Nearly eighty years after her death Mata Hari remains the 20th Century's most powerful icon of female betrayal. Legend has it that she was the exotic spy who used sex to secure military secrets. She was the forerunner of a small army of silent screen vamps who preyed mercilessly on their besotted male victims. The myths which surrounded her extraordinary life and death were largely of her own creation. They also owed much to the motives of the men who arrested, tried and executed her for espionage. But was Mata Hari ever a spy? Or was she innocent of the crimes with which she was charged in the darkest days of the First World War? Was Mata Hari the spy who never was?