338 • MATA HARI
and later at Wormwood Scrubs. There he reestablished contact with
several of his former students, includingWilliam Younger.
In December 1941 Masterman was assigned the task of debriefing
Dusko Popov, recently arrived from Lisbon, and it was this remark-
able encounter between one of theAbwehr’s star agents and hisMI5
handler that led to the creation of theTwenty Committee, the inter-
departmental body created to supervise the conduct ofdouble agent
operations and liaise with all the appropriate services. Masterman
was to chair a total of 226 weekly meetings of the Double Cross
Committee, as it became known, before he was invited to write an
account of its activities at the conclusion of the war. Masterman re-
turned to Oxford in September 1945, having completed his task in an
astonishing two months. However, it was to be 27 years before he
revealed to his former employers that he had retained a copy of his
manuscript, and that he intended to publish it in America asThe Dou-
ble Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945(1972). In 1975 Master-
man released his autobiography, and he died in Oxford in June 1977.MATA HARI.The exotic dancer Margaretha MacLeod was detained
in Falmouth in December 1916, while en route from Vigo to Rotter-
dam, when she was mistaken for a notorious German spy. She was
escorted to Holloway Prison, but protested her detention to the Dutch
minister in London, who raised her case withBasil Thomson. When
she was interviewed by Thomson, with the help of an interpreter, the
issue of her identity was clarified, but she was not released immedi-
ately because of her extraordinary claim to be working against the
Germans for the French Deuxie`me Bureau. According to her version
of events, she had been directed to extract information from two Ger-
man attache ́s in Madrid, Major Kalle and Lieutenant Commander
Hans von Krohn. However, instead of returning her to prison, Thom-
son gave her a room at the Savoy Hotel. Meanwhile his request to
Paris for verification was answered with the advice that MacLeod
should be returned to Spain, and the appropriate arrangements were
made.
Once back in Spain, MacLeod installed herself in the Ritz Hotel
and made plans to reach Holland overland, via Paris. She applied for,
and was granted, a French visa but when she eventually reached
Paris, in February 1917, she was arrested and charged with espio-