The Spy

Epilogue

On October 19, four days after the execution of Mata Hari, her primary accuser, Captain Georges Ladoux, was accused of spying for the Germans and imprisoned. Despite pleading innocence, he was repeatedly questioned by French counterespionage services, although government censorship—legalized during the period of conflict—prevented that fact from being leaked to newspapers. He claimed in his defense that the information had been planted by the enemy:

“It is not my fault that my work left me exposed to any and all sorts of intrigue, while the Germans were collecting data that were essential to the country’s invasion.” Ladoux was eventually released in 1919, one year after the end of the war, but his reputation as a double agent followed him to the grave.

Mata Hari’s body was buried in a shallow grave, which has never been located. According to habits of that time, her head was cut off and handed over to government representatives. For years it was kept in the Anatomy Museum on Rue des Saints-Pères in Paris, until, on an unknown date, it disappeared from the institution. Museum officials only noticed it was missing in the year 2000, although it is believed that Mata Hari’s head was stolen well before then.

In 1947, prosecutor André Mornet, by then publicly indicted as one of the lawyers who founded proceedings to revoke the “hasty naturalizations” of Jews in 1940, and largely responsible for the death sentence of the woman he claimed was “the modern-day Salome, whose sole objective is to deliver the heads of our soldiers to the Germans,” confided to journalist and writer Paul Guimard that the entire proceedings were based on deductions, extrapolations, and assumptions, concluding with:

“Between us, the evidence we had was so poor that it wouldn’t have been fit to punish a cat.”