MATA HARI'S CAPTOR

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 586, 18 July 1933, Page 3

MATA HARI'S CAPTOR

DEATH IN FRANCE FRENCH SECRET SERVICE . AGENT DURING WAR. EXPLOITS RECALLED. Oommandant Ladoux, the man who arrested Mata Hari during the war, recently died in a quiet nursing. home on the French flRJiviera. In the early staiges of the war, after being wounded at the front, he was called by Marshial Joffre to organise one of the most important services of the famous "Deuxieme Bureaux," the French Secret Service headquarters, and centralise all information on counter-espion-age. At that time the French intelldgence service was practically non-existent. Ladoux was before all things a soldier. Funds were lacbing, but his only staff was a handful of officers and agents, yet in spite of the most primitive methods and official red tape he succeeded in building up a system by which were arrested scores of notorious German agents. In spite of his great service -to his country, towards the end Commiandant Ladoux himself was arrested by the French authorities and subjected to a eourt-martial which acquitted him. The case in which Ladoux was involved and which created a sensation at the time wias that in which a son of the proprietor of a great French newspaper was arrested, a,nd shot at Vincennes as a German spy, although actually working under the instructions of Ladoux. Innocent Man Shot. The younig m'an's father had sold the control of his paper to German interests before the war for th'e sum of 5,000,000 francs, the money being held for him in Switzerland. The son, wiith a passport supplied by Commandant Ladoux, had gone into Switzerland to collect the money, but was arrested on his return. Commandant Ladoux had always said that he intended writing a book vmdicating the honour of young Lenoir, but now death has prevented him. Ladoux's greatest coup was the arrest of Mata Hari, the most famous and fatally beautiful of all women spies. After having had her s'hadowed for months without result, he finally managed to lure her to his office and pretended to engage her in thi& French Secret Service. She was to have gone to Holland n a mission via Portugal, but was stopped on the high seas by a British warship and sent back to Spain. There, according to his story, Ladoux obtained proof that she was playing a double- game. She was sumimoned back to Paris, and soon after arrested and shot. Marthe Richard, who is now of British nationality, and who was Ladoux's most bnilliant woman agent during the war-, says:„ "When I first joined the service at the request of Commandant Ladoux, he had scarcely any funds, and was only just beginning to build up his staff. He gave me 800 francs, then worth about £30, and told me- to go down to Spam, find a way of entering the German Secret Service, and keep him informed of events. "That is how our service always worked. Some of us succeeded, and some of us failed. Those who succeeded are alive to-day — the '.thers! That wfas life in the secret service. "It was through our efforts that France was able to use a real etfecitive invisible ink. The Germans had a secret preparation, but we are still using the schoolboy recipe of aspirin

dissolved in water. I nmnaged to bring into France, concealed in my finger naisl, a few grains of anticollodion, which I had found my German friends using, and gave it to Ladoux. "Another time Commandant Ladoux made a mistake almost faftfafl for me by giving me a tube of ordinary aspirins instead of a powerful sleeping drug, forl which I had asked. I was to burgle the safe of the German Naval Attache in Madrid, and needed this- to keep him quiet for a time. Luckily a colleague of mine tried some of the tablets on himself on our journey down, and found that they were harmless."