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Josephine Baker’s Daring Double Life as a World War II Spy

Using fame as a cover, the glamorous entertainer spied for the French Resistance against the Nazis.

As war drums reverberated across Europe in 1939, the head of France’s 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 collect infor­mation on Nazi Germany and other Axis powers. Typically, the secret service chief sought out men who could travel incognito. Then again, nothing was typical when it came to the American-born dancer and singer.

Born into poverty in St. Louis in 1906, Baker had grown up fatherless in a series of rat-infested hovels. She had only sporadic schooling and married for the first time at age 13. Stung by discrimination in Jim Crow America based on her skin color, she left at the age of 19 to perform as a burlesque dancer in the music halls of Paris where her risqué dance routines while clad in little more than a string of pearls and a rubber banana skirt made her a Jazz Age sensation. After branching out into singing and acting in films, she became Europe’s highest-paid entertainer.

A celebrity of Baker’s stature made for a most unlikely spy candidate since she could never travel surreptitiously—but that’s exactly what made her such an enticing prospect. Fame would be her cover. Abtey hoped Baker could use her charm, beauty and stardom to seduce secrets from the lips of fawning diplomats at embassy parties.

Having found in France the freedom that America promised on parchment, Baker agreed to spy for her adopted country. “France made me what I am,” she told Abtey. “The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life.”

The cries of “Go back 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 aid France, my adopted country,” she told Ebony magazine decades later, “but an overriding con­sider­ation, the thing that drove me as strongly as did patriotism, was my violent hatred of discrimination in any form.”

(Images are from Google.)