America's Mata Hari? The Double Life of Esther Reed
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Pushkin. She was tall and fabulously beautiful. Her background, her dancing, and even her name were exotic. She performed in the nude, or close enough for the standards of Paris in 1905. She was Mata Hari, the most infamous lady spy of the 20th century. At least, that's Mata Hari's reputation. But was she actually a spy at all? Or was she just a spy?

Was she a desperate young woman, fleeing an abusive husband, struggling to make a living in a cruel world? Her real name was Margaretha Zeller, but the Mata Hari persona soon became much bigger and more famous than struggling single mother Margaretha. She had many lovers, and many of those lovers were military men of rank. That was enough to cause whispers.

And while she admitted accepting money from a German official in 1915, she always denied supplying any useful information to the Germans. The French didn't believe her. In the middle of the First World War, she was arrested, accused of causing the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers, and late in 1917, she was executed by a firing squad.

A century later, the French government finally released secret documents concerning the case and doubts about her guilt only grew. Was she ever really a spy? Or was she a beautiful woman flouting the standards of polite society in a time of war? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

This is another of our occasional cautionary conversations, and my guest this time is Jake Halpern. Jake is a journalist, a novelist, non-fiction writer, comic writer, radio producer, writing teacher at Yale, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. I keep thinking there are several very talented Jake Halperns out there, but it turns out they're all the same guy. But perhaps that's appropriate because Jake is fascinated by people who live double.

Double Lives. He's the host of the Pushkin podcast Deep Cover, which is all about people assuming the persona of someone else.

Season three is Deep Cover, Never Seen Again, which we will be discussing. And although we'll have some spoilers in the conversation ahead, we'll try to avoid blowing everything wide open, not least because I'm only halfway through the season and I am completely gripped. Jake, welcome to Cautionary Tales. Thanks so much for having me on. It's terrific to be able to talk to you. And...

I started with Mata Hari, who's really mentioned just briefly in passing in Deep Cover. She's mentioned by one of the people you interview, a TV detective.

And he doesn't seem to view this Mata Hari label with any irony at all. But it seems ironic because there's a sort of Mata Hari figure, much misunderstood woman at the heart of your reporting. And she's called Esther, at least I think she's called Esther. Yeah, she is. She's still called Esther. So how is it that...

people come to view Esther as a spy. And what parallels do you draw between her case and Mata Hari? Because, I mean, superficially, they're very different. Yeah, so there are some interesting parallels.

Both Esther and Margarita Zella, who was then dubbed Mata Hari, were basically trying to get away from bad home situations. With Esther, it was that she had a bad relationship with her sister, her mother had died, she wanted a fresh start, and she wanted to be not found by her family. She started taking on names that weren't hers.

And in order to function in modern society, you can't just have a name. You also need social security number, et cetera. And so she ends up taking on the name of a young woman who she thought was deceased and forgotten. But it turns out that there is this detective character who's actively looking for her. The woman's name who had died was named Brooke Henson. And so the small town police officer in South Carolina is looking everywhere for Brooke Henson.

And then he all of a sudden gets wind that there is a Brooke Henson who's enrolled at Columbia University up in New York City. This was seven years after she disappeared. And he starts tracking her down and trying to figure out who is this. Is this the real Brooke Henson or is this an impersonator? And in the course of his investigation, he comes to suspect that she's a spy. And this...

idea, which is kind of half-baked, ends up taking hold and creating this whole juggernaut of a story about this alleged spy who's on the run. It is an astonishing story. I mean, the characters that you're talking to are remarkable. This small-town cop who's just devoting way too much attention to this case.

One of the people you describe is I think called the Gem Finder. He's responsible for escalating this story about Esther and this suspicion that she's a spy, escalating it up the media food chain, which is a really striking and horrible image. So talk us through that process and

how it unfolds. Yeah, so it really does escalate. What happens is, if you remember, we have this small town detective in the mountains of South Carolina who's been trying to find out what happened to a local young woman who's gone missing, Brooke Henson. Then he gets wind that there's a Brooke Henson of the same age, same name, same social security number, et cetera, who's at Columbia. And as he starts to track her down, she vanishes from Columbia.

And as he pokes around, he finds out that she had dated two West Point cadets and a Naval Academy midshipman. She appeared to be a master at creating these false identities. And he thinks she's a spy. Although it's really kind of a half-baked theory.

And at some point he gets interviewed by the local media down in South Carolina and puts forth this theory that she might be a spy. And this guy, Tom Colbert, the gem finder, gets wind of this. And he's kind of a trafficker in stories, a kind of very resourceful middleman who takes these small market stories from little towns and brings them up the media food chain and sells them for a finder's fee. And so he's

Colbert, the gem finder, gets wind of this small-town detective, interviews him, hears his theories, and writes up a press release based on this. And within three days, it's on the front page of the New York Post. And not long after that, it becomes the basis for a kind of

tabloidy news story in which a detective is hired and is trying to track her down. All predicated on this theory that hasn't really been fully vetted and that turns out to be wrong, that she's a spy. But that doesn't really matter because the media has kind of seized upon it because the narrative has this kind of

It's kind of a trope or it's kind of something that's deep in our minds. The Mata Hari story, right? This idea that she's this seductress or what have you. And once the kind of genie's out of the bottle or the story is out, there's kind of no taking it back and it takes on a life of its own. Well, it takes on a life of its own, but it is helped in taking on a life of its own by these various...

media entrepreneurs or journalistic entrepreneurs, I'm not sure quite what you would call them. So you start with overenthusiastic small town detective, he has this speculation. His speculation then gets to the local news. It's then picked up by Colbert. He then writes it up and he writes this very sensational press release. So he's kind of really, really seasoning the pot. He's adding chilies, adding his spices, he's making it more and more exciting.

Then it gets to the tabloids, as you say. When it gets on TV, then they're adding more to it. So they have to hire their own detective. And their own detective has to chase around trying to find Esther, but also he's kind of adding his own theories, his own ideas. And so this whole thing is much, much bigger than the original story, which is just there's this girl and she's doing some slightly strange things. Right. There's all kinds of small things that get completely conflated. Well, first of all, that she's dated these West Point cadets.

I mean, if you stopped and thought about that for a second, within this 48 hours story about the West Point cadets, there's a moment where they say, oh yeah, she was inquiring with one of them about what they were learning in class.

And then this was presented as like evidence of espionage occurring. But when I talked, I talked to both of the former West Point cadets and they said, look, this is ridiculous. This doesn't require like anything more than a closer look to see how could anything being discussed in an open classroom for training cadets at West Point constitute conspiracy.

sensitive military secrets that would really indicate espionage. I mean, anyone that kind of looked at this for a second would be able to kind of say, this doesn't quite hold up. Or there's one moment in the instant messages back and forth between her and one of the cadets that was her boyfriend at the time where she jokingly says, oh yes, I've always wanted to be a James Bond character.

her and then this is paraded about as proof positive that that's precisely what she is by the way if you were james bond would you ever say that that's what you wanted to be although james bond of course does constantly introduce himself as james bond that's true fair enough fair enough but i mean it's a striking cautionary tale in the way that our preconceived narrative shapes what we then perceive and what we pay attention to and what we don't pay attention to because

If I were to tell you, well, there's this woman and she's dating someone from West Point. Okay, fine, whatever. Oh, and she asks him about what he's learning. Well, I mean, isn't that called a relationship? Don't people normally ask the people they're dating about what they're doing in their lives? That doesn't mean you're a spy. When the host of the 48 Hours show is interviewing the detective that's tracking her down and says, how many men has she gone through? With the implication that she was just kind of this...

operative who just these relationships were merely means to extract classroom data. I don't know what. But when you actually talk to the two cadets, these were like, these were real relationships that went on for a long period of time. But it was this presumption that they were just that she was this operator who was only interested in men to extract some value from them because she was calculating and using her sexual wiles to entrap them.

all of which plays into various spy movies and TV shows they've seen. But even a kind of cursory review of the underlying facts didn't prop it up. So I'm curious as to what this suggests about our cultural obsessions and fears. And there's clearly a dose of misogyny in there, this idea that, well, you know,

There's a sexually active young woman. That's not okay. That can't be just accepted in its own right. There's this panic about national security. I mean, what else is going on in this kind of weird mix of obsessions that cable TV got so excited about?

I think you're right. I think there's clearly some misogyny at play here. I think it plays into some of the kind of tropes of spy movies that we see where there is a kind of honeypot or kind of, you know, this sexy woman who's seducing and kind of manipulating men to get their secrets and compromise them. We've all seen countless shows like that. And I think that what happens as storytellers is that we recognize that that is

is attractive, that it's a story that people like to hear, that confirms these kind of storylines that we read about in fiction. Oh, but this is a true story that proves that that happens. But I think that what we have to do as storytellers is resist that impulse to just follow that into the fictional realm of which we think we know it. I'm friends with another journalist named Jack Hitt, who always says,

There's always a moment in a story where there's dissonance, where your reporting differs from the story you were expecting to find. And that is the moment that you've actually discovered your story. Let me just explain what I mean by that. So when I pitch a story as a journalist, it's usually being pitched on impartial information. I know that there's a woman who's used many identities. I know that she's duped Columbia.

And then the part of the story that's unknown, the terra incognita of the story, I'm filled in by assumptions. And those assumptions are often derived from similar stories that I've seen, often in the realm of fiction. So I think the story is going to go that way. But at some point along the course of reporting, I guess you could say this is true for law enforcement as well as journalists,

is that you find information that runs counter to the story you were expecting, counter to the cliche that you have kind of come to know. And then you're at this pivotal moment. How do you deal with this dissonance? Do you kind of ignore it and plow ahead with the story that you think the audience wants and the story you set out to report? Or do you pause for a moment and say, huh, what's the real story here? And is it actually possible that it's more interesting and more original than the story that I had in my head?

And I think that what happened is, is folks got to that juncture and instead of kind of pausing, they just said, oh, well, yes, sure, there may be some indications that this story isn't exactly what I thought it was going to be, but we're just going to push ahead with it. And that's what I see as the storyteller at work here. So there's this very human tendency, I think, that we see in journalists and we see sometimes in the police as well of moving...

along a certain preconceived track and not being able to stop and say, hang on a minute, are these really the questions I want to be asking? Is this really what I want to be doing? Do I need to rethink the whole premise of this? And it sounds as though you got your friend's voice in your ear when you reach this critical moment. And not all of us have that. But there's somebody in the story who has this inability to stop and rethink the

almost more than any of the characters that we've discussed, the media, the police, and that's Esther herself. I'm really struck by how she makes some questionable decisions.

early on, but they're quite small things. Talk me through how it escalates to the point where anybody at all can think that she's a spy to a point where she's on America's Most Wanted. So just to kind of, I'm going to break it down. Let's start with Esther. I mean, this is something that I've gone over with her so many times. So I'm not going to do any spoilers here. I'm going to try to think about how I can explain. I find her years later, right? Let's just put it that way. And spent the better part of a week

kind of talking to her and having her talk me through her story and how this kind of escalated. And so,

I think that what happens is, is the detectives and the media tends to see this as a story of a woman with a master plan. But there's never quite a good explanation of what she's up to. She doesn't appear to be taking money. The times that she gets into Columbia, she's trying to get an education, but that doesn't really make sense why you would want to get a degree in a name that wasn't yours. So from the outside, and I feel sympathetic to law enforcement here, they're looking at this and they're trying to come up with,

with some sort of overarching explanation that makes logical sense for why she's doing what she's doing. And the spy theory, even though it has a lot of problems, at least attempts to make sense of it. So with Esther, the real reason ends up being like much more commonplace in the sense that she wants to get away from her family. She wants to get a fresh start. And the series of choices that she makes kind of incrementally lead her deeper and deeper into the problems.

So initially she's just going by another name just so no one finds her. But she realizes that she can't get a job without a social security number. She needs an ID so she can drive the car. And eventually she decides she wants to take classes at a school and you need social security number to do this. And so she's

she makes a series of incremental decisions to kind of go deeper into the realm of having an identity that offers her protection. It's not all at once. And by increments, she ends up deeper and deeper into it. And then people start knowing her as this other person. And then going back becomes more and more difficult because she's built this other life as this other person. And it's going pretty, pretty well. But in the back of her mind, she,

She is aware that this is problematic. She just doesn't see a way out.

out of it, the deeper that she gets into it. And meanwhile, law enforcement is seeing all this and thinking like there must be something very sinister at play here. To answer the second part of your question, after the media kind of really escalates this, it puts pressure on law enforcement to find her. And eventually she does go on a top 10 most wanted list at the Secret Service. So these things all kind of interplay.

It is incredible. The term of art, I think, in psychology is escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. I talked about this once in a cautionary tale about the Cottingley Fairies, which is one of my favourite cautionary tales. It's all about how Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed that there were fairies at the bottom of the garden because, well, there were these photos of the fairies. And of course, the photos were faked. And when I talk about

The Cottingley Fair is. I often talk about Sir Arthur and what Conan Doyle was thinking and why he was fooled and his motivated reasoning and these various things. But actually, one of the most interesting people in that story is Elsie Wright, the teenage girl who fakes the photos and why she fakes the photos and why she keeps...

lying about it in the end for almost her entire life until she's old enough to be a great grandmother I think she's in her 70s or in her 80s when she finally confesses that she's faked these photos and it's because it's escalated initially the photos were kind of a family joke she wanted to slightly embarrass her her parents because they'd been mean to her cousin and

But then her mother showed one of these photographs to a spiritualist society and then the photographs got picked up by this major spiritualist and then they got to Conan Doyle and Conan Doyle starts writing about it and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's one of the most famous photographs

lies of the decade. And she only ever intended to play a joke on her mom and dad, who, by the way, they weren't fooled. Certainly her father was not fooled. There was no point where she could pull the plug because each time there was an opportunity to confess, it seemed that it would be a catastrophe. And in the end, she had to wait until everybody was long dead before she finally confessed. That sounds like a version, very much a version of this. And I think it's

It's only by kind of thinking about especially those early incremental decisions to stick to the lie does it start to make sense that you're like, OK, it's it's easier just to say yes or maybe doesn't seem like a big deal. This is eventually going to become this just juggernaut of a thing. No, I think that's I think that that very much encapsulates the kind of situation that Esther was in. Cautionary Tales will be back after this short break.

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I am struck by the difficulties of maintaining a double life. You know, you've studied several of these people, you've created three seasons of Deep Cover. So what have you learned about what it means to try to lead a double life? Well, I mean, I'll start by saying something very obvious, but it's hugely stressful. I think it's something that people are curious about and maybe even romanticize, especially the undercover law enforcement officer. But

I think it basically wreaks havoc on your life and you're living in like more or less a constant state of anxiety that you're going to be exposed. That's certainly the case for the three seasons of the show. Now, it's possible that there are people out there that are just pathological liars and are able to kind of lie without remorse or fear. But

It's a tremendous amount of information to keep track of in your head constantly and to be processing which person are you, which name do you respond to at the airport, what are the things you can or cannot say, what are the tells, and then this idea of who are you. Now, Esther claims in her case,

She says she was always the same person, that what she was looking for was a fresh start and that the identities, the names, the social security numbers, even the kind of general trappings of the backstory of where she grew up, that this was all just a kind of

costume that she was wearing, but underneath fundamentally, she was the same person just looking for a fresh opportunity. Whereas like with the first season of Deep Cover that I follow this, this FBI officer from Detroit, who then is basically impersonating a kind of

high-rolling drug kingpin type character. And for him, the two personas were radically different. And then it, of course, spills over into his kind of personal life. But even with him, I think actually, now that I stop and think about it, he was a risk taker and he liked the risk of it. And Esther also describes herself as a risk taker. You know, does that mean there's some appeal to this? I don't know. But

I don't think so in Esther's case. I think so in Ned, the undercover FBI agent from the first season. And there's certainly moments where she makes some very impulsive decisions and she confesses to you that she's panicked and she's not very good in these stressful situations. That's what she says. That's why she does these things that

from the outside you go, that is going to make everything so much worse. But she must have been smart because she got into an Ivy League school, albeit pretending to be somebody else. So, I mean, do you have to be smart to lead a double life? I think so. I think Esther is extremely smart and

I won't do a spoiler because you haven't gotten to the sixth episode, but when you see... I know, and I'm completely hooked, by the way. I'm completely hooked. I'm loving it. I'll give you like a little teaser, which is when you find out where she is now, it's only further proof of just how...

bright and capable she is. So yeah, I think you have to be really smart. I think if you're not smart, you know, you're either dead in the case of the undercover agent swimming with the fishes or whatever, have the back of some boat, or you're just immediately exposed. And Esther says she doesn't handle stress well. And she has some moments that, uh, there are several moments where she does things where, um, she does seem to be panicking and, and she makes decisions that you're like, uh,

decisions I would make, I feel like, under that kind of pressure. But she also has what I think to be tremendous resilience at the point where she has to vanish from

Colombia, she basically goes dark for a period of almost a year and a half. And I talked to the guy who is the US Marshal tracking her down. He's basically almost what we think of a bounty hunter, but he works for the federal government and he's tracking her and he's quite good at what he does. And he says, you know, people say they like to go off the grid, but very few people have the stamina or the discipline to sever all ties with everyone and just exist on their own.

And she does that. And to me, that is a sign of not just her intelligence, but also of her mental fortitude. I think I would last about two weeks before I felt like I had to call a friend because I was going out of my mind. Having reported all three of these seasons about people leading double lives, is there anything that you've learned from them that you think that maybe we could all use in our own lives? That's a great question. Yeah.

I do think that lying is seductive. I thought about this. I started off my career as a journalist at the New Republic, and I came there right after the Stephen Glass scandal, which he was a journalist who just made things up. He ended up making up stories wholesale. I think that there's an aspect of lying and of making up where we are from, which is both seductive, but is also deeply understandable.

That like to some degree, we're all limited by where we were born, who we were, the lives that we have kind of been allotted. And so to me, the desire to kind of become someone else or to kind of have that total blank slate, that to me is very understandable. I don't look at these people and think like, what on earth are they?

Were they possibly thinking, I don't see the allure of it all? That's not what I think, because to me, I get that. I mean, we all reinvent ourselves to some extent, even if just leaving high school to go to college. But if ever there was a kind of cautionary tale about writing the hot checks of lying and them coming due.

These are these kind of hyperbolic examples of why lying is so problematic, because you have to keep track of everything. And in these cases, that is just exaggerated to the utmost extreme, remembering who you are, which life you're in, which person you are.

And it's just hugely stressful. And I think that even on a smaller scale, you can see that that's the position that lying puts us in. So even if it's like, do you want to go out for a drink tonight? No, I can't. I'm not feeling well. And then you go out with someone else and you have to remember where you were or hope you weren't seen. Like that's what these folks are doing on this much greater scale. And to me, it's just a reminder of like why I don't want to go down that path for many reasons, including just how stressful it is.

There is this line in the movie Excalibur, Merlin says, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world. And there's this very dark view there of what it means to not tell the truth. But of course, I mean, we do all lie all the time for little lies, for good reason, to avoid embarrassment, avoid hurting someone's feelings.

It's not so easy to just draw that bright line and say, never cross it. It's not. It's not. No, we do. Like, oh, do I look nice in this dress? Dad, did I do OK on the basketball court today? Your student asking, do you think I have any ability at writing? I mean, like, there's all these moments where...

Sometimes it's not just kind of for gain. It's what we perceive as kind of generosity or decency or kindness that justify the small half-truth. But I will tell you this, and this is just a little about myself. I married a woman who's almost constitutionally incapable of telling a lie. I've really never met anyone quite like her. She'll say, like, I don't want to have drinks tonight. I'm just—

I'm just not feeling social. Like that's the kind of thing that she will just say. And she does this all the time. She's done this in my writing too. It's like, can you tell a small lie? And her position is that... Everyone needs a truthful editor. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I find it too honest sometimes, but I think that her feeling is...

that among other things it's just a cleaner way to live because you're never debating you're never getting into that situation of doing the the arithmetic of whether or not the lie is justified which is a space that i feel like prior to meeting her i spent a lot of time in even on these kind of small so-called white lies of kind of social niceties so

So I think that I think that some of them, I mean, I've never really kind of put this together, but I think that there's probably it's not a coincidence that I'm married to this truth teller, but I'm also deeply intrigued by these people who are to various degrees masters of deception. I did not expect our conversation to end up talking about white lies and defending going out for drinks or not going out for drinks, but it has been an absolute disaster.

Pleasure, Jake. Thank you for joining us. I should say Deep Cover, Never Seen Again is available now from Pushkin on all the usual pod platforms. Jake Halpern, thank you very much. Tim, thanks so much for having me. And now here's the opening of Deep Cover, Never Seen Again. This is a story about a young woman who ran away from home.

At least, that's how it all started. I think people think that I had this master plan and I went out and did it. And like, you know, like it's not fun, right? You're constantly scared. You have no support. You have no one to talk to, which is part of the reason it got so carried away. Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would have been like, this is crazy. Along the way, there were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running, but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a train track.

There was clearly the wrong train track and like my train is running away. And at some point, you're not thinking, crap, how do I get off this train track? You're just thinking, crap, how do I stop this train from like going off the rails? You know, I just kept making horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision, just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing me at that point. We're going to come back to this woman and go deep into her story. So you'll hear more about all of that.

But not just yet, because this is actually a story about not one, but two young women who vanished at about the same time. The two of them were roughly the same age, but in so many other ways, they could not have been more different. One grew up in rural Montana, where she was raised in a sheltered, devoutly religious home. She was shy and kind of a nerd. The other was a kind-hearted free spirit from South Carolina,

She partied often and sometimes hung out with a rough crowd. They both disappeared in 1999. Their families searched for them, but didn't find many clues. And then, improbably, their stories collided when a lone investigator got involved and quickly became obsessed. I think of a situation as a sweater. So sometimes you have a loose thread and you pull the thread and you get a knot.

And sometimes you pull a thread and it just keeps unraveling. And you just keep pulling and pulling and pulling. This investigator was convinced that the fates of these two young women, the free spirit and the nerd, were linked.

and that by solving one of their cases, he might also solve the other. Not just that. He suspected that one of them was a master of deception, a highly trained chameleon who conned her way into the Ivy Leagues. He began an investigation that ultimately drew in the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals, and the Justice Department. The media soon got wind of this. Allegations of murder, fraud, and espionage swirled.

Eventually, a nationwide manhunt got underway, all because of this one investigator and his hunch. Now, given the gigantic scope of all this, you might think that our investigator worked for some big city police department or a fancy federal agency or maybe even an international outfit like Interpol. Nope. He was a small-town cop who'd just become a detective. He didn't have a partner or, for a while, even a computer.

But he was doggedly stubborn, almost perversely so. I just pulled a thread and it just kept going and going and going until the whole thing unraveled. I get it. I love pulling on threads. As a journalist, I've done this so many times. Pulled and pulled until I've lost track of what I was originally looking for or whether it was worth it. And sometimes, most of the time in fact, it's not.

But every once in a while, there's a set of facts that's so irresistibly curious that I just can't let go. And I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're a journalist or a detective or just a nosy neighbor. So many of us believe that great mysteries lurk in the periphery of our lives. So when we find an especially curious thread, we keep pulling because we won't be satisfied until we've unraveled it all.

I'm Jake Halpern, and this is Deep Cover, Season 3, Never Seen Again. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Russelo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.

The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lital Millard, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano and Morgan Ratner.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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