Arrest of Mata Hari

On the morning of 13 February 1917 French policemen knocked on the door of Mata Hari’s room at the Élysée Palace hotel on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Some accounts place the arrest at the Plaza Athénée hotel, where the dancer also stayed. The 40-year-old Dutchwoman Margaretha Zelle, a famous dancer before the war and later a courtesan of wealthy protectors, was detained on charges of espionage and of dealings with the enemy. The room was searched and the items found were placed under seal. That same evening she was locked up in the Paris women’s prison of Saint-Lazare.

The arrest was the culmination of a game between intelligence services lasting several months, in which Mata Hari believed she was playing on France’s side. In the summer of 1916, while seeking a pass to the spa town of Vittel, where her lover, the Russian officer Vadim Maslov of the brigades fighting in France, was recovering, she agreed to spy for the head of French counter-espionage, Captain Georges Ladoux. The French were already watching her, because the British regarded her as suspect. In the autumn she went to Spain, and in November the British held her for several days at Falmouth and questioned her in London, then sent her back to Madrid. There she grew close to the German military attaché, Major Arnold Kalle. Kalle then sent Berlin dispatches about an agent with the code name H-21, with details so precise that the French, who were intercepting and reading them, easily recognised Mata Hari. On 4 January 1917 she returned to Paris. Six weeks later the police came for her.

From the start Mata Hari denied the charges. “I am innocent. Someone is fooling with me,” she wrote, insisting that she had worked only for French counter-espionage and on its instructions. The search of her room produced no conclusive evidence. Two pharmacy preparations were found in her handbag. She said that one of them was a contraceptive, but the substance could also be used as invisible ink. The military examining magistrate in charge of the investigation, Captain Pierre Bouchardon, was to question her many more times over the following months.

At Saint-Lazare Mata Hari was first put in solitary confinement under round-the-clock watch. She soon fell ill and was moved to the prison infirmary, and then to a cell that had earlier held women accused in famous Paris trials. She was looked after by the nuns who served as warders in the prison. For several months the press did not learn of the arrest. For Mata Hari, a citizen of a neutral country who throughout the war had travelled between The Hague, Paris and Madrid, freedom was over, and the proceedings had begun that in July would bring her before a court martial.