The Nazi barked orders to his men in German. The soldiers had taken up positions around the magnificent chateau in southwest France, and now their black leather jackboots clicked on paving stones as they closed ranks to secure the many entrances to the opulent property. One of the armed men rang the doorbell as his superior officer stood beside him. Four more uniformed Nazis waited in the courtyard nearby. The thick blue field uniforms and high boots of their infamous wardrobes caused them to sweat profusely in the hot afternoon.
Finally, a servant opened the heavy door to the chateau’s main entrance. The officer-in-charge demanded to see the mistress of the house. Seeing little alternative, the servant admitted the soldiers into the lobby and asked them to wait.
In spite of the obvious impatience of the men downstairs, world-renowned superstar Josephine Baker slowly made her way through lavishly furnished reception rooms that stretched deep into her mansion. When she entered the front room, the officer-in-charge stepped forward officially. He had received a tip she was hiding arms, he told her. He needed to conduct a thorough search of the premises to verify whether there was any truth to it. The consequences for such a crime could be imprisonment, perhaps worse.
“I’m a starlet for heaven’s sake,” she shot back, “what on earth do you think you might find here?” Then, with a wave of her hand, she let him understand that she had nothing to hide.
The Nazi soldiers proceeded to comb the chateau, scattering paintings and mementos from friends like Picasso. They spread out over the prolific grounds, which made an ideal sanctuary for Baker’s animals: dogs, monkeys, mice, rabbits, and a pet cheetah among them.
Inside, Baker led the German officer into her library. Holding his chin aloft, he inspected her vast book collection as she expected he would, with all the feigned erudition of a man who believed himself superior. Reading him as capably as one of those massive tomes, she played to his ego, and his demeanor softened.
“My job takes me to many of the chateaux in the region,” he said in French, abandoning his brusque authority, “but yours is particularly magnificent.”
She thanked him, beaming the youthful smile — a playful parody of a smile — with which she’d won over millions of admirers. She put the officer at ease in the library, and soon he grew comfortable, almost chatty with her. She played the part, drawing him off guard.
All the while, she kept one ear pricked for the shout of discovery she was certain would come. Hidden from view somewhere in that massive home was a man named Jacques Abtey, Baker’s intelligence handler. They had been in the middle of planning an operation, one that would make a vital contribution to the nascent resistance movement, when the Nazis came knocking. Abtey was already compromised, and Baker, his star student and one of the most famous women in the world, was a spy.
Jacques Abtey was feeling frustrated the day he met her. It was September 1939 and war had just been declared with Germany. Abtey, blond and fair, with Scandinavian good looks and an air of seriousness that belied his thirty-three years, was responsible for anti-German counterintelligence in Paris. The war was still young; the French thought they could win. But the intelligence services were concerned about infiltration by German sympathizers attempting to undermine the French war effort from within. Abtey’s office, known as the Fifth Bureau, was short-staffed, and he was under the gun. He had a mountain of work to attend to.
So it was unwelcome news when one of his informers, Daniel Marouani, a concert promoter in Paris, implored him to meet Josephine Baker, the American-born entertainer known for her erotically charged performances. With her extensive social connections and adoring fans, Baker had access to useful information, he implored. She could be very helpful to Abtey.
What could Marouani be thinking? the spymaster griped. You can’t trust starlets. That fact had been incontrovertibly proven during the First World War when France enlisted a well-known exotic dancer who performed under the stage name Mata Hari to spy on Germans. What seemed a clever idea ended in disaster when it came to light the woman, a double agent, had been passing secrets to a German officer with whom she’d been carrying on an affair. The French executed Mata Hari by firing squad in 1917, the incident was not well received publicly, and ever since there’d been an unofficial dictate in French intelligence to stay away from female agents — especially celebrities.
But Marouani was persistent, and facing an onslaught of pestering, Abtey reluctantly agreed to accompany him to a mansion in an affluent Paris suburb. He knew little about the star apart from what he’d gleaned from her records, photos, and press articles. His impression was that she was eccentric, popular with the Paris crowds. She had opened her own nightclub in Montmartre that drew the literati of the day. He remembered seeing photographs of her wandering down the Champs Elysées with a pet baby cheetah on a lead. None of this did anything to soothe his annoyance.
Abtey and Marouani were admitted to Baker’s Paris home by a servant. When the exterior gate closed it seemed they had stepped into another world. An ornamental stream flowed through lawns flanked by magnolia trees and enormous rhododendrons, a far cry from the jammed Paris streets in the city center. Across the grounds they spotted an open bandstand where Baker famously hired orchestras to perform for guests. Taking in the massive property, the pair almost missed the sing-song call of a woman greeting them in English.
Abtey saw her tatty felt hat first as it poked above the bushes. Then Baker rounded the hedge, beaming ear to ear. She had one hand in the pocket of a pair of shabby trousers. In the other she carried a rusty tin can full of snails she’d been collecting from her garden. It was an unexpected sight to anyone who knew Baker as the sex icon of the jazz age 1920s, when the star exposed nearly every inch of herself onstage with barely-there dresses fashioned from sequins or, in one famous case, bejeweled bananas. Now thirty-three, she had moved from the avant-garde to the role of fashion icon and was one of the best-dressed women in Paris. But even in her gardening clothes, her lithe body projected the sensuality and energy for which she had become so well known. Her hair was carefully coiffed beneath the hat, short and shaped, projecting youthfulness.
“I’m so pleased to meet you, Mr Fox,” she chirped, addressing Abtey by the cover name she had been given. “Hello, Marauani.”
During a brief tour of her home, Baker meted out details about her life. She grew up a poor Black girl in a low rent district of St. Louis. The daughter of entertainers, a Black-and-Native-American mother and Spanish-European father, she came of age in vaudeville, and her prospects were dimmed by the racism she faced onstage and off. In that era, most Black performers were relegated as background performers in better paying white establishments and rarely permitted to headline or build a career. Many talented musicians and stage entertainers threw in the towel, opting for steady paychecks in local factories.
When an opportunity to perform in France came along as part of a comedy troupe, she pounced on it, and soon she began performing as a singer-dancer in nightclubs. The Paris crowd had never seen anything like her: A sparkplug of sensual energy, she shook and vibrated onstage in performances that were provocative and arousing. She became a star almost overnight, and France offered her a life she could never have dreamed of in the US.
Seated inside the villa, Abtey accepted a glass of champagne and listened to Baker speak with emotion about France. She wanted to aid the war effort utilizing her unique skill set as a performer, as well as her international contacts and close relationships in high society and with people in power. She could offer useful information in those early days of the war when world powers were still choosing alliances and hedging bets.
How deep could an American’s loyalty truly run for France? Abtey wondered silently. “I have been shown only love from the people of Paris,” Baker pronounced in a sweep of emotion. In France she was an artist, a star. “They have given me their hearts and I have given them mine. I am ready, Captain, to offer my life in the service of France.”
It was interesting, he had to admit. She was a bold, popular personality, one who attracted notice everywhere and to whom the very environment seemed to yield. No one would ever suspect her as an agent.
Then again, here was a performer whose fortune was built seducing audiences. Abtey felt himself being drawn in, and his guard went up. But the afternoon was young, and Baker cajoled him into giving her a test. She was a regular guest at the Italian Embassy, where one of the attachés was of particular interest to the intelligence service. Abtey, worn down by her charm, asked her to see what she could find out. She took the assignment eagerly.
Abtey returned to his office. The mountain of paperwork had only grown larger during his afternoon away, and he marveled at how many hours had passed; it was as if he had been intoxicated or under a spell. He put the business with Baker out of his mind, but a few days later he received a message and found himself walking to a meeting point, where she immediately zipped up to the curb in her enormous Packard, a huge luxury car with whitewall tires and exaggerated fenders that ballooned up over the wheel wells. As soon as Abtey jumped in she began unspooling information she’d collected. She became so animated that she stopped looking at the road and lost control of the careening car for a moment. A traffic enforcement officer approached, blowing his whistle angrily, but smiled when he recognized her. Abtey, clinging white-knuckled to the seat as she took off, noted with interest the traffic officer’s leniency — here was a woman to whom the normal rules seemed not to apply.
As his heart rate stabilized, he also realized that the information Baker was passing along was solid. The attaché had revealed to Baker aspects of Italy’s political inclinations that confirmed the intelligence service’s suspicions. She was a natural, a born performer adept at reading people and drawing them into her confidences. By the time the ride was over, Abtey had come to an uneasy decision: There was something to the idea of using her to collect information. But his faith in her was razor thin; certainly, she couldn’t be trusted to do anything without strict oversight. To that end–and putting out of his mind the uncomfortable fact that he was enjoying spending time with her–he would personally oversee her instruction.
They started at once on a crash course in espionage, and Abtey found that his pupil was an avid learner. France had had a spy service since the 1870s, but at the outbreak of the Second World War the art of spycraft was still mostly instinctual, although it would get a technological update throughout the later years of the war. Spies learned how to detect lies, interrogate marks without their knowledge, and memorize vital information using mnemonic devices. There were some gadgets, such as invisible ink and small containers to conceal photographs and documents, and Baker learned useful tricks, such as how to scribble up her arm and read documents upside down. But mostly Abtey was teaching her improvisation, and in this regard she was a remarkably quick study. She also had an unteachable quality intrinsic to great spies: She changed roles, moods, even identities like clothes. It was as if she had been born into a double life.
Performing to packed houses in the evenings, Baker longed to utilize her newfound skills. Meanwhile, she accepted a post as a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross during the day. Frustrated not to be using all she was learning, she nevertheless gave the job her full attention. War refugees were flooding into the city from outside Paris, and as Baker helped oversee their care, her instincts told her to stay on the lookout for suspicious characters. When she noticed one young man who claimed to be a German deserter, she undertook a minor investigation and then reported him to Abtey. He was quickly discovered to be a spy and quietly hauled off by French police. Grudgingly, Abtey acknowledged the success.
Meanwhile, the war was not going well for the French. When Paris was bombed in early June, leading to fears of a coming invasion, Parisians started to flee the city in droves. Even the French government soon abandoned the capital, heading first to Tours and then to Bordeaux. The country Baker had adopted as her own, the very heart of her identity, was now in chaos. She had been performing in Paris with a fellow singer and sometimes rival named Maurice Chevalier, but dwindling crowds and fears that the theatre might be bombed brought the show to an abrupt close and she departed for her chateau in the south.
Abtey stayed on in Paris to oversee the evacuation of his office and the destruction of sensitive documents. But he left by June 14, 1940, when German troops marched into the capital victorious. Under the terms of the Armistice, they occupied the north of the country and in the south a puppet government was established with leaders who were sympathetic to the Nazis. The regime was named after Vichy, the small southern spa town which became the new seat of French power. Bending the rules of the Armistice, the Germans maintained a low-key presence in the south to monitor opposition and were quick to track down any hostile activity.
In full flight, Abtey rendezvoused with a superior officer from the now collapsed French intelligence apparatus, Captain Paul Paillole. Vowing to continue their work clandestinely, they hatched a plan. Paillole had already rounded up a ring of former French spies now living in hiding, whom he planned to reactivate. He planned to mobilize Abtey, his most trusted man, to establish a communications network — boats, planes, and human couriers — within German-occupied Europe in order to send vital intelligence gathered by the spies to the emerging resistance movement led by General Charles de Gaulle in London. If successful, their intelligence pipeline would be an indispensable source of strategic information for the nascent French Resistance.
Abtey, a stoic patriot, accepted the heavy charge on the spot. Paillole promised he would acquire a fake passport for him, though Abtey surmised it wouldn’t be enough. To set up a secret, continent-wide communications linkup he would have to travel continuously. But the Germans had placed severe travel restrictions on men under forty, and his youth would draw attention. How on earth was he to accomplish his mission if he couldn’t move freely?
The answer occurred to him in a vision of feathers and lace and at once he headed south to the country estate of his star pupil.
She struggled to pack. Her off-stage identity was as much a performance as the one she donned onstage, and her clothes were an extension of her act. Wavering between boas and coats, she decided to wrap herself in her favorite fur. There, that’s better.
Emerging from her room, she saw Abtey in his traveling disguise: A mustache and glasses and a thick Marseilles accent. He addressed her as “Mademoiselle Baker,” and she couldn’t help giggling. Feeling playful, he continued talking, sending her into hysterics. It felt good to laugh, but soon they remembered themselves and the gravity of the moment and fell silent. Looking again, she realized how utterly convincing he was as her modest secretary. This will work, she told herself.
They had already weathered a close call. The recent visit to her chateau by the uniformed Nazis, which came soon after Abtey arrived, had been a confidence builder, a test of her resolve and skill. She had put the officer in charge at ease, prompting him to see what she wanted him to see, just as she’d been trained to do. As a result, he held back his men from a more thorough ransacking. Even Abtey, spared discovery, had been impressed.
The five-hour wait to leave Toulouse by train was trying. She and Abtey killed time walking down the canal. There wasn’t much food in the station café and they had forgotten their ration tickets at the chateau. It was difficult to get any decent food without them, and they didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention by purchasing a bite on the black market. The warmth of France seemed to be dissipating along with the food.
They boarded the train at last, winding through the majestic Pyrenees mountains towards Spain. She rehearsed the conversations they had practiced and answers to questions she might be asked by the frontier guards. The intelligence packet from Paillole for this first rendezvous with the British included information about the exact whereabouts of the German military divisions in the west of the country, details of German troop numbers and landing fields, and precise descriptions of Nazi parachute divisions. Most important of all was a series of photographs of the landing craft the Germans were proposing to use to invade Britain. All of this information had been gathered by Paillole’s spy network and had to be placed into the hands of the British ambassador to Lisbon, their contact. Their mission hinged on the British accepting the intelligence and agreeing to support the spy network. If they were caught with the intelligence en route they would be tried as traitors to France’s Vichy government or else whisked away by the Nazis, their future uncertain.
As a safeguard against searches, they had transferred the raw intelligence to Baker’s musical scores in invisible ink made with bicarbonate chloride, which could be revealed with lemon juice. Baker pinned the photographs to her undergarments, certain no one would dare search her. Just in case, they also committed much of the intelligence to memory — although if they were caught it was unlikely they’d get the chance to pass it on.