Gijón, Jul 12 (EFE).- The writer Carmen Posadas (Montevideo, 1953) has affirmed this Tuesday that the story of the double spy Mata Hari, who provided her services to both sides during the First World War, is overrated because ” her only merit was dancing naked” during her years as a cabaret artist.
The Uruguayan writer has demystified the character of the most famous double spy in history in one of the chapters of her latest book, “License to spy”, in which she addresses the role that women played in espionage from ancient times to the present. Last century.
La Mata Hari was a famous cabaret artist whose “only merit was dancing naked” and who, seeing her career decline over the years, agreed to spy for the Germans and the French, “as if Madonna or Shakira were now spying for Russians and Ukrainians”, but her work “was terrible”, explained the author in a meeting with the press during the Black Week in Gijón.
During the research task he carried out to document the book, which, among others, includes the stories of the Biblical Rahab, whose intervention was decisive in conquering the Promised Land, of the Galician juggler La Balteira during the reign of Alfonso X, or of the flying squadron of Catalina de Médicis, Carmen Posadas discovered that Malinche, lover of Hernán Cortés, “was not a traitor.”
The indigenous Malinche, whose collaboration with the conquistador gave rise to a legend according to which her betrayal condemned her people to live 300 years of slavery, “was not a traitor” but a “brilliant spy” who acted to defend the interests of her tribe, that she was subjected by others, she explained.
Posadas has also investigated Caridad Mercader, “a woman so devoted to the cause of the Soviet Union that she not only ordered her son Ramón Mercader to assassinate Leon Trotski, but also killed her own husband when she saw that his communist convictions were faltering.” ”.
The author has verified that women are better spies than men because they are more discreet, although she herself “could not be” because her “legs would shake” and she does not find any personal motivation to do that job.
Posadas recalled that during the Cold War, the East German secret services used handsome men infiltrated on the other side of the Berlin Wall who seduced the secretaries of high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces and large companies to obtain sensitive information through them.
This type of activity is known as “sexpionage” and has been shown by the cinema in the James Bond films, he has pointed out.
Posadas has also highlighted that with the fall of communism, the western secret services relaxed, they believed that the enemy were radical environmental groups, to such an extent that when the attack on the Twin Towers in New York occurred, “there was no one in the CIA who knew how to speak Arabic.