mata hari: first she looked at the purse

The cult of the spy. Though romanticized and glorified in popular culture, do they represent a dangerous threat to the open society?…

…For some spies, the only thing that really counts is payday.

Mati-Hari. Click image for source...

Mati-Hari. Click image for source…

Take the legendary Mati Hari, a seductive exotic dancer who was responsible for perhaps fifty thousand Allied deaths in World War I. Trained at a German espionage school, the Dutch-born enchantress was sent to Paris at the outbreak of the war. There, as her willowy charms ingratiated her in diplomatic and military circles, some people began to notice a curiously persistent connection between what her new friends told her and the military mishaps that thereafter befell the Allies.

In time, hoping to make the best of a bad thing, France offered her a job as a double-agent. Handeing her a list of spies in Belgium, they asked her to fetch their intelligence reports. Replied Mati Hari ingratiatingly: “I am proud to do this for the France that I love.” Ever the opportunist, she promptly sold the list to the Germans, who methodically began to eliminate the Belgian agents.

Even for the tolerant French, that was a bit much: they executed Mati Hari by firing squad. That’s how the croissant crumbles after all.


ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…At 18, she answered an advertisement in a Dutch newspaper by a man looking for a wife, and soon said “I do,” or whatever they say in Dutch. The man was a colonel in the Dutch army, and they moved to the East Indies, where she had two children. Shockingly, the marriage was a disappointment. The Colonel, who mostly only showed affection to his wife via alcoholic beatings, also kept a native wife in addition to a concubine. She soon left him and moved in with another officer, and began studying the native culture, part of which involved learning the Indonesian dances. She created a


name for herself, Mata Hari, which was Indonesian for “eye of the day” (the sun). She soon moved back in with her husband, and during this time, one of her sons died for possibly one of three reasons:

(1) He died while getting a mercury treatment for the genital syphilis he contracted from his father (ew), which Mata Hari also contracted from her husband.

(2) He was poisoned by a servant.

(3) He was poisoned by one of the many enemies Mata Hari’s husband apparently had, despite him being such a great guy.

The couple finally moved back to the Netherlands and divorced at the turn of the century. In 1903, she moved to Paris.

There, Mata Hari began her life in show business. First, as a circus horse rider. It failed to pay the bills and the owner of the circus recommended she try dancing, which he noticed she was very good at. She followed his advice and then some. She invented a new background for herself and told people she was a Java princess of priestly Hindu birth. She called what she did “sacred dances” which tied together the Indonesian dances she had learned with religion, spirituality, and taking off her clothes. (She often undressed down to nothing but a bra and ornate arm and head jewelry. Even as an exotic strip dancer, she rarely removed her bra for shows or photographs, supposedly because she was self-conscious of having small breasts. Historians think she might have also worn a body stocking in her dance performances, as no navel or genitals could be seen in photos of her shows.) Some descriptions of her dancing bring to mind slow, writhing hip movements, others fast, rhythmic ones: it sounds like a jingle-less form of belly dance.

She was promiscuous, flirtatious, and an overnight sensation. Her act was some of the first exotic dancing to be seen as highly respectable. Parisian society viewed it as part of the bohemian performance explosion that Paris would become known for (like the film Moulin Rouge! kinda-sorta tried to portray.) She also around this time became a first class courtesan, and was soon the lover of royalty, millionaires, politicians, and high-ranking officers of many different European countries. Before the Great War, she was seen as a free spirit and artist. However, as European powers began to collide, people in high places began to be suspicious of the kind of power a seductress of her caliber could have.

Suspicions were not helped when Mata Hari spent a great deal of the war traveling around Europe, making the rounds of her high-profile clients. She also took large amounts of money from men to fund her lifestyle, regardless of the fact some were German politicians….Read More:http://swungover.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/the-story-of-mata-hari/

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