REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON
Mata Hari was the ultimate femme fatale. The Dutch-born exotic dancer and courtesan was famously beautiful and enigmatic, and equally notorious for her many affairs – often with military officers. But Mata Hari led a double life, spying for the French in the early part of the First World War before later being ‘turned’ by the Germans. She was eventually tried for espionage and executed by firing squad in Paris in October 1917, aged just 41, despite questionable evidence for her guilt. In the century since, Mata Hari has been portrayed countless times on stage and in film. And it’s not difficult to understand why: as a tale of glamour and intrigue, her life makes quite a story.
For Helen Fry, the popular image of Mata Hari as a delectable, dangerous female agent has done immense disservice to the wider history of women in intelligence. In this, her latest book, she sets out to challenge the lazy tradition of ‘assessing women operatives primarily on their presumed seductive qualities’ to argue instead that their work required patience and determination – and a lot of plain old hard graft.
Fry’s book is a comprehensive account of the many hundreds of women who worked in espionage and intelligence-gathering in Britain and abroad over a 30-year period, as ‘intelligencers, codebreakers, spies, secret operatives, handlers, and double agents.’ These women clearly had important responsibilities and were frequently exposed to extremely dangerous situations. But, equally, the work was often boring, repetitive, and exhausting.
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