what little I know of them, are people who seek popularity and recognition. Even when faced with truth, they always find a way to escape, coldly repeating what had just been said or blaming the accuser of speaking untruths. I understand that you wanted to create fantastical stories about yourself, either out of insecurity or your almost visible desire to be loved at any cost. I understand that in order to manipulate so many men, experts themselves in the art of manipulating others, a little fantasy was needed. It’s inexcusable, but that is the reality; and that’s what led you to where you are now.

I heard you used to say you had slept with “Prince W——,” the son of the kaiser. I have my contacts in Germany and all are unanimous that you never came within a hundred kilometers of the palace where he stayed during the war. You boasted you knew many people in the German High Commission; you said it loud enough for all to hear. My dear Mata Hari, what spy in their right mind would mention such barbarities with the enemy? But your desire to call people’s attention, at a time when your fame was in decline, only made matters worse.

When you were on the stand, they were the ones who lied, but I was defending a publicly discredited person. From the beginning, the charges listed by the prosecutor are absolutely pathetic, mixing truths you told with lies they decided to interweave. I was shocked when they sent me the material, after you finally understood you were in a difficult situation and decided to hire me.

Here are some of the accusations:

And so on and so forth; a series of delusional points not worth enumerating, culminating in the telegram sent via open channel—or deciphered code—so as to forever smear a woman who, according to what Kramer later confessed to his interrogator, had been “the worst among our poor choices of spies to serve our cause.” Ladoux even claimed you had invented the name H21 and your real nom de guerre was H44, who underwent training in Antwerp, Holland, at the famous spy school of Fraulein Doktor Schragmüller.

In a war, the first casualty is human dignity. Your arrest, as I said before, would serve to show the ability of the French military and divert attention from the thousands of young men dropping dead on the battlefield. In peacetime, no one would accept such delusions as evidence. In wartime, it was all the judge needed to have you arrested the next day.

Sister Pauline, who has acted as a bridge between us, tries to keep me updated on everything that happens at the prison. Once she told me, a little flushed, that she had asked to see your scrapbook with everything that was published about you.

“I was the one who asked. Don’t go judging her for trying to scandalize a simple nun.”

Who am I to judge? But from this day I have also decided to keep a similar album about you, though I never do that for any other client. As all of France is interested in your case, there is no shortage of news articles about the dangerous spy sentenced to death. Unlike Dreyfus, there is no petition or popular demonstration asking to spare your life.

My album is open next to me, to the page where a newspaper gives a detailed description of what happened the day after the trial. I only found one error in the article, regarding your nationality.

·

Ignoring the fact that the Third War Council was judging her case at that very moment—or pretending she was not worried about what was happening, since she considered herself a woman above good and evil, always aware of French intelligence’s steps—Russian spy Mata Hari went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask permission to go to the front to meet her lover, whose eyes had been seriously wounded and, even then, was forced to fight. She gave the city of Verdun as her location, a guise meant to show she did not know at all what was happening on the eastern front. She was told that the papers in question had not arrived, but that the minister himself was in charge of it.

The arrest warrant was immediately handed down at the end of the closed session, which was sealed to reporters. Details of the case will be made known to the public as soon as the trial is over.

The minister of war had issued and sent the arrest warrant three days prior to the military governor of Paris—office 3455 SCR-10—but had to wait until the charge was formalized before such a warrant could be executed.

A team of five people, led by the prosecutor of the Third War Council, went immediately to room 131 of the Hotel Élysée Palace and found the suspect in a silk robe, still taking her breakfast. When asked why she was doing that, she claimed she had had to wake up very early and go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at that moment she was famished.

While they asked the accused to get dressed, they searched the apartment and found a vast amount of material, mostly women’s clothing and accessories. Also found were a permit to travel to Vittel and another to perform paid work in France, dated December 13, 1915.

Claiming it was all just a misunderstanding, she demanded they make a detailed list of what they were taking so she could sue them if they did not return everything to her room in perfect condition that same evening.

Only our newspaper had access to what took place at her meeting with the prosecutor of the Third War Council, Captain Pierre Bouchardon, via a secret source who used to provide us with information about the fate of people who had infiltrated and were later unmasked. According to this source—who provided us with the full transcript—Captain Bouchardon handed her the charges hanging over her head and asked her to read them. When she finished, he asked if she wanted a lawyer, which she categorically denied, and answered only:

“But I’m innocent! Someone is joking with me, I work for the French intelligence, when they ask me for something, which has not happened very often.”

Captain Bouchardon asked her to sign a document that our source wrote and she did so willingly. She was convinced she would return that same afternoon to the comfort of her hotel and would immediately contact her “immense” circle of friends who would eventually clarify the absurdities of which she was accused.

As soon as she signed the declaration in question, the spy was led directly to Saint-Lazare prison, repeating constantly, already on the verge of hysteria: “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!” while we managed to secure an exclusive interview with the prosecutor.

“She wasn’t even a beautiful woman, like everyone claimed,” he said. “But her complete lack of scruples, her complete lack of compassion, led her to manipulate and ruin men, leading to at least one suicide. The person standing before me was a spy with her heart and soul.”

From there, our team went to the Saint-Lazare prison, where other journalists had already gathered to speak to the director general of incarceration. He seemed to share the opinion of Captain Bouchardon, and also ours, that Mata Hari’s beauty had already faded with time.

“Only in her photos is she still beautiful,” he said.

“The debauched lifestyle she maintained for so long meant the person who came in here today had huge dark circles under her eyes, hair that was already beginning to discolor at the roots, and very peculiar behavior. She said nothing, except, ‘I’m innocent!’ always shouting, as if she were back in those days when women, because of their nature, were unable to control their behavior properly. I’m surprised at the bad taste of some friends of mine who had more intimate contact with her.”

This was confirmed by the prison doctor, Dr. Jules Socquet, who, in addition to testifying that she was not suffering from any disease—she had no fever, her tongue showed no signs of stomach problems, and auscultation of her lungs and heart showed no suspicious symptoms—released her to be placed in one of the cells of Saint-Lazare after asking the sisters in charge of that wing to provide a stock of sanitary napkins as the prisoner was menstruating.

·

And it was then, only then, after many interrogations at the hands of the man we call “Torquemada de Paris,” that you contacted me and I went to visit you at Saint-Lazare. But it was too late; many of the statements given had already implicated you in the eyes of that man who, as half of Paris knew, had been betrayed by his own wife. A man like that, dear Mata Hari, is like a bloodied beast who seeks revenge instead of justice.

Reading your testimonies before my arrival, I saw you were much more interested in showing your importance than in defending your innocence. You spoke of powerful friends, international success, and crowded theaters, when you should have been doing just the opposite, showing you were a victim, a scapegoat for Captain Ladoux, who had used you in his own internal battle with his fellow colleagues to take over the general management of the counterespionage service.

According to what Sister Pauline told me, when you returned to the cell, you cried incessantly and spent sleepless nights in fear of the mice that infested that infamous prison. Nowadays, it’s used only to break the spirits of those who thought they were strong—women like you. She said that the shock of it all would drive you mad before the trial. More than once you asked to be admitted, since you were confined to a solitary cell, with no contact with anyone; the prison hospital, with the little resources it had, would at least allow you to talk to someone.

Meanwhile, your accusers were beginning to get desperate, because they had not found anything among your belongings to incriminate you; the most they found was a leather purse with several business cards. Bouchardon ordered that those respectable gentlemen—who for years begged for your attention—be interviewed one by one, and they all denied any more intimate contact with you.

The arguments of the prosecutor, Dr. Mornet, bordered on the pathetic. At one point, in the absence of evidence, he claimed:

Interestingly, in the end, even Captain Ladoux testified in writing in your favor; he had absolutely nothing to show Torquemada de Paris. And he added:

“It is evident she was at the service of our enemies, but you must prove it and I have nothing with me to confirm this statement. If you want vital evidence for questioning, it is better to go to the Ministry of War, which has such documents. For my part, I am convinced that a person who is able to travel during the time in which we live and has contact with so many officers is already proof enough, even though there is nothing in writing or that is not the sort of argument admitted in war tribunals.”

·

I am so tired, I’ve entered a state of confusion; I think I am writing this letter to you, that I will deliver it to you and we will still have time together to look back, with wounds healed, and be able to, who knows, wipe all of this from our memory?

But in fact, I am writing this for myself, to convince myself that I did everything possible and imaginable; first by trying to get you out of Saint-Lazare; then by fighting to save your life; and finally having the chance to write a book telling the injustice of which you were victim for the sin of being a woman, for the greater sin of being free, for the immense sin of stripping in public, for the dangerous sin of getting involved with men whose reputations needed to be maintained at any cost. This would only be possible if you disappeared forever from France or the world. There is no use describing here the letters and motions I sent to Bouchardon, my attempts to meet with the consul of the Netherlands, nor the list of Ladoux’s errors. When the investigation threatened to come to a halt for lack of evidence, Ladoux informed the military governor of Paris that in his possession were several German telegrams—a total of twenty-one documents—that implicated you to the core. And what did these telegrams say? The truth: that you sought out Ladoux when you arrived in Paris, that you were paid for your work, that you demanded more money, that you had lovers in higher circles, but NOTHING, absolutely nothing, that contains any confidential information on our work or the movement of our troops.

Unfortunately, I could not attend all your conversations with Bouchardon, because the criminal “national security law” was enacted, and at many sessions defense lawyers were not allowed—a legal aberration justified in the name of “national security.” But I had friends in high places and heard you questioned Captain Ladoux severely, saying you had believed in his sincerity when he offered you money to work as a double agent and spy for France. At this point, the Germans knew exactly what would happen to you, and they also knew all they could do was jeopardize you further. But unlike what’s going on in our country, they had already forgotten agent H21 and were focused on stopping the Allied offensive with what really counts: men, mustard gas, and gunpowder.

I know the reputation of the prison where this morning I will visit you for the last time. A former leper colony, then hospice, it was transformed into a place for detention and execution during the French Revolution. Hygiene is virtually nonexistent, the cells are not ventilated, and diseases spread through the fetid air that has no way of circulating. It is basically inhabited by prostitutes and people whose families pull strings to have them removed from their social lives. It also serves for study by physicians interested in human behavior, despite having already been denounced by one of them:

Today, one of your cell mates is what we now call a “fighter for women’s rights.” And what’s worse, a “pacifist,” “defeatist,” “unpatriotic.” The charges against Helene Brion, the prisoner to whom I refer, are very similar to yours: receiving money from Germany, corresponding with soldiers and ammunition manufacturers, leading unions, having control of workers, and publishing underground newspapers stating women have the same rights as men.

Helene’s fate will probably be the same as yours, though I have my doubts, because she is a French national with influential friends in the newspapers, and did not use the weapon most condemned by all moralists, the one which makes you a favorite to inhabit Dante’s Inferno: seduction. Madame Brion dresses as a man and is proud of it. Furthermore, she was judged treasonous by the First War Council, which has a fairer history than the tribunal headed by Bouchardon.

·

I fell asleep without realizing. I just looked at the clock and there are only three hours to go before I am at that wretched prison for our final meeting. It is impossible to recount everything that has happened since you were forced to hire me against your will. You thought innocence was enough to extract you from the web of the legal system on which we have always prided ourselves, but that in these times of war has become an aberration of justice.

I went to the window. The city is asleep, except for groups of soldiers coming from all over France, singing on their way toward Gare d’Austerlitz, not knowing what fate awaits them. The rumors do not let anyone get any rest. This morning they said they had pushed the Germans beyond Verdun; in the afternoon some alarmist newspaper said Turkish battalions are disembarking in Belgium and moving toward Strasbourg for the final attack. We go from euphoria to despair several times a day.

It’s impossible to tell everything that happened from February 13, 1917, when you were arrested, until today, when you will face the firing squad. We will let history do justice to me, to my work. Perhaps one day history might also do justice to you, though I doubt it. You were not merely a person unjustly accused of espionage, but someone who dared to challenge certain customs. And for that you could not be forgiven.

However, one page will suffice to summarize: They attempted to trace the origin of your money, and then that part was sealed as “secret,” because they came to the conclusion that many men in high positions would be implicated. Former lovers, without exception, all denied knowing you. Even the Russian with whom you were in love and for whom you were willing to travel to Vittel despite suspicion and risk appeared with one eye still bandaged and read his deposition text in French, a letter read in court with the sole purpose of humiliating you in public. The boutiques where you used to shop were placed under suspicion, and several newspapers made sure to publish your unpaid debts, although you insisted all along that your “friends” had changed their minds about the gifts they’d given you and disappeared without settling anything.

The judges were forced to listen to things from Bouchardon such as: “In the battle of the sexes, all men, no matter their expertise in various arts, are always easily defeated.” And he managed to make heard other pearls, such as: “In war, simple contact with a citizen of an enemy country is already suspicious and reprehensible.” I wrote to the Dutch consulate asking them to send me some clothes that had been left in The Hague, so you could present yourself with dignity before the court. But to my surprise, despite articles being published fairly often in the newspapers of your country, the government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was notified of the trial only on the day it began. In any case, it wouldn’t have helped; they feared it would affect the “neutrality” of the country.

When I saw you entering the courtroom on July 24, your hair was unkempt and your clothes faded, but your head was held high and you kept a steady pace, as if you had accepted your fate, refusing the public humiliation to which they wanted to subject you. You understood the battle had come to an end, and that all you could do was leave with dignity. Days earlier, Marshal Pétain ordered the execution of countless soldiers, all accused of treason because they had refused a frontal assault against German machine guns. The French saw in your stance before the judges a way to challenge those deaths and…

·

Enough. There is no use dwelling on something that, I’m sure, will haunt me for the rest of my life. I will lament your departure; I will hide my shame for having erred on some obscure point or for thinking that the justice of war is the same as in peacetime. I will carry this cross with me, but I need to stop scratching the site of infection if the wound is to heal.

However, your accusers will bear much heavier crosses. Though today they laugh and shake hands with one another, the day will come when this entire farce is unmasked. Even if that never happens, they know they condemned an innocent person because they needed to distract the people, just the way our revolution, before bringing about equality, fraternity, and liberty, had to put the guillotine in the public square to provide bloody entertainment to those who still lacked bread. They tied one problem to another, thinking that would result in a solution, but all they did was create a heavy chain of indestructible steel, a chain they will have to drag for the rest of their lives.

There is a Greek myth that has always fascinated me, and that—I think—encapsulates your story. Once there was a beautiful princess who was admired and feared by all because she seemed to be too independent. Her name was Psyche.

Desperate his daughter would wind up a spinster, her father appealed to the god Apollo, who decided to solve the problem: She was to go alone, in mourning dress, to the top of a mountain. Before dawn, a serpent would come to marry her. Intriguing, because in your most famous photo, you have this snake on your head.

But back to the myth: The father did what Apollo ordered, and to the top of the mountain she went. Terrified and freezing cold, she went to sleep, certain she would die.

However, the next day she awoke in a beautiful palace, having been turned into a queen. Each night her husband came to meet her, but he demanded she obey one single condition: to fully trust in him and never see his face.

After a few months together, she was in love with him, whose name was Eros. She loved their conversations, found great pleasure in their lovemaking, and was treated with all the respect she deserved. At the same time, she feared being married to a horrible serpent.

One day, no longer able to control her curiosity, she waited for her husband to fall asleep, gently moved the sheet aside, and with the light of a candle saw the face of a man of incredible beauty. But the light awakened him, and realizing his wife had not been able to be true to his only request, Eros disappeared.

Each time I recall this myth, I wonder: Are we never to be able to see the true face of love? And I understand what the Greeks meant by this: Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears. We follow its winding and luminous paths, we let ourselves go to the highest peak or the deepest seas, but we trust in the hand that leads us. If we do not allow ourselves to be frightened, we will always awaken in a palace; if we fear the steps that will be required by love and want it to reveal everything to us, the result is that we will be left with nothing.

And I think, my beloved Mata Hari, that that was your mistake. After years on the icy mountain, you ended up totally disbelieving in love and decided to turn it into your servant. Love does not obey anyone and will betray those who try to decipher its mystery.

Today you are a prisoner of the French people, but as soon as the sun rises, you will be free. Your accusers will need ever-increasing strength to drag the fetters they forged at your feet in order to justify your death. The Greeks have a word full of contradictory meanings: metanoia. Sometimes it means repentance, contrition, confession of sins, the promise not to repeat what we did wrong.

At other times it means going beyond what we know, to stand face-to-face with the unknown, without recollection or memory, without understanding how it will be to take the next step. We are bound to our lives, to our pasts, to the laws of what we consider right or wrong, and suddenly, everything changes. We walk the streets without fear and greet our neighbors, but moments later they are no longer our neighbors—they put up fences and barbed wire so we can no longer see things as they were before. So it will be with me, with the Germans, but above all, with men who decided to find it easier to let an innocent woman die than to recognize their own mistakes.

It is a shame that what happens today already happened yesterday, and will happen again tomorrow; it will continue to happen until the end of time, or until man finds out he is not only what he thinks, but mostly what he feels. The body tires easily, but the spirit is always free and will help us get out, one day, from this infernal cycle of repeating the same mistakes every generation. Although thoughts always remain the same, there is something stronger, and this is called Love.

Because when we truly love, we know others and ourselves better. We do not need words, documents, minutes, statements, accusations, or defenses. We need only what Ecclesiastes says:

So be it. Go with God, my beloved.