WOMEN SPIES
It is no disparagement of the sex to say that women do not make good
spies. Generally they are lacking in technical knowledge, and therefore
are apt to send misleading reports through misunderstanding what they
hear. Their apologists have urged that one of their most amiable
qualities, compunction, often steps in at the moment when they are in
a position to be most useful: just when they have won the intimacy of
a man who can really tell them something important they cannot bring
themselves to betray his confidence.
Throughout the War, though women spies were convicted, no woman was
executed in England. In France there were one or two executions apart
from any that may have taken place near the Front, where espionage was
highly dangerous. The case of Margaret Gertrud Zeller, better known
as Matahari (‘Eye of the Morning’), has overshadowed all the other
cases. Her father was a Dutchman who, while in the Dutch East Indies,
married a Javanese woman. He brought her home to Holland, and there the
daughter became known as an exponent of a form of voluptuous oriental
dancing that was new to Europe at that time. She was tall and sinuous,
with glowing black eyes and a dusky complexion, vivacious in manner,
intelligent and quick in repartee. She was, besides, a linguist. When
she was about twenty she married a Dutch naval officer of Scottish
extraction named Macleod, who divorced her. She was well known in
Paris, and until the outbreak of war she was believed to be earning
considerable sums of money by her professional engagements. She had a
reputation in Holland, where people were proud of her success and, so
cynics said, of her graceful carriage, which was rare in that country.
In July 1915 she was fulfilling a dancing engagement in Madrid, when
information reached England that she was consorting with members of
the German Secret Service, and might be expected before long to be on
her way back to Germany _via_ Holland. This actually happened early in
1916. The ship put into Falmouth, and she was brought ashore, together
with her very large professional wardrobe, and escorted to London. I
expected to see a lady who would bring the whole battery of her charms
to bear upon the officers who were to question her. There walked into
the room a severely practical person who was prepared to answer any
question with a kind of reserved courtesy, who felt so sure of herself
and of her innocence that all that remained in her was a desire to help
her interrogators. The only thing graceful about her was her walk and
the carriage of her head. She made no gestures and, to say truth, time
had a little dimmed the charms of which we had heard so much, for at
this time the lady must have been at least forty.
I have said she was openness itself. She was ready with an answer to
every question, and of all the people that I examined during the course
of the War she was the ‘quickest in the uptake.’ If I quoted to her
the name of some person in Spain with whom it was compromising to be
seen in conversation she was astounded. He a suspect? Surely we must be
mistaken.
‘I see how it is,’ she said at last, ‘you suspect me. Can I speak to
you alone?’ The room was cleared of all but one officer and myself.
She looked at him interrogatively.
‘I said “Alone.”’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘this gentleman and I may be regarded as one person.’
‘Very well,’ she said, ‘then I am going to make a confession to you. I
am a spy, but not, as you think, for the Germans, but for one of your
allies--the French.’
I do not know to this moment whether she thought we would believe
her, but she plunged then into a sea of reminiscence, telling us of
the adventures she had undergone in pursuit of the objects of her
employers. I wondered how many of them were true.
We had altogether two long interviews with Matahari, and I am sure that
she thought she had had the best of it. We were convinced now that she
was acting for the Germans, and that she was then on her way to Germany
with information which she had committed to memory. On the other hand,
she had no intention of landing on British soil or of committing any
act of espionage in British jurisdiction, and with nothing to support
our view we could not very well detain her in England; so at the end of
the second interview I said to her, ‘Madame’ (she spoke no English) ‘we
are going to send you back to Spain, and if you will take the advice of
some one nearly twice your age, give up what you have been doing.’ She
said, ‘Sir, I thank you from my heart. I shall not forget your advice.
What I have been doing I will do no more. You may trust me implicitly,’
and within a month of her return to Spain she was at it again.
This time she was captured on the French side of the frontier and, as
I heard at the time, with compromising documents upon her. I should
have thought that so astute a lady would have avoided documents at all
hazards. They carried her to Paris, put her on her trial, and on 25th
July 1916 condemned her to death, but there was, as there is usually in
such cases, an interminable delay, and it was not until 15th October
that she was taken from Saint Lazare Prison to Vincennes for execution.
A French officer who was present described to me what happened. She
was awakened at 5 o’clock in the morning, and she dressed herself in
a dark dress trimmed with fur, with a large felt hat and lavender kid
gloves. With an escort of two soldiers, her counsel and a padre, she
was driven to Vincennes. When she came into sight of the troops she
gently put aside the ministrations of the padre and waved a salute to
the soldiers. She refused to be blindfolded, and she was in the act of
smiling and greeting the firing-party when the volley sent her pagan
spirit on its journey.
Another lady who was taken off a ship in transit from Rotterdam to
Barcelona was the cause of diplomatic remonstrances. She was a German
named Lisa Blume, and she was accompanied by an aged German duenna who
had been a governess in her earlier years. Attention was first called
to Fraulein Blume by the enormous quantity of baggage she was carrying.
She had no fewer than seventeen trunks filled, for the most part, with
expensive clothes, which hardly seemed to fit in with her story that
she was housekeeper to a member of the German Embassy in Madrid. She
was most indignant at her treatment, and she refused to answer any
questions at all. Her duenna, however, was more communicative. Fraulein
Blume, she said, was the daughter of a railway official in Germany, and
though undoubtedly housekeeper, she was also in confidential relations
with the Counsellor of the Embassy. When we came to search her baggage
we discovered a ration of nine iron crosses, which she appeared to
be conveying to the personnel of the German Embassy. There was
reason to believe, moreover, that she was the bearer of messages
probably committed to memory, from the German Government to their
representatives. Under these circumstances we interned her and retained
the decorations, but the duenna was allowed to proceed upon her
journey. We thought it likely that the incident would not be allowed to
pass without comment, and in due course representations were received
from two neutral Powers who, when the true relations of Fraulein Blume
with her employer were explained, appear to have dropped the question
rather hurriedly.
[Illustration: MATAHARI, EXECUTED AT VINCENNES. ALBERT MEYER. ERNST
WALDEMAR MELIN.]
Towards the end of 1915 some very remarkable telegrams were handed
in at Malta. They were a meaningless jumble of words, and evidently
a code, and it was decided that the sender was a woman who called
herself Madame Marie Edvige de Popowitch, a Serb, who had come to
Malta for the state of her health. She looked astonishingly well for
an invalid. Her flow of eloquence was reported to be extraordinary.
Among her effects was found a Dutch dictionary in which certain words
were underscored, and some of these words occurred in the telegrams.
On probing the possibility of this dictionary providing a code, it was
found that the messages that were to have been dispatched to a certain
port in the Mediterranean detailed the sailing of steamers from Malta.
It was decided to send her to England to be dealt with, and she was
put on board H.M.S. _Terrible_, together with two canaries, from which
she refused to be separated. The voyage was stormy in more than one
sense, and the captain did his best to placate his prisoner, but it was
whispered that on one occasion when he went to listen to her complaints
about her rations she flung a beef-steak full in his face.
It was with this reputation that she came before us. On that occasion
three officers were present besides myself. The lady entered my room
calm but determined. She was one of the shortest women I have ever
seen, and certainly the broadest. Sitting in the low armchair, her
head scarcely reached to the top of the table, but it would have been
a mistake, I saw at once, to treat her as negligible in any other
respect. She spoke French. In the earlier stages of our interview I
was ‘ce Monsieur,’ at a later stage I was ‘ce maudit policeman.’ It
was my rather searching inquiry into her reasons for possessing an
ancient Dutch dictionary that provoked the change. The difficulty was
that when any question was put to her she never stopped talking even to
take breath. Her voice rose and rose until the very walls reverberated
with it. I do not know what a welkin is, but I am quite sure that if
we had had one over our heads that morning it would have been rung.
Her excitement rose with her voice and, finding herself at the usual
disadvantage in sitting in a low chair, she got up from it and came
nearer and nearer until her gesticulations began narrowly to miss our
faces. There was a point at which one of the officers with me began
unostentatiously to remove the paper-knives, pens, rulers, and other
lethal weapons that lay at my right hand, and to push them out of her
reach, but she became at last so violent, and her hands were so nearly
at the level of our faces that we rose too, and as she advanced upon
us, still talking, we gave way, until she was at the table and we
were half-way to the door. As nothing would stem the torrent of her
eloquence it was suggested in a whisper that we should all bow gravely
to her and leave the room, sending in the proper people to get her
into a taxi. I do not suppose that those silent and dignified vaulted
corridors have ever re-echoed such language as the lady used on her
way to the taxi. I was told afterwards that the storm would have been
far more severe if it had not occurred to the wily inspector who had to
deal with her to talk to her soothingly about her canaries.
Madame Popowitch was medically examined as to the state of her mind,
and we were advised that it would not be wise to try her on the capital
charge. It was therefore decided to keep her in internment until the
end of the War. She was removed to Aylesbury, where she bombarded the
authorities with a myriad complaints. Nobody seemed to have pleased her
except the captain of H.M.S. _Terrible_, who, she said, never failed to
inquire after the health of her canaries. All this time these canaries
were being looked after by the police, but at the suggestion of the
prison authorities they were sent to Aylesbury, where it was reported
they had a calming effect upon their mistress. In the end Madame
Popowitch was certified insane and removed to an asylum.
Eva de Bournonville was probably the most incompetent woman spy ever
recruited by the Germans. She was a Swede, of French extraction,
well-educated and a linguist. Life had not prospered with her. She had
been a governess in the Baltic Provinces, an actress (I should think
a very bad one), and a secretary and typist employed occasionally at
foreign Legations. In the autumn of 1915 she was out of work, when she
was approached by one of the spy-recruiting agents in Scandinavia. It
chanced that she had an acquaintance in Scotland whom she had met in
Sweden. To this lady she wrote that she was coming to England for the
sake of her health and proposed to pay her a visit. Provided with a
Swedish passport, she had no difficulty in entering the country: she
was, moreover, a lady by birth, and her manners were perfect.
On her arrival in London she put up at a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury,
and wrote to her friend in Dumbartonshire, saying that after a good
rest she proposed to apply for a post in the Censorship, for which her
friend might give her a recommendation. The Scottish lady sent her
the address of some acquaintances in Hackney, and advised her to call
upon them. She did so and, finding that they were not at home, she
left a card on which she had given the Danish Legation at Pont Street,
W., as her address, for it appears that she had made arrangements to
have remittances sent to her through the Danish Legation. On this she
received an invitation to Hackney where, however, she soon began to
excite uneasiness in the minds of her new acquaintances. With all her
education she was remarkably stupid at the business of espionage. She
called again and again, and went out walking with the family. There
were a good many Zeppelin raids in those days, and she was continually
plying her host with questions about the anti-aircraft defences.
Could she be taken to see the nearest gun? How many guns were there
in London? How far could they shoot up in the air? And once, when
she accompanied the family to Finsbury Park, she said, ‘Oh, this is
Finsbury Park. Where are the Zeppelin guns placed here?’ At last she
asked her host to recommend her to the Postal Censorship, and here he
put down his foot and said, ‘You see, if anything went wrong we should
get into serious trouble.’ On this she dropped the family in Hackney,
who remembered afterwards that she had said on one occasion, ‘The
Germans know everything that passes here. You cannot hide anything from
them.’
She failed in her application to join the Censorship, chiefly on
account of the lack of satisfactory English references. She told the
lady who interviewed her how her father had been a general in the
Danish Army, and her grandfather a music-teacher to Queen Alexandra,
while an aunt was still acting in that capacity to the Danish Royal
Family.
She left Bloomsbury for lodgings in South Kensington, and later for a
certain Ladies’ Club. Then she returned to Bloomsbury, and put up at a
private hotel in Upper Bedford Place, where army officers were wont to
spend their leave. She was unremitting in her questions to subalterns.
For some time letters, afterwards proved to be in her handwriting,
containing information that would not have been of much use to the
enemy had he received it, had been intercepted, but beyond the
handwriting there was nothing that would give the identity of the
writer. At last certain observations in one of the letters pointed to
a particular hotel in Upper Bedford Place, but in that hotel there
were more than thirty guests, and it was impossible to determine
which of them was the spy. A certain officer who was employed on
the case determined to test the matter in the simplest possible
way. He selected one or two of the most likely of the guests and
whispered to them incredible stories about secret engines of war
that were in preparation. The most incredible of all was told to Eva
de Bournonville, and on the following day a letter was intercepted
containing this very information which, if it had reached the German
spy agent, ought to have caused his remaining hairs to rise in their
places. De Bournonville was arrested on 15th November 1915. She
expressed great surprise, and made no admissions. In my room on the
following day she made a brave show of innocence until I produced her
letter and showed it to her, with the messages in secret ink between
the lines developed. She opened her eyes very wide and said, ‘Yes, it
is my handwriting, but how did _you_ get it?’ I told her that I had got
a good deal more. She then asked to be allowed to see me alone, and the
room was cleared of all but a military officer.
‘You may think it curious,’ she said, ‘but I always wanted to work for
you and not for the Germans. I am very fond of the English and the
Belgians, and I do not like the Germans at all. Never have I forgotten
their behaviour to Denmark in 1864. My idea was to make the Germans
believe I was working for them until I was fully in their confidence
and then offer my services to you. I only did this for adventure.’
It then appeared that the German military attaché in Sweden, acting
with an agent of the Secret Service, had induced this wretched woman to
imperil her life for £30 a month. A cheque for that amount was actually
found in her possession on her arrest, and she claimed to be allowed
to keep it. She was tried before Mr. Justice Darling at the Old Bailey
on 12th January 1916, and was sentenced to death by hanging. Following
our universal practice of not executing women, the King commuted the
sentence to one of penal servitude for life. She was sent to Aylesbury
to serve her sentence, and was repatriated in February 1922. It
transpired in the course of this case that the Germans were instructing
their spies to address their letters to non-existent Belgian prisoners
of war.
Towards the end of 1917 the Germans had ceased to employ agents in
England for obtaining naval and military information. What they were
then concerned about was the public morale, I suppose because their own
was giving premonitory symptoms of crumbling. We first became aware of
this through the letters written by a Mrs. Smith to her relations in
Germany. Mrs. Smith proved to be a working housekeeper. Originally
she had been a German nurse in Switzerland, where she had married one
of her patients, an English doctor, not long before his death. Having
thus acquired British nationality, she came to England, where she
found herself obliged to eke out the slender provision her husband had
made for her by taking work as a housekeeper. Her letters, written in
German, contained gems like the following:
‘Tell Uncle Franz that Fritz is perturbed at seeing so many of the
trout in his fish-pond eaten by the pike. If more pike get into the
pond there will soon be none of his trout left. It makes him very
angry and frightened.’
And in another letter she writes:
‘On Sunday I went out to see the place where the big birds roost. It
was full of birds, and some of them are very big indeed. It is said
that they will soon take longer flights. I do not think that the
great eagles that fly over us are frightening these birds; they only
make them angry.’
Mrs. Smith made a brave attempt to explain these letters away. She had,
she said, an uncle named Franz who bred trout in a fish-pond, and who
had written to her about the depredations of pike. And about the great
birds she ventured the suggestion that they were herons; but when we
put before her our own interpretation of this simple code she became
silent and resigned, and she retired into internment at Aylesbury with
a philosophic heart.