Compiled by Sebastian Garcia, SpyChix

Mata Hari, Dutch Dancer and Spy for Germany During World War I, Standing, in a Formal Cloak Mata Hari was the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and prostitute Gertrud Margarete Zelle, who was shot by the French as a spy on 15 October 1917.

Mata Hari was also one of the most inept agents in the world of espionage. But when it came to the notorious Mata Hari, her accomplishments were counted in the bedroom and on the stage, not in the recorded annals of secret intelligence. She was a creature of her own imagination. Her wild fancies finally engulfed her in terrible adventure and led her before a French firing squad on October 15, 1917.

The enigmatic Mata Hari struck down by bullets that day had nothing to do with the little Dutch girl born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, on August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, Holland. Her parents, Adam Zelle and Antje van der Meulen, were wealthy. Her father owned a successful hatter’s business and he and his wife lavished attention and gifts on their only daughter. Her mother died when she was fourteen, however, and her father sent her to a convent school.

Graduating at eighteen, Margaret met within a few weeks a dashing Dutch officer, Captain Rudolf MacLeod, a man of forty whose uncle was an admiral and who bragged of his frequent visits to the court of The Hague where he chatted with Queen Wilhelmina. The couple married in 1895 and left for Java where MacLeod was serving as a colonial officer. They made their home in Banjoe-Biroe, a Dutch East Indias settlement that was anything but idyllic. It was a place of squalor and uncomfortable climate, unbearably hot and rain-soaked.

MacLeod’s image of the handsome, dashing husband soon vanished. He drank incessantly, while his wife struggled against boredom and labored through a difficult pregnancy, which had begun before the nuptials. Worse, MacLeod kept a string of native girls as mistresses, bringing these women into his home at all hours of the day for quick assignations. When Margaret gave birth to her son Norman on January 30, 1896, MacLeod, according to her bitter statements in divorce court later, was having sex with a native girl in the next room. The boy later died, poisoned by an embittered servant.

MacLeod then proposed that Margaret and he operate a badger game. He would arrange through intermediaries for wealthy plantation owners in Java and Sumatra to visit his wife. While the visitor was having sex with her, MacLeod would suddenly barge into the bedroom to play the outraged husband. Both MacLeod and Margaret would then blackmail the victims for heavy payments. Margaret later summed up this sordid episode of her life by sarcastically repeating MacLeod’s oft-stated philosophy that “man is an animal! Let’s make the most of it.”

In her divorce proceedings, Margaret claimed that she was little more than a naive, confused young woman who was easily manipulated by her calculating spouse. “My husband picked wealthy men as suitable objects for blackmail,” her petition stated. “One gentleman was a great admirer of my eyes and I led him on as I was told … I was able to collect several thousand guilders.”

Awarded custody of her daughter, Margaret received only a small court-ordered settlement from MacLeod. Placing her child in the home of a relative, she spent most of the settlement money on dancing lessons. She had resolved to support herself as an Oriental dancer, and intended to emulate the dances she had seen performed in Java, those that emphasized the arms, legs, and eyes, which Margaret felt were her best physical attributes. To make her body supple and lithe, she performed strenuous acrobatic exercises.

In October 1903, she believed she was ready to astound the world with the mystical dances of Shiva (or Siva) and traveled to Paris to make her reputation. Her ambitions were dashed by failure. No one would hire her. The tall, long-legged beauty, however, found work for a while as a stripper in some low-life clubs.

For most of the following year, Margaret was a common streetwalker. By late 1904 she was servicing ten to twenty men a day in a cheap bordello. She contracted a venereal disease and a Dr. Bizard was summoned to examine her. (Ironically, this same physician would become her mentor in Saint-Lazare Prison while she awaited a firing squad.)

Returning to Holland, Margaret pressed all she knew, friends, and family members, for cash. With a substantial amount of money, Margaret returned to Paris with a new wardrobe and took an expensive suite of rooms at the luxurious Hotel Crillon. The woman was no longer Margaret Getrude Zelle. She was Mata Hari, a stage name she had created, one that meant “Eye of the Morning,” or “Child of the Dawn,” whichever definition Margaret cared to give. Acting as if she were a member of visiting royalty, Mata Hari summoned the entrepreneurial nightclub owner, Emile Guimet, to her Crillon suite.

Guimet went out of curiosity, being told by a courier that “the most exotic dancer in the world wished to see him.” He was greeted by a tall, sloe-eyed brunette who exuded sultry sex with every move of her curvacious body. Guimet was captivated, enthralled by a woman he thought was the most sophisticated, worldly female he had ever encountered.

Guimet fell in love with the siren, making her the dancing star of his nightclub and his mistress as well. Guimet presented Mata Hari to high society Paris in a stunning nightclub debut in 1905. Promiscuous, flirtatious, and openly flaunting her body, she captivated her audiences. Audiences and critics alike swooned over Mata Hari’s exotic, interpretive dancing. They heaped praise upon her for her undulating prowess as she shed one veil after another with swirling precision, ending her act with shuddering, quivering nakedness.

Everywhere the dancer appeared she was mobbed by rich men begging her to take their wealth in exchange for her sexual favors. Police had to be called to put down riotous crowds when Mata Hari appeared at the Casino de Paris, the Olympia, and the FoliesBergere. She was by then called “the red dancer,” after the many red veils she would shed while dancing the Dance of Love, the Dance of Sin, the Dance of Death.

Leaving Paris for two years, the dancer toured the capitals of Europe — London, Vienna, Rome, Berlin. Fame and fortune were dumped into her coffers. To men everywhere, Mata Hari became the smoldering symbol of sex. She knew it and capitalized on it at every turn. She was summoned to perform privately before Crown Prince Wilhelm in Berlin. The Prince and the dancer had a brief but passion-filled affair during which Wilhelm gave Mata Hari diamonds and emeralds worth more than $100,000.

When Emperor Wilhelm objected to his son’s liaison with the courtesan, the Prince flaunted the dancer in public. On one occasion, he had the dancer at his side on a Berlin parade ground while he reviewed the royal guards. In 1907, he escorted the dancer into his officers’ mess where he ordered her to perform naked on the tables before his salivating men. Some time later Wilhelm tired of the dancer and turned her over to his future brother-in-law, the Duke of Brunswick. Within months, she had stepped down another notch to become the mistress of Berlin Police Chief Traugott von Jagow.

A beefy, bald man, Jagow would later become the adjutant of Colonel Walther Nicolai, head of German intelligence (Nachrichtendienst) during World War I. Although he could not afford her extravagant lifestyle, Jagow’s love for Mata Hari was genuine and remained for the rest of her life but her association with him would, indeed, cost the dancer her life. Though she drew an allowance regularly from Jagow, the dancer continued her many affairs with European diplomats and aristocrats.

By 1912, however, Mata Hari had risen to great heights as a legitimate ballet dancer. She had never forsaken ballet, which she practiced painfully each and every day, exercising for several hours in a ballet exercising room that she had constructed in her villa. She scored great successes at the Paris Opera Ballet and also in the ballet theaters of Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin. In 1912, she appeared at La Scala in Milan and rendered a magnificent performance of the classic ballet Bacchus and Gambrini, one which dispelled all doubts of her most severest critics about her dancing abilities.

Like all in her profession, the dancer kept a bulging scrapbook of clippings praising her and her performances. Unlike other dancers, she kept a second scrapbook, much thicker, which contained hundreds of letters from Europe’s most powerful men, all of which were compromising, along with copies of her own profane, obscene letters to them. Undoubtedly, these letters made up her insurance policy, correspondence that could easily be converted to blackmail.

The year 1912 was pivotal for Mata Hari. She not only scored her most triumphant artistic successes at that time, but decided on a new career packed with adventure, excitement, and danger. She had decided to become a spy. Exactly how she slipped into the dark shadows of espionage is uncertain to this day. The accomplished spymasters of Europe would minimize her activities in this realm The British joked about her ineptitude, the Germans dismissed her as ineffective. Only the French branded her so devastating as to be equal to a whole German army.

Jagow was the inspiration for this new career. The ever faithful lover invited Mata Hari to lunch in a private room of a Berlin restaurant some time in 1912. Jagow by then had become one of Nicolai’s spymasters for German military intelligence, which was already preparing for war with France and England. The German came bluntly to the point.

The spymaster proposed that the dancer go on using her boudoir as a source of money, but that she get information in the bargain. Jagow told her that he would supply her with a list of clients who would pay her handsomely — he told her the fee should be 30,000 marks per night — and that she was to pry state, political, and military secrets from these lovers.

The spy was by then designated as a German agent under the code number of H.21. The prefix H, learned later by Allied intelligence, applied only to German spies recruited before August 1914, the beginning of World War I. As such, Jagow arranged for her to attend important diplomatic parties and receptions in all of the capitals of central and western Europe, even North Africa. In the German embassies in Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Cairo, the dancer met and seduced high-ranking diplomats and military officers who mixed their bedroom babble with information about troop movements, munitions dumps, espionage operations, naval maneuvers, warships, new artillery weapons. All of this Mata Hari or H.21 dutifully reported in eyebrow-raising detail to Jagow.

When the war began, Mata Hari was well-positioned to spy for Germany, a country that she is said to have adopted and one that secretly granted her citizenship. Jagow then ordered the dancer to return to France via her native Holland. Once she arrived at her villa in Neuilly, she would receive further instructions. Mata Hari went to Amsterdam but found the French border closed to her. Only those with special passes were permitted to cross.

Undaunted, the spy went to the French consulate in Amsterdam, pleading non-belligerency. “My home is in Neuilly,” she said. “My friends are there. My career is in France.” To a French official she showed letters she had received from high-ranking French politicians and military officers. The consul agreed to prepare a pass for her. While she waited, the ever sexually active dancer seduced the richest Dutch trade merchant in Amsterdam. She learned from him the number and embarkation dates of food ships leaving Holland for England, and subsequent rerouting to France. The spy delivered this information to Major Sprecht, a German intelligence officer in Amsterdam, and he sent it on to Jagow.

Agents did watch the dancer as one important Foreign Office official after another dined with her, went to her hotel suite, and slept with her. But these officials were much too important to be questioned by the police. Further, nothing Mata Hari did suggested that she was a spy. Her mail was inspected and nothing incriminating was found. What investigators did not know was that she was told much by her paramours, how the French armies were supplied, where troops were positioned, even where recruits to act as reinforcements were being trained.

This information the spy sent to Jagow in Germany inside the diplomatic pouches of certain neutral countries with the cooperation of diplomats in the embassies of those countries. When French counterintelligence was about to close its dossier on Mata Hari, agents turned up evidence that brought more suspicion upon the dancer. Jules Cambon, department chief of the French Foreign Office and a close friend of the dancer, arranged for Mata Hari to receive a pass to travel to the village of Vittel which was near the front lines.

Although French agents watched her day and night for almost seven months they could not collect any evidence against her. All they reported was that she worked tirelessly in nursing wounded men. Most of these, however, were officers whom the dancer subtly pumped for information. The wounded men gladly told her all she wanted to know about a great French offensive that was going to be mounted in that sector, which later became known as the battle of the Somme.

Jagow later received this information from the spy when she returned to Paris. A huge German army lay in wait for the French attack and smashed the French armies, slaughtering more than 200,000 men. Captain Georges Ladoux of French counterintelligence then thought to jolt the spy into an admission by having her brought to his office where he bluntly accused her of being an agent for Germany. “Madam,” Ladoux intoned, “you are under suspicion by all the Allied Powers. You are to be deported, returned to your native Holland.”

Mata Hari knew that deportation would end her career as a German agent. She thought to outwit the French officer by offering to spy for France. “I can be extremely useful,” she promised. “I have access to German military matters.” Then she asked that she be sent to German military headquarters. “I will obtain any secret intelligence the French General Staff might require.”

Though she thought she was being clever, the spy had made a fatal mistake. She had all along denied that she knew anything of espionage and yet, to prevent her deportation, she offered to expertly perform the acts of a professional spy. Ladoux pretended to be persuaded that Mata Hari would do anything for her “beloved France.” He agreed that she could spy against the Germans, but not at Stenay where she originally proposed to go.

Ladoux ordered the dancer to travel to occupied Brussels. Then came a report from British intelligence that told the French that one of its agents had been captured and killed in Brussels. The agent, the British said, had been betrayed by a woman who answered the description of Mata Hari. Now convinced that the dancer was working with the Germans, Ladoux ordered that Mata Hari was to be arrested the moment she returned to France. The Germans had all but given up on Mata Hari. She was no longer beautiful, nor sultry. Her sallow complexion had hardened and she now bore a decidedly wrinkled and well-lined face. She appeared gaunt, emaciated. Everything about her seemed severe, including her attitude and personality. She was shrewish and demanding.

Also, the Germans knew that their spy had been identified as such many months earlier. She was too notorious now to be used with any kind of effectiveness. Realizing that she was no longer the beau ideal of espionage, Mata Hari went to other foreign powers, offering her services as an agent but she was rebuffed. Returning to the Germans in Madrid, the spy demanded that she be paid for her services and that she receive another assignment. A nervous Captain von Kalle contacted Jagow in Berlin.

Jagow was irked and resigned to the fact that Mata Hari was now expendable. He sent a wire to the German Embassy in Madrid that agent H.21 was to return to France where, through a neutral legation, she would be paid 15,000 pesatas. French intelligence intercepted this message and quickly identified agent H.21 as Mata Hari. Agents trailed her back to Paris where she registered at the Plaza-Athenee Hotel on the avenue Montaigne. She collected her check but oddly did not cash it.

On the morning of February 13, 1917, Commissioner Priolet, in the company of his secretary and two gendarmes, burst into Mata Hari’s suite to find the spy in bed, eating her breakfast. Priolet ordered her to dress. As she silently did so, her rooms were searched and the check for 15,000 pesatas was discovered. The spy was unperturbed. As she was leaving her rooms, she swooped up several bunches of wild violets and thrust them into the arms of the startled Priolet.

Mata Hari was taken to the crumbling prison fortress of Faubourg Saint-Denis where she was kept in a padded cell to prevent possible suicide. The French expected to get information from the dancer before eliminating her. She languished in her cell until brought to a closed military trial, which occured on July 24-25, 1917. So secretive was this hearing that armed sentries were placed outside the doors with strict orders to shoot anyone who came closer than ten paces.

Colonel Semprou of the Guard Republicain acted as president of the court. Lieutenant Andre Mornet represented the Commissioner of the Government (Judge-Advocate General) and acted as the prosecutor. Also in attendance was Major Massard of the Deuxieme Bureau. Mata Hari was represented by a brilliant lawyer, Edward Clunet, who so enthus iastically undertook the case that he became the spy’s devoted champion.

Semprou opened with a damning statement: “On the day that war was declared you had breakfast with the Prefect of Police (Jagow) at Berlin and then drove with him through a shouting crowd.” Dressed all in black, Mata Hari was unperturbed, calmly responding: “It is true. I had met the Prefect in a music hall where I danced. That is how we came to know each other.” She added the titillating tidbit that Jagow had come to inspect her scanty costume after receiving complaints that it revealed too much of the dancer’s body. “A little later the Prefect charged you with a mission and gave you thirty thousand marks,” intoned Semprou. “That is true,” the dancer replied softly. “He was the man and gave me thirty thousand marks. But not for the reason you impute. He was my lover.” “Hundreds of thousands of marks were paid to you—” “As a courtesan, yes! I confess it, but never a spy!” The dancer had lost her composure. She learned forward as if pleading with the officers of the court who sat ramrod stiff in front of her. “Harlot, yes, I am that! But traitoress — never!”

Then Semprou presented the court’s real evidence: “At the order of German Headquarters you were notified in Madrid that you were to be paid 15,000 pesatas, money waiting for you here in France, and you came to France and collected those funds.” Mata Hari for the first time appeared frantic. She shook her head and said: “I was the mistress of Kalle, head of German intelligence in Madrid. That payment was a love debt, that’s all.”

Semprou then drove home his point like a dagger into her heart: “But that remittance was sent to the order of H.21. That is a number on the list of German spies. That was your number. That is what you were known as—not as a mistress, a lover, a harlot. That was the pay of a spy. You, madam, are H.21, an agent in the employ of the German intelligence service. And that is what you have always been since long before this war began.”

The dancer was trapped and knew it. She was shattered at the evidence. Her body trembled. Her doe-eyes blinked uncontrollably. Her mouth quivered as it delivered a final answer: “That … that is not true! I’m telling you that—it was—it was to pay—to pay for my nights of love. It—it is my price. Please believe me, gentlemen.”

The court deliberated for a half hour. Then Mata Hari was ordered to stand and hear its verdict. The president of the court stated in an emotionless voice that she had been found guilty of espionage against France. He then said: “Margaret Gertrude Zelle—you are condemned to death.” Stunned, the dancer muttered: “It’s not possible. It’s not possible.”

On the day before the scheduled execution, she maintained a confident, almost cheerful air. Also on that day, Sister Leonide was present with Dr. Bizard in the dancer’s cell. The nun had been instructed to be Mata Hari’s cellmate and watch the prisoner closely so that she would not harm herself before the sentence was carried out. At one point, to cheer up the condemned spy, Sister Leonide said to Mata Hari: “Show us how you dance.” The spy rose from a small bed, smiling. She loosened her robe and began to slowly dance about the cell.

At 4 A.M. the following morning, Commandant Julien came into the cell. He asked Sister Leonide to wake the spy. The condemned woman put on her warmest gown and chatted calmly as she dressed. “It is cold. I slept so well. Another day I would not have forgiven them for waking me so early. Why do you have this custom of executing people at dawn? In India it is otherwise. It takes place at noon. I would much rather go to Vincennes [the place of execution] about three o’clock after a good lunch. Give me my nice little slippers, too. I always like to be well shod.” After powdering her face, the spy cocked her head at Julien and announced: “Gentlemen, I am ready.”

She was escorted into a large touring car, which sped off toward Vincennes, arriving there at 5:40 A.M., the car driving up to the firing range where twelve picked soldiers of the Fourth Regiment of Zouaves awaited her. Dr. Bizard quickly poured a small glass of brandy for the dancer and she drank this down. Then she lifted her skirts and stepped from the car and began marching toward a post staked in the middle of the rifle range.

An officer offered her a blindfold, which she refused. When he attempted to tie her waist to the post, the dancer waved him away. She smiled and held that smile as the twelve riflemen, standing twelve paces away from her, fired their bullets into her body. As the spy slumped to the ground, an officer walked up to her, placed a pistol behind her ear and fired a bullet into her brain, the traditional coup de grace. No one came forth to claim the body.

In the mist-shrouded forests and mountains of Transylvania, home to the castle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a more modern myth, dating from the cold war, has survived down the generations. This, some say, was the location of an extraordinary “sex school”, one in which the most beautiful and handsome of cold-war spies were trained in lovemaking before being sent forth to seduce and inveigle secrets from western diplomats and agents. In the mid-1960s, one American author claimed he’d been taken to one such school, housed in a former royal hunting lodge outside Brasov. He alleged that it had a curriculum of sex studies run by the Romanians and that at least three of its young students were jaw-droppingly beautiful.

It takes only a cursory examination of the history of Transylvania’s former royal hunting lodges to establish that the possibility of any of them ever having housed a college for 15-year-old female sex spies is fanciful in the extreme. However, four decades on, the myth of an intelligence school for government whores is still deeply ingrained in the Romanian psyche. So is there any truth in it?

“Before 1989, everybody hears about this,” says Csendes Ladislau-Antoniu, president of the CNSAS, the archive of f the Securitate, the secret police who terrorised Romania for decades, “but in my position I didn’t see any papers [proving it].” He admits: “About spies as spies we know very little as an institution. Its [the Securitate’s] job was not to see if James Bond was blond or not.”

Nicolae Popa, a Romanian MP and senator for Brasov, is also well acquainted with the rumours but is more sceptical. “It’s exaggerated, like Dracula. Vlad the Impaler has been built up to be a vampire who drinks blood. It’s the same thing.”

I was told that one of the few people alive who might be able to confirm if such a school ever existed was Lt-Gen Pacepa, the former deputy chief of Romania’s espionage service. Now living in the US, where he is one of the country’s leading authorities on cold-war spies, he resides under cover so deep that, despite two Ceausescu-imposed death sentences and a $4m bounty on his head — $2m from the Romanian state, $1m from Yasser Arafat and $1m from the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi, who sent Carlos the Jackal after him — he has never been found, officially. But thanks to the internet I reached him in days. He dismissed the idea of the “school” as pure fantasy, but in a letter confirming Romania had, nevertheless, employed prostitutes as spies, five words stood out: “You are onto something real.”

Lt-Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest- ranking spy ever to defect to the West, a defection as important to the US and the CIA as that of Oleg Gordievsky, erstwhile chief of the KGB’s London bureau, was to Britain. A grainy picture on the cover of his controversial new book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB and the Kennedy Assassination, shows him as a balding man in a brown suit. The head of the DIE (Departamentul de Informatii Externe), Romania’s foreign intelligence service, he helped trigger — with his 1987 defection and autobiographical book Red Horizons — the revolution that destroyed one of the cruellest, most corrupt dictatorships of modern times; Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were sentenced to death in 1989 largely on the basis of the evidence it contained.

Pacepa, who ran the DIE from 1968 to 1978, revealed that, while all communist countries, including Russia and East Germany, used prostitutes, both male and female, as spies, “my DIE excelled at it”. But there wasn’t any school. “All training was individual and was done in special safe houses that were studded with hidden microphones and video cameras. But these were no ordinary agents. They were, for the most part, “illegals”, recruited for their very particular skill sets and attributes, the most important of which was their genitalia. The highly classified PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye — KGB foreign intelligence) manual for illegal operations puts it this way: “A regular foreign-intelligence officer has an official position, a diplomatic passport and a country behind him; an illegal officer acts under a foreign flag and has only his penis — that’s his cover, his source of information, his immunity.”

The “illegals” were originally the invention of Stalin, who in the late 1920s ordered his foreign-intelligence services to train a new type of spy: one who could gather information from potentially hostile countries without compromising his own if caught. The earliest illegal officers were foreign-born Soviet citizens whose mother tongue was French or German. They were sent abroad under phoney western identities and all connection with their country of origin was erased.

The most successful illegal of his generation was Richard Sorge, described by Frederick Forsyth as the “most formidable spy in history” and by Le Figaro as “Stalin’s James Bond”. Doc-umented as a German citizen, the Azerbaijani-born Sorge used his cover as a journalist to run a Soviet illegals network out of the German embassy in Tokyo. He’d left a German wife behind in the Soviet Union but he was always surrounded by mistresses ready to give their lives for him.

In Japan, the German military attaché’s wife, with whom he’d had an affair, was so in love with him that in 1938, when her husband was named ambassador to Tokyo, Sorge was given free run of the embassy. From there he forecast such events as the attack on Pearl Harbor and the launch of Operation Barbarossa. Years later, after his 1944 capture and execution by the Japanese, Khrush-chev made Sorge a Hero of the Soviet Union and built a cult around his memory. His reputation as a womaniser was part and parcel of his legend. According to the PGU manual, his intelligence career, like that of many illegal agents, was based “more on his penis than his training”.

Having, as Pacepa calls it, a “king-size penis” was still the rule for male Soviet-bloc illegal officers from 1972 to 1978, when he ran the ultra-secret DIE component dealing with this category of spy. “These lady-killers were supposed to exploit their unusual sexual endowment [and outstanding academic or technical credentials] to achieve social status, usually by marrying wealthy or influential women,” he says. Hence the PGU manual’s dictum that an illegal’s penis is “his cover, his source of information, his immunity”. It was up to the agent to use his sexual and technical prowess, as well as his wits, to gain all those things.

To Pacepa (who’d known almost nothing about illegal operations during his previous four years as deputy chief of Romania’s foreign-intelligence programme, because the secret headquarters they were run from were known only to the DIE chief and its personnel director, Ceausescu’s brother), the clash between the puritanism espoused publicly as part of the communist ideal and the private reality came as a shock.

While Ceausescu was prudish about sex, his wife was the opposite. One of the most disturbing of innumerable horrifying passages in Pacepa’s exposé of the couple’s corruption, Red Horizons, concerns Elena’s dislike of a loyal secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party, purely because his wife was a Jew. “You’d better shove one of your sexy illegal officers up under her skirt,” she told Pacepa. “I’m sick of her pretending to be the Virgin Mary.” When the mission to seduce the secretary’s wife failed, an enraged Elena screamed at Pacepa: “You have three more months to get her to hike her skirt up… I want her tape-recorded, photographed and filmed… Let me see her lying naked under your man. Wiggling her precious rear end until they reach orgasm.”

In Romania, the training of these “sexy” illegals took three to eight years and was done not in a Transylvanian school but in 150 safe houses where trainee agents were kept under round-the-clock control. Many of these safe houses were ordinary flats, moved from time to time to avoid suspicion. There, illegal agents perfected the language of their target country, learnt appropriate skills, such as tennis and bridge, and were taught how to infiltrate western scientific and industrial targets.

Despite the high priority given by the DIE to recruiting illegals with huge penises, Pacepa says only one seduction operation was used externally by his organisation, and that was a honeytrap involving a female Stasi agent, also used by the DIE. In May 1958, he was at a meeting in East Berlin with Markus Wolf, the famed chief of the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence service, when Wolf heard that a Moscow-trained DIE illegal, Gheorghe Mandache, who’d been moved to the city to perfect his German, had vanished with his East German girlfriend. It took over a year to find them; they were living under new identities in Düsseldorf, West Germany. The PGU wanted Mandache killed to discourage other illegals from defecting, and decided that “Gerda”, a German-born Romanian spy, would seduce him.

In September 1959, Pacepa met Gerda at one of Wolf’s safe houses. “So what do you think of your next lover?” Wolf asked her with a wink, after showing her Mandache’s photograph. “My job is my only lover” was Gerda’s flat response.

“She seemed as emotional about her new task as if she’d been going grocery shopping, not leaving to kidnap a human being who’d certainly be shot afterwards,” recalls Pacepa. In fact, Gerda’s mission failed. Mandache was too in love with his girlfriend to be susceptible to her charms. But Pacepa was chilled by the episode.

Gerda was one of a number of agents who Pacepa claims underwent cosmetic surgery on their genitals by specialist PGU surgeons. This surgery was most commonly practised on “wives” — women illegals whose role came into being in the 1950s and early ’60s, when the DIE’s Soviet advisers insisted they provide Romanian “wives” to as many western agents as possible in order to keep them “tied” to the DIE for ever. Under PGU guidelines, a “wife” had to have a “tight sex orifice, so that she could squeeze her lover’s penis like a vice,” alleges Pacepa. “PGU doctors specialised in mould-ing the sex orifice according to the particularity of each case,” he explained. It was crucial that the “wife” was sexually experienced. “Each candidate was secretly filmed making love; those selected were helped to perfect their sexual technique by illegal officers who could no longer be sent abroad.” In Programmed to Kill, Pacepa builds a convincing case that Marina Oswald, the wife of Kennedy’s assassin, was a KGB “wife” created specially for Lee Harvey, a loner who was unlikely to have had the social skills necessary to marry a Russian woman in the brief time he courted her.

The activities of the DIE were modest in comparison with those masterminded in East Germany by communism’s greatest spymaster, Markus Wolf, himself a womaniser. A figure so elusive that it took western spy agencies 20 years to find out what he looked like, the “man without a face” started using agents as “Romeo” seducers in the early 1950s, when he headed up the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence service, the FVA, and arguably perfected the use of them.

An MI6 source says that, while honeytrapping was not unique to communist spy agencies, the Soviets and eastern bloc countries were quickest to realise that the rise of the status of women in society meant that, for the first time in history, they had access to national secrets. The KGB, Stasi and DIE exploited that knowledge mercilessly. Under Wolf’s direction, senior FVA officers

scouted around East Germany for promising candidates in the manner of sports scouts, recruiting only one in every hundred chosen. These Romeos were then dispatched mainly to West Germany, where they had a catastrophic effect on national security. Although the Soviet bloc countries began to use the honeytrapping agents in the 1950s, the practice continued for more than 30 years. During the 1970s and ’80s an incredible 25 Bonn secretaries were seduced, duped or willingly co-opted by Soviet or East German agents.

In Man Without a Face, co-written by Anne McElvoy, Wolf recalled how the Bild-Zeitung put together a photo-montage of 12 women beneath the headline “The Secretaries who Spied for Love”. To his annoyance, “The secretaries were relentlessly portrayed as pitiful, misused victims, all of a certain age, single and hungry for love, delivered helpless into the arms of misfortune.”

In actuality, Wolf said, the way it worked was this: “When we sent a young male agent to the West with a specific espionage task, we would say to him, ‘Okay, you are likely to have a private life like anybody else, but if you do happen on a secretary, and a well-placed one at that, so much the better.’ The rest was up to him.”

The truth was rather less prosaic. In 1960, Leonore Heinz, secretary to a high-ranking official in the West German foreign ministry, fell in love with Heinz Sütterlin, married him and confided to him every scrap of information that came her way. Sütterlin passed films of the documents his wife smuggled out to an East German illegal officer codenamed Maks, who was being run by the KGB out of East Berlin. When Maks defected to the CIA, Sütterlin and his wife were arrested. Confronted by her husband’s admission that he’d married her not for love but on orders from the KGB, Leonore hanged herself in her cell.

ven Wolf acknowledged that the human cost of these Romeo operations was high in terms of “disrupted lives, broken hearts and destroyed careers”. Far from being the martini-drinking, laissez-faire world of James Bond, they too often ended in tragedy. Few cases sum up the catastrophic consequences of those targeted by Romeo illegals than that of Margret Höke, who in 1987 was convicted by a German court of high treason for passing 1,800 secrets over 12 years to her KGB lover, which made her the most notorious of the infamous Bonn secretaries.

In exclusive, previously unseen footage rel-eased to The Sunday Times by the director Dirk Posselt, who spent over a year persuading Höke to talk to him for a documentary series, Top Secret, Höke’s voice trembles and frequently becomes agitated as she recalls her first meeting with Franz Becker on a perfect day in the summer of 1968. She was struggling to get a connection in a phone booth; he offered to help. She didn’t know he was a KGB agent then, any more than she feels he knew she was a secretary in the office of the West German president. This despite the fact that she has since learnt he was married at the time.

“That’s what the officials didn’t believe. They thought he was a so-called Romeo. But that’s how it started, without me having any idea who he was. And he didn’t know who I was. I thought he was a student, like he told me, that he was alone and that he was looking for companionship.”

A petite, nervous woman with neat white hair, conservatively attired in a cardigan and skirt, it is clear she was never a Mata Hari. Indeed, it’s hard to reconcile her with the woman the presiding judge at her trial called a “most dangerous spy”. Sentencing her to eight years in jail, the judge, Klaus Wagner, said she’d used her love for Becker “cleverly and unscrupulously”, endangering the security of the Federal Republic at a time when the Soviet Union was using all means to prevent the West from rearming. Indifferent to the consequences of her spying, she’d wanted only to satisfy the man her friends called “Beautiful Franz”.

In Höke’s version of events, it was all so much more innocent. The product of a repressive, abusive, small-town childhood with a controlling mother, she’d left home without a word at 22 to do a secretarial course in Bonn. There she’d had trouble forming “normal” social relationships, particularly with men, until, 10 years later, handsome, charming Becker, 27, walked into her life. After that initial 1968 meeting, they’d begun seeing each other, at first infrequently. He’d showed great interest in aspects of her life such as her visits to vegetarian communes, and was particularly intrigued by her secretarial job, “Even though,” Höke says, “I was in this small position where nothing of great importance happened.”

For the first five years of their relationship, during which Becker was often away “on business”, the information she gave him was mostly verbal. He was vague about what he needed it for, saying only that it was of interest to the Swiss company for which he worked as an electrician. Höke took it at face value, even though in all the years she knew him he never gave her his phone number. When-ever Höke became frustrated with his reticence on his background and tried to end the relationship, he’d convince her it was going well. Desperately lonely, she dreamt of marrying him. One day Becker produced a lipstick concealing a miniature camera and asked her to photograph documents for him. Having attended a government seminar on spying techniques, she knew this was part of the job, but her first and only attempt to use the camera at her office was foiled by the arrival of a high-ranking officer. Terrified of discovery, she carried all future documents home in a rolled-up newspaper and photographed them with her own camera, using a reading lamp as a flash.

“I took some pictures but actually there was nothing of great interest,” she insists.

On seven or eight occasions, Becker contacted her from his travels and asked her to travel to Copenhagen under the name of Frau Günther on a “blind date”. There she handed documents to a woman courier, “Renate”, in a supplement of Der Spiegel. Money changed hands. Later she would be charged with accepting £11,000 in bribes.

Hard as it is to credit, Höke is adamant to this day that she did nothing wrong. She admits knowing that something about Becker wasn’t plausible — on a visit to Switzerland she had a strong sense that everything in his life was fake or arranged — but she couldn’t bear to lose him. She persuaded herself that the information she was passing on was mundane and inconsequential.

In August 24, 1985, five police showed up at her door. Höke was paralysed with shock. Eighteen months after they’d broken up, she’d just met Becker in Copenhagen, where he’d tried to persuade her to continue the relationship and had pressed money upon her, which was on her when she was arrested. Höke remains bemused — some might say deluded — about why officials were so angry. She blames the media and a politically motivated expert witness. “They’d never had a case like this where someone was so naive, and they didn’t believe me. I told them straight, ‘[Franz] works for an organisation in Switzerland that has nothing to do with [secret] agents.’ Then I thought they’d let me go. On the contrary, that was only the beginning.”

In August 2004, nearly 20 years after last seeing Becker, Höke made contact with him. She travelled to Berlin, left a message at his old “company” with her hotel number, and he got straight back to her. He was amazed but thrilled to hear from her. They met for a coffee and he brought along his wife. She discovered that he’d been married on the day they met in 1968 and that his only daughter had been born three years later.

Becker’s wife first learnt about her husband’s 15-year affair with Höke on the TV news and had been equally devastated. According to one report, she’d tried to commit suicide. Confronted with his double life, Becker had had a nervous breakdown. Now, years on, he was extremely ill with a heart condition. “His wife didn’t know about me and obviously I didn’t know about her,” says Höke. “This he somehow had to stomach. I think that’s the reason he got sick.”

Höke told him she forgave him, which he was thankful for but found hard to accept. They were able to clear the air. He admitted he’d been a Stasi or KGB illegal for most of his adult life, but denied being a Romeo and insisted that their meeting had come about naturally.

In January 2005, Becker died, having kept in touch with Höke until the end. Any bitterness Höke still feels is not directed at her late Romeo lover but at the German justice system. While Becker, whose court case took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was merely fined and given a two-year suspended sentence, she’d spent four years and four months in jail, lost all her civilian rights and needed years of counselling. She now lives a lonely life in the home of her dead parents.

“Everything was not so easy for Franz, but he had a family, a house, a daughter and a grandchild,” she says. “On the contrary, I was alone.

I was fired on the spot and lost everything that was possible. I have nothing any more, including the flat and everything that belonged to it. The legal fees I’m still paying off until today. But I can live with that. I live a very simple life. I’ve come to terms with my situation.”

Unfortunately, if Pacepa is to be believed, the devastation suffered by victims of Romeo and Juliet agents, and the activities of illegal officers in general, did not end with the cold war, and we may still be at risk even now. This assertion was proven by the 2006 arrest in Montreal of the Russian spy known as Paul William Hampel, who confessed to being an officer of the SVR (the PGU’s successor). “The concept of the illegal officer was and still is unique to Russian intelligence,” says Pacepa. “It is Russia’s most secret weapon of the future.”


Compiled by Anne Myers, SpyChix

LOS ANGELES (STAFF & WIRE REPORTS) — The security industry expects the number of cyber-espionage attacks to increase in 2012 and the malware used for this purpose to become increasingly sophisticated.

In the past two years there has been a surge in the number of malware-based attacks that resulted in sensitive data being stolen from government agencies, defense contractors, Fortune 500 companies, human rights organizations and other institutions.

“I absolutely expect this trend to continue through 2012 and beyond,” said Rik Ferguson, director of security research and communication at security firm Trend Micro. “Espionage activities have, for hundreds of years, taken advantage of cutting-edge technologies to carry out covert operations; 2011 was not the beginning of Internet-facilitated espionage, nor will it be the end,” he added.

Threats like Stuxnet, which is credited with setting back Iran’s nuclear program by several years, or its successor, Duqu, have shocked the security industry with their level of sophistication. Experts believe that they are only the beginning and that more highly advanced malware will be launched in 2012.

Kayla Cohen, a cyber security expert at private intelligence communications agency GCIS said her firm is already preparing for their defenses.

“Our agency has been the target of several cyber attacks over the last couple of years’, Cohen said this morning, “Our online infrastructure has engaged a variety of new defenses against what we expect will be a rise in attacks in 2012”.

Cohen cited the recent Anonymous attack on Stratfor, another intelligence communications company.

“The responsibility will be to build a more solid relationship between government and the private sector to fight these attacks’, she added

CAPITOL HILL NEWS & ONLINE REPORTS - Israel’s defense minister extolled what he called Barack Obama’s resolve and risk-taking on Thursday, remarks likely to help the president’s re-election bid after the Pentagon beefed up warnings to Iran over its nuclear program.

The comments by Ehud Barak, lone centrist in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative coalition, also appeared to dampen speculation the Israelis could defy U.S. remonstrations by attacking their arch-foe’s nuclear facilities unilaterally.

In back-to-back interviews this week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his top military officer, General Martin Dempsey, made unusually strong statements about U.S. willingness to use force to deny Iran the means of developing an atom bomb.

“The change of emphasis … is a very important development, because it makes clear a fact that was already known to us from closed-door (discussions),” Barak told Israel Radio. “It makes clear to Iran that it faces a real dilemma.”

Panetta said on Monday the secretive Iranian nuclear program — which the Islamic Republic says is purely peaceful — could potentially yield a bomb within a year, a move that would be a “red line for us and … obviously, for the Israelis.”

“If we have to do it, we will deal with it,” Panetta said on CBS television. Asked whether he meant military steps, he replied: “There are no options off the table.”

The hazy diplomatic code leaving open the possibility of preemptive air strikes, and often echoed by Israel, was honed on Tuesday by Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We are examining a range of options,” he told CNN. “I am satisfied that the options that we are developing are evolving to a point that they would be executable if necessary.”

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