As the drums of war resounded across Europe in 1939, the head of the French military intelligence service recruited an unlikely spy: France’s most famous woman, Josephine Baker.
Jacques Abtey had spent the early days of World War II recruiting spies to gather information on Nazi Germany and other Axis Powers. As a rule, the head of the secret service was looking for men who could travel incognito. Then again, nothing was typical about the US-born dancer and singer.
Born into poverty in St. Louis in 1906, Baker grew up fatherless in a series of rat-infested slums. She had only sporadic schooling and got married for the first time at age 13. Stung by discrimination in Jim Crow America because of her skin color, she left at 19 to perform as a burlesque dancer in music halls in Paris where she risked being dance routines while she was dressed little more than a pearl necklace and a banana rubber skirt made her feel Jazz Age. After branching out into singing and acting in films, she became the highest paid artist in Europe.
A celebrity of Baker’s stature was a highly unlikely spy candidate since she could never travel surreptitiously – but that’s exactly what made her such an alluring prospect. The celebrity would be his cover. Abtey hoped Baker could use her charm, beauty, and fame to woo secrets from the lips of lovable diplomats at embassy parties.
Having found in France the freedom promised by America on parchment, Baker agreed to spy on his adopted country. “France made me what I am,” she told Abtey. “The Parisians have given me their hearts and I am ready to give them my life.”
The cries of “Return to Africa!” she had heard from fascists while performing across Europe also fueled her decision. “Of course, I wanted to do all I could to help France, my adopted country,” she said. Ebony magazine decades later, “But a primary consideration, which pushed me as strongly as patriotism, was my violent hatred of discrimination in any form.”
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Baker uses Star Power to learn the secrets
Josephine Baker, c. 1945
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Baker began his espionage career by attending diplomatic parties at the embassies of Italy and Japan and gathering intelligence on Axis Powers that might join the war. Not afraid of being caught, the neophyte spy wrote notes of what she had heard on the palms of her hand and on her arms under her sleeves. “Oh, no one would think I’m a spy,” Baker says, laughing when Abtey warns him of the danger.
In the weeks following the arrival of German forces in France, Baker continued his nightly performances in Paris, sang to soldiers on the front lines on the radio, and comforted refugees in homeless shelters. When the invaders approached Paris in early June 1940, Abtey insisted she leave, so Baker loaded her belongings, including a gold piano and a bed once belonging to Marie Antoinette, into vans and left for a castle 300 miles southwest. . As Nazi troops descended the Champs-Élysées and occupied his Parisian home, Baker hid French refugees and resistance fighters in his new quarters.
In November 1940, Abtey and Baker worked to smuggle documents to General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French government in exile in London. Under the pretext of embarking on a South American tour, the artist hid secret photographs under her dress and took away sheet music with information on the movements of German troops in France written in invisible ink. With all eyes on the star as they crossed the border with Spain en route to neutral Portugal, the French security chief, posing as Baker’s secretary, received little attention from the from German officials. The limelight drawn to Baker allowed Abtey to travel in the shadows.
In Portugal and Spain, Baker continued to collect details of Axis troop movements during embassy feasts. Collapsing in the bathrooms, the secret agent took detailed notes and tied them to her bra with a safety pin. “My notes would have been very compromising if they had been discovered, but who would dare to search Josephine Baker to the skin?” she wrote later. “When they asked I for papers, they usually meant autographs.
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Baker keeps spying even when he’s sick
Josephine Baker (right) pictured in her military uniform as member of the Corps of French Women Fighters in North Africa.
George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty Images
Charged in Morocco in January 1941 to set up a liaison and transmission center in Casablanca, Abtey and Baker crossed the Mediterranean. The artist brought 28 pieces of luggage and a menagerie of pet monkeys, mice and a Great Dane. The more visible Baker’s journey, the less suspicion it arouses.
In North Africa, she worked with the French Resistance network and used her connections to obtain passports for Jews fleeing the Nazis in Eastern Europe until she was hospitalized with peritonitis in June 1941. She underwent multiple surgeries during an 18 month hospitalization which left her so ill. that the Chicago Defender mistakenly ran his obituary, written by Langston Hughes. He wrote that Baker was “as much a victim of Hitler as the soldiers who fall today in Africa fighting his armies. The Aryans drove Josephine out of her beloved Paris. Baker quickly corrected the record. “There was a little mistake, I’m way too busy to die,” she told the Afro-American.
Even during Baker’s recovery, the espionage work continued as American diplomats and members of the French Resistance gathered at his bedside. From her balcony, she watched American troops arrive in Morocco as part of Operation Torch in November 1942. After her final release, Baker visited Allied military camps from Algiers to Jerusalem. By day she rode in jeeps through the scorching deserts of North Africa. At night, she bundled up and slept on the floor next to her vehicle to avoid landmines.
After the liberation of Paris, she returned to the city she loved in October 1944 after an absence of four years. Dressed in her blue auxiliary air lieutenant’s uniform punctuated with golden epaulettes, Baker rode in the back of an automobile as the crowds along the Champs-Elysees threw flowers at her. No longer just a glamorous magazine star, Baker was a patriotic heroine.
She donned her uniform again in 1961 to receive two of France’s highest military honors, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur, in a ceremony in which details of her espionage work were revealed. in the world. A teary-eyed baker told her compatriots: “I’m proud to be French because it’s the only place in the world where I can make my dream come true.”
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