Josephine Baker the Spy

Josephine Baker in WW2 French Uniform

Josephine Baker the American who spied against the Germans in France in World War II.  Born in St. Louis, she was one of the most famous black stars of the Broadway stage in the 1920s. After a sensational debut in Paris in 1925, she re­mained in France, becoming a French citizen in 1937.
When France declared war on Germany in Sept. 1939, Jacques Abtey, chief of counterintelli­gence in Paris for the French military intelligence agency, the Deuxiéme Bureau, recruited her as a secret informer. (Like the Germans, the French referred to such an unpaid informer as an Honorary Agent.) Abtey had to be per­suaded to recruit Baker, for he felt that she might turn out to be a double agent like Mata Hari. But Baker convinced him that if necessary she would give her life for France.


She had supported Italian dictator Mussolini's inva­sion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and so she had many con­tacts in the Italian Embassy in Paris. From them, and from friends in the Japanese Embassy, she obtained informa­tion about German troop movements. After Germany conquered France in 1940, as a black French citizen she could have been sent to a concentration camp. She left Paris, vowing never to perform there while the Germans occupied the city.
Under the 1940 armistice between Germany and France, much of the south and the French colonies in North Africa and elsewhere came under the administration of a col­laborationist government with its capital in Vichy. In Nov. 1940 Baker made her way out of Vichy France into Spain and then to Lisbon, Portugal. She was accompanied by Abtey, who was using a fake passport identifying him as her ballet master. With them went important Deuxiéme Bureau intelligence information, written in invisible ink on Baker's sheet music; pho­tographs were hidden in her clothing. The information was passed to British intelligence officers in neutral Portugal.
Later in the war, she carried information from Morocco to Lisbon, often working directly for Col. Paul Paillole, a legendary French intelligence officer. For her work in the war she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of Resistance. Her wartime activities were reported in Abtey’s book The Secret War of Josephine Baker (1949).