Monday, May 3, 2010
Who's Who - Mata Hari Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa Highly successful in Paris was she the mole inplanted
french daily reveals grisly details of altantuya’s deathmaking the headlines in europe why public interest has stuck stubbornly on the casetoo many unanswered questions over who conspired in her killing, not least why she should be denied the justice of having those guilty brought to the dock and punished.by arnaud dubus
Editthe double faced honorary consul of mongolia: altantuya’s father gave all the pictures, notebooks, films, computer files - to the double faced syed rahman
March 7, 2009 · No Comments
After the murder of Altantuya, a charitable soul contacted Shaaribuu Setev, the father of the young woman : Datuk Syed, honorary consul of Mongolia in Malaysia. “I am ready to do everything to help you”, said the diplomat to Shaaribuu Setev. His dedication even pushed the amicable Datuk Syed to make revelations to the father. “The Malaysian governement is ready to spend one billion of tughrik (mongolian currency, equivalent to 500,000 euros) to cover up the case”
Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa (Mongolian language: Шаарийбуугийн Алтантуяа; sometimes also Altantuya Shaariibuu; 1978 – 2006), a Mongolian national, was a murder victim who was either murdered by C-4 explosives or was somehow killed first and her remains destroyed with C-4 in October 2006 in a deserted area in Shah Alam, Malaysia near Kuala Lumpur.
Altantuyaa was born in 1978. Her parents raised her and her sister while they worked in Russia where Altantuyaa started first grade elementary school. She was reportedly fluent in Mongolian, Russian, Chinese and English.
Altantuyaa moved back to Mongolia in 1990 and a few years later, married a Mongolian techno singer, Maadai. They had a child in 1996 but the marriage ended in divorce and the child went to live with Altantuyaa’s parents.
Despite training as a teacher, Altantuyaa briefly moved to France where she attended modeling school before returning to Mongolia. She only modeled part-time, for a brief time also opening a tour business in Mongolia.
Altantuyaa remarried and had another child in 2003 but the second marriage also ended in divorce (this is questionable). The second child also lives with Altantuyaa’s parents. Her mother said she never been a model.
She moved to Hong Kong in 2005, it was around this time she met Abdul Razak Baginda, a defense analyst from the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre think-tank,
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Who's Who - Mata Hari
Mata Hari (1876-1917) was the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and prostitute Gertrud Margarete Zelle, who was shot by the French as a spy on 15 October 1917.
Born on 7 August 1876 in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, Mata Hari's name has since become synonymous with espionage, although it remains by no means clear that she was guilty of the spying charges for which she charged.
The daughter of a well-to-do hatter, Mata Hari attended a teachers' college in Leiden before, in 1895, marrying Captain Campbell MacLeod (of Scottish antecedents but serving in the Dutch army). They lived together from 1897-1902 in Java and Sumatra.
Returning to Europe together they thereafter separated, at which point Mata Hari took to dancing upon the Paris stage from 1905, initially as 'Lady MacLeod' and soon after as 'Mata Hari', the name she retained until her execution.
Highly successful in Paris (among other cities), Mata Hari's attractiveness, as well as her apparent willingness to appear almost nude on the stage, made her a huge hit. She cultivated numerous lovers, including many military officers.
Still unclear today are the circumstances around her alleged spying activities. It was said that while in The Hague in 1916 she was offered cash by a German consul for information obtained on her next visit to France. Indeed, Mata Hari admitted she had passed old, outdated information to a German intelligence officer when later interrogated by the French intelligence service.
Mata Hari herself claimed she had been paid to act as a French spy in Belgium (then occupied by German forces), although she had neglected to inform her French spymasters of her prior arrangement with the German consul. She was, it seemed, a double agent, if a not very successful one.
It appears (the details are vague) that British intelligence picked up details of Mata Hari's arrangements with the German consul and passed these to their French counterparts.
She was consequently arrested by the French on 13 February 1917 in Paris. Following imprisonment she was tried by a military court on 24-25 July 1917 and sentenced to death by a firing squad. The sentence was carried out on 15 October 1917 in Vincennes near Paris. She was 41.
To many she remains the unfortunate victim of a hysterical section of the French press and public determined to root out evidence of a non-existent enemy within, a scapegoat attractive as much for her curious profession as for her crimes.
The spy who spooked IndiaM J Akbar, 02 May 2010, 03:18 AM IST
You don’t have to be beautiful to be Mata Hari; you merely have to be available. Margaretha Zelle, the Dutch-born, Paris-based, World War 1 German agent who made spying synonymous with sexual frisson, was actually a bit of a podge who couldn’t get a job in a vaudeville chorus line because she wasn’t “cute” and became a circus horse-rider.
One pithy observer thought she was as attractive with clothes as without them, which may or may not have been a compliment. She was driven to striptease by despair: she fled her husband, an officer in the Dutch colonial army, posted to Indonesia, and an alcoholic who beat her regularly and mercilessly.
But she had an extraordinary talent, the ability to trump the real with the surreal. She reinvented herself as an expert in the secret and mysterious arts of “Indian” erotica (hence the name ‘Mata Hari’), learnt during her interlude in Java, and became a sensation. She was not much of a spy actually; she did more spending than spying. The Germans, cold to a fault, betrayed her, and she ended up before a French firing squad in 1917.
It is not, presumably, compulsory, but it is clearly useful for a potential spy to have a split personality. The pain of the tragedy, or failure, is subsumed by the surreal. But a fevered imagination also weakens or even erases the constraints of duty and morality that bind real life.
There is an obvious problem in the analogy with Mata Hari. The honey in the Madhuri Gupta trap came from Mudassar Rana, and we have no confirmation yet about his expertise in the seductive arts. But gender is not the issue. Men are far more vulnerable to the inflammable concoction of ego and libido. In the 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister, an armed forces attache in our mission in Karachi was lured by a woman operative of Pakistani intelligence. But the principle of a spy’s mentality holds. Since there is never sufficient justification for the betrayal of a country, and the greed (whether for money or sex) involved must be rationalized by layers of self-deceit, the spy converts a complex, tortured fiction into his or her version of that malleable commodity called truth.
Moreover the Fifties are a dangerous decade in the age of professionals. They mark the intersection between ebb of career and flow of frustrations. Gupta, an IFS B-cadre officer, was second secretary at an age when a regular IFS officer would already have been ambassador. The caste-and-cocoon world of an embassy like Islamabad could only have heated her fantasies to an unbearable conflagration. You can see that she had lost any mooring with reality in the taunt after her arrest — “What took you guys so long to get it?” It would not even occur to her that institutions are reluctant to condemn their own, particularly when the final responsibility with those who decided to send her to a mission like Islamabad.
It is foolish to blame Pakistan for this squalid episode. Posting a 54-year-old with a chip factory, rather than a mere chip, on her shoulder is akin to an open-ended invitation to ISI and its carefully groomed stable of studs. The ISI response was well crafted. Rana was of a similar age, and wooed Madhuri at the “Iffy” cafe (you couldn’t have invented such a name for an “iffy” operation, could you?) even as he distilled her grievances into information for Pakistan’s intelligence services.
Gupta’s interrogation by the Delhi police is essential, of course; but a second interrogation, within the grand portals of the offices of the external affairs ministry, is equally necessary. Who decided to send Gupta to Pakistan? A simple psychographic analysis would have thrown up the obvious; Gupta was entirely unsuitable for a hostile environment, prone to blandishment and subversion, like Islamabad. Paradoxically, and this can only be a surmise, she might have got the Islamabad job precisely because someone thought she would be less vulnerable than say an equally Urdu-qualified Indian Muslim option. This is not an allegation of bias against Delhi, although prejudice still lurks, albeit less flagrantly. But the dark services of the Pakistani establishment, imbued with hostility as they are to India, find the Indian Muslim an even more difficult entity to come to terms with, for Indian Muslims challenge the very foundations of their nation by rejecting the two-nation theory.
Madhuri Gupta may be a marginal Pakistani success, for she knew less than her bravado believes, and might even have been turned into a conduit of misinformation, without her knowledge, after she was uncovered. But she does constitute a gigantic Indian failure. Only saps get sucked into such soft snares, and an Indian diplomat, and an Indian mission, leapt at the bait hook, line and sinker.
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