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Kalle’s messages may have been a calculated ploy to expose her-he allegedly sent the telegrams in an old code that the Germans knew the Allies had cracked-but they were all the evidence Ladoux needed.

Each of the communiqués referred to agent “H 21,” whom the French quickly identified as Mata Hari.

In either case, by the time she returned to Paris, a French wireless station at the Eiffel Tower had intercepted coded messages that Kalle sent to Berlin. The dancer evidently made a bumbling attempt to glean information from Kalle, but she may have also offered him her services as a spy. Just what transpired between the two is the subject of much debate. Anxious to make money to start a new life with him, she accepted Ladoux’s deal and announced her intentions to seduce military secrets out of high-ranking Germans.įollowing an abortive attempt to travel to Belgium in November 1916, Mata Hari ended up in neutral Spain, where she bedded a German major named Arnold Kalle. By then, Mata Hari had begun a passionate romance with Vladimir de Masloff, a 21-year-old Russian army captain. Ladoux was well aware of Britain’s suspicions that she was a German agent, but he seems to have considered the recruitment a means of either entrapping her or turning her to his side. That summer, a French intelligence operative named Georges Ladoux approached her in Paris with yet another lucrative espionage offer-this time to spy for France. Mata Hari only sank deeper into wartime intrigue in 1916. “Although she was thoroughly searched and nothing incriminating found,” a report read, “she is regarded by Police and Military to be not above suspicion, and her subsequent movements should be watched.”ġ969 In epic Super Bowl upset, Jets make good on Namath guarantee After questioning Mata Hari when she passed through England, the British cautioned their French allies to watch her closely. Her constant movements-not to mention her presence in Germany at the beginning of the war-had soon attracted the attention of British intelligence, which suspected her of being an enemy agent. Over the next several months, Mata Hari continued traveling through Europe and carrying out flings with military officers and politicians. Whatever the case, the 39-year-old was assigned a German codename: “H 21.” The cash-strapped dancer accepted the money-she later claimed she considered it payback for the assets seized from her a year earlier-but whether she actually took part in espionage is unclear. Kroemer evidently considered her high-class contacts and neutral Dutch citizenship a valuable asset, so he offered her 20,000 francs to become a spy for the Kaiser. The details of Mata Hari’s espionage career remain sketchy, but it seems to have begun in the fall of 1915, when she was approached by Karl Kroemer, the honorary German consul in Amsterdam.