Female spies have been the subject of cultural fascination since Mata Hari, but the realities they face are quite different from fiction.

The real Mata Hari was barely a spy, and accounts of her putative career in what many have called "the second oldest profession" only serve to establish that she was not very successful.  

In this final attempt to sustain an income, Margaretha was betrayed by her own employers who, even as they signed her up, were convinced that she was a double agent working for the Germans. The compelling public image of Mata Hari effectively proved the downfall of its creator, who was shot on October 15, 1917, following a trial that most now regard as barely legal.

It seems that the cultural stereotypes surrounding femininity are hard to shake, with pejorative accounts of women as devious, deceptive, and dishonest feeding into the mythology of the woman spy as a seductress, an Eve-like figure, a Mata Hari.