History Prof Reflects on Exotic WWI Spy Mata Hari in Worldwide BBC Program
Mata Hari known to history as one of the world's most legendary spy-seductresses is the subject of a BBC Forum featuring subject expert Tammy Proctor, chair of USU’s Department of History and an expert in World War I espionage.
She’s known to history as one of the world’s most legendary spy-seductresses. In actuality, Mata Hari was a complicated, conflicted woman, says Tammy Proctor, chair of the Utah State University Department of History and a participant in a worldwide BBC forum about the World War I spy.
This episode of BBC Forum, a weekly general-subject radio program of the BBC World Service. Podcasts of the show are available at the BBC website.
Proctor, an expert in World War I espionage, took part in a panel discussion, recorded in London, along with Mata Hari biographer Julie Wheelwright and Dutch journalist Hanneke Boonstra. Proctor herself is the author of “Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War” (2003, New York University Press).
2017 is the century mark of the execution of Mata Hari, whose actions, according to the French government, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Proctor said that during the pre-recording of “Mata Hari: Dancer, Lover, Spy,” the panel experts generally concluded that Mata Hari “wasn’t a very good spy.” In fact, Proctor added, “she was a very bad spy. And she surely didn’t send 750,000 men to their deaths.”
The iconic image of the raven-haired exotic dancer encircled in jewel-crusted scarfs is credited as the origin of the mysterious seductress-traitor stereotype we know from James Bond films.
But this legacy, said Proctor, obscures the woman herself. And, in part, it pulls attention from the thousands of women spies who quietly and courageously aided their countries, said Proctor.
Proctor’s research has focused on this corps of largely unknown women spies. Still, “I was interested with why there’s this long memory of Mata Hari and why she’s such a trope,” said Proctor. “Why is there this persistent idea that this is how women in espionage work? It’s not true.”
Contrary to the myth Mata Hari created for herself, she was born a Dutch citizen. As a young woman, she escaped an ugly childhood to marry an army colonel in the Dutch East Indies. Following an equally ugly marriage with her abusive husband, she returned to Paris. She was forced to leave her daughter, her only child after a young son had died previously.
To support herself, the then-Margaretha Zelle took up teaching and nude modeling for artists to fund her fight for custody of her daughter, said Proctor. When that failed, Zelle found that audiences liked her willowy exotic dances. She copied dance moves she’d learned in Indonesia and promoted a story that as Mata Hari she was a foreign princess.
It worked, and audiences flocked to see her. “I think everyone (on the panel) had a grudging respect for what she was able to do with herself,” said Proctor, “at the same time recognizing that she lived in a total world of fantasy.”
Then came 1914 and theaters were closed with the launch of the Great War. As a Dutch citizen and enemy alien, Mata Hari had her assets frozen by the French government, leaving her helpless and desperate.
The spy chapter of her life began when she sought permission from the French government to enter a war zone to visit a lover who had been wounded. The details are unclear, said Proctor, obscured by myth-making and lack of records. French officials offered her money to spy for them.
She in turn approached the Germans offering to be a double agent.
“Her motivations are hard to pick apart,” said Proctor. “She takes money from the Germans. But she claims all along that she’s a French patriot, and she takes money from the French, saying she’s going to pass the German information to the French.”
Mata Hari is believed to have been set up and she was soon captured by French officials. Mata Hari, said Proctor, was likely “played to a certain extent.”
“But I think she liked the idea of the glamor of it. She made promises of things she couldn’t deliver on, and she didn’t have a lot of military secrets to pass on. Successful spies are the ones who are not splashy.”
Following a trumped-up trial with fabricated evidence, Mata Hari faced the firing squad
on Oct, 15, 1917 at the age of 41. Memorably, she refused a blindfold.
The image of the sexy, mysterious female spy was magnified in subsequent decades, largely in the memoirs of early intelligence officers, said Proctor. “They very much played on these stereotypes, downplayed the role of women and making heroes of the male agents,” said Proctor. “I think it speaks to the idea of male vulnerability — these women somehow catching men at their most vulnerable, in the bed. I think that continues in the way espionage is covered.”
But for every Bond girl, said Proctor, here’s a Miss Moneypenny, the dependable stalwart who gets things done. “That’s the hidden reality underneath,” she said. MI-5, the British spy agency, for instance, employed some 800 women in World War I.
Adds Proctor, “I think those stories are more interesting than the mystique.”
Related links:
BBC World Service: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04plxq2 (to download the episode)
UPR.org
History.usu.edu
Writer and contact: Janelle Hyatt, 435-797-0289, Janelle.Hyatt@usu.edu
Tammy Proctor is featured on the episode of BBC Forum, a weekly general-subject radio program of the BBC World Service, to air Sunday, Jan. 29, at 3 p.m. on Utah Public Radio. Podcasts of the show are also available at the BBC website.
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