MATRIX CHURCHILL• 339nage. At her trial, heldin camerabefore a military tribunal in July
1917, the prosecution alleged that a German signal from Madrid re-
questing funds for ‘‘Agent H-21’’ had been intercepted by a radio
station on the Eiffel Tower and decrypted, and after a day and a half
she was convicted and condemned to death. Three months later, in
October 1917, she was executed by a firing squad, with her Deu-
xie`me Bureau contact, Captain George Ladoux, present as a witness.
Although Mata Hari’s stage name, which means ‘‘Eye of the
Morning’’ in Hindi, has become synonymous with glamorous espio-
nage, she was never a professional spy and her appearance certainly
did not impress Thomson, who remarked that ‘‘time had a little
dimmed the charms of which we had heard so much.’’MATRIX CHURCHILL.An engineering company based in the En-
glish Midlands, Matrix Churchill was the subject of a Customs and
Excise investigation in 1992 that resulted in an inquiry conducted by
Lord Justice Scott. A director of the company, and an SIS asset of
long standing,Paul Henderson, was charged by Customs with
breaches of the UN embargo on the export of weapons to Iraq. The
prime interest of theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) had been in
nuclear nonproliferation, and Henderson had been one of a stable of
British businessmen in contact with the regime who had volunteered
information about Saddam Hussein’s illicit procurement program.
The fiasco occurred soon after the abortive prosecution of a Mid-
lands steel firm, Sheffield Forgemasters, for manufacturing high-ten-
sile tubes to an unusually demanding specification for clients in
Baghdad. Ostensibly for use in the oil industry, the company had sus-
pected they were for a military application, and in fact they were
components of a long-range ‘‘supergun’’ with a barrel 500 feet long,
designed by a visionary Canadian scientist,Gerald Bull.
British Customs officers raided Sheffield Forgemasters and an-
other Midlands company, Walter Somers, and seized eight crates
containing smoothbore pipes marked for delivery to a petrochemical
scheme in Baghdad. However, when it emerged that the directors of
both companies had been in touch with SIS since 1988, when the
original Iraqi contracts had been signed, and they had expressed con-
cern about the military application of the orders, all charges against
them were dropped. SIS had been fully aware of the Iraqi plans and