Even though she is one of the best-known spies in history, Mata Hari (1876-1917) was far from being successful. She ironically found the fame she had longed for in her death and continued legend. Her life and adventures still fascinate people, who regard her as the twentieth century's first and foremost femme fatale.

A baby girl was born in Leeuwarden, located in the Netherlands, on August 7, 1876, and christened Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She came from a proper bourgeois, Calvinist family, and her father was a well-to-do hatter. But when he abandoned his family for another woman, and Margaretha's mother died soon after, the teenage girl found herself in dreadful circumstances.

It wasn't until March 1895 that the 18-year-old's destiny began to take shape. It happened while reading the advertisements in the Het Nieuwes van den Dag. There, she came across an advertisement by an army captain, stationed in the Dutch...