From Lisbon with Love: Josephine Baker, Pt. II

After the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Josephine Baker joined the French Resistance as a spy. That year, she planned and took part in a top-secret mission to Lisbon, Portugal, in an effort to thwart Hitler.

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Above: Photograph of Josephine Baker at the opening of the Tour de France (June 27, 1933). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF).

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SHOW NOTES

Josephine Baker, distributing food at a charitable function in 1931. Baker, who loved France as her adopted home, participated in a number of volunteer activities that benefitted the poor (both on and off camera).

The Nazis conquered Paris in June 1940. Josephine Baker joined the French Resistance soon after, working as a spy.

Pre-war postcard depicting the Château de Milandes. Baker made this property her homebase after the fall of Paris in 1940. She stockpiled weapons in the basement and held seccret meetings with other members of the French Resistance here.

Interior of the Hotel Aviz, Lisbon (1930s-40s). Now defunct, the glamorous Hotel Aviz played host to numerous spies during the Second World War—including Josephine Baker.

Jack Downey, “Crowds of French patriots line the Champs Elysees to view Allied tanks and half tracks pass through the Arc du Triomphe, after Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

---Baker, Jean-Claude and Chris Chase. The Hungry Heart. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1993.

---Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Life and Art: The Icon and the Image. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

---Lewis, Damien. Agent Josephine. BBS Publication: New York, 2022.

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TRANSCRIPT

It was late 1939 or early 1940, and the telephone rang at the Deuxiènne Bureau, a French intelligence agency. Somebody handed the receiver to intelligence officer Jacques Abtey. Josephine Baker was on the other end—six days earlier Abtey had recruited her as an Honorable Correspondent or volunteer spy.

“Come quickly,” Baker urged him. “I would be so happy to see you.” As the singer, dancer, and movie star well knew, she could not disclose sensitive information over the phone—anybody could be listening, including German intelligence men. Sensing the urgency in her voice, Abtey promised to meet her just as soon as he could.

Agent Abtey and H.C. Baker rendezvoused in central Paris, the entertainer rolling up in her supremely sleek, black-and-white Delage, its seats upholstered with scintillating snakeskin, a ride that was suitably stylish for a spy. Baker invited Abtey to get in so they could talk while she drove. Her handler obliged. As she tore through the streets of Paris, Baker emitted a “furious torrent” of words, as if more agitated than excited by what she had to say. Baker was on friendly terms with an attaché at the Italian embassy, and she had pumped him for all the information he had about Italy’s war plans. Benito Mussolini had yet to join the conflict slowly engulfing Europe, and politicians around the world were at pains to divine if and when the dictator would. Somehow, Baker had gotten this guy talking and found that if she kept pushing back on the stock platitudes and evasions he gave her, he would lean in and whisper what Italy was really up to. By dint of this strategy, Baker was able to learn that Il Duce—Italian for “the Leader,” as Mussolini was known—was on the verge of entering the war on the side of Nazi Germany.

Baker had extracted some valuable intelligence from her attaché-friend, but she did not have Abtey’s undivided attention as she talked him through it. He was more than slightly preoccupied by her driving—she was swerving, braking, and punching the pedal to the metal as if she were in a high-speed chase, making him worry for both his and her safety. Baker had driven like a madwoman before. On one occasion, she rammed her vehicle straight into a streetlight near the Paris Grand Hotel. A crowd gathered, clearly concerned for the driver’s wellbeing, but Baker soon allayed their fears. She hopped out of the car, signed a few autographs, and caught a cab home, as cool as could be.

That misadventure ended happily enough (for everyone but the lamp post), and thankfully Baker did not crash the car when Abtey was with her. Nevertheless, the intelligence man came away from the conversation with doubts about his latest recruit. He wrote later that he saw her erratic driving and stream-of-consciousness debriefing as a sign of “unbelievable nervousness.”

The Deuxiènne Bureau had brought her onboard partly because it lacked qualified personnel and financial resources, and he wondered if she would ever receive “the very special training” that would set her up for “success in our kind of work.” In less than a year, Baker would prove her handler wrong.

Josephine Baker embarked on her most dramatic secret mission after the Nazi occupation of Paris in June 1940. Abandoning her Paris home, she took refuge in a medieval castle in southern France, where she joined the French resistance. The work she did there—and elsewhere—would earn her the highest French medal of honor, civilian or military, after war’s end.

Today, we’ll hear how Paris fell to the Nazis, how Baker and Abtey reunited after that calamity, and how the two of them planned and executed a daring mission to deliver top-secret intelligence to the British Secret Intelligence Services. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to another episode of Spy vs. Spy . . .

From Lisbon, With Love: Josephine Baker, Pt. II

The Nazis are Coming, the Nazis are Coming

Nobody could believe how quickly it all happened. On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of France. After stampeding into the neutral countries of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg, German troops prepared to enter France by way of the northeastern Ardennes region. The Allied Powers had long viewed this stretch of land as a natural barrier to foreign invasion because its dense forests, rolling hills, and rough terrain would not be easy for armored vehicles to navigate. This assessment proved gravely mistaken. Thanks to the relentless brutality of the German Blitzkrieg, Hitler’s forces surged through the Ardennes and into France, overpowering Allied soldiers who met them in battle. By the beginning of June, the unthinkable became inevitable as the Germans gunned and bombed their way to Paris.

As the enemy closed in, many French men and women fled. Yet Josephine Baker remained, undaunted. Around the beginning of the Nazi incursion into France, Baker was singing and dancing in a star-studded musical revue titled Paris-London. The show was running for the entertainment of Allied soldiers who were stationed at fortifications along the French border with Germany. Even as Nazi panzers advanced on Paris, Allied soldiers needed to maintain a presence on the border south of the Ardennes. As the fighting raged, hospitals near to where Paris-London was running filled with wounded servicemen. When Baker wasn’t onstage, she visited the wards and did whatever she could to boost morale, making beds, bathing patients, and never refusing a request for a song.

Then, on June 10, Baker’s manager, Henri Varna, cancelled Paris-London. This was the star’s cue to pack her bags and hightail it for safe harbor outside the French capital. The entertainer set about loading her car with clothing as well as other necessities. Her cargo included champagne bottles full of gasoline, a commodity that would become increasingly precious in the coming months. Seated behind the wheel, Baker motored toward the Dordogne region of southern France, where earlier that year she had rented property that would serve as a safe haven. The mass exodus out of Paris and other cities made the trip interminable. The roads were jammed with vehicles of every make and model—horse-drawn carts, farm wagons, bicycles, and even hearses. After hours of frustrating stop-and-go traffic, Baker reached the farmland of Périgod, where the Dordogne River wound through open meadows and woodland alike. Here, an ancient castle hugged a sheer cliff; there, a palace overlooked a ravine.

Finally, Baker turned onto a dirt lane and crossed a stone bridge into the village of Castelnaud-Fayrac. Zipping through town, she drove up a hill and came to a stop in front of a large gateway studded with iron. She had arrived at the place she would call home for the foreseeable future: the Château des Milandes. Built in the late fifteenth century, the château had an imposing, even fearsome, exterior—gargoyles, demons, and dragons glared down on all who entered. The castle would offer Baker a much-needed sense of security as the Nazi war machine went about its bloody work.

In the words of Damien Lewis, author of Agent Josephine, “The ancient building, with its secret nooks and crannies, its deep cellars, twisting stone staircases and soaring towers, seemed to offer the perfect hideaway.” It also afforded ample space for her private menagerie. Ever the animal lover, Baker moved into the medieval dwelling with a small zoo’s worth of fauna, including a Great Dane named Benzo, a monkey named Glouglou (or “Gobble-Gobble” in English), a golden lion tamarin by the name of Mica, and two mice whose names translated to Curly and Question Mark. It was, in other words, a full house.

By June 14, 1940, the Nazis considered their mission accomplished.

That day, jackboots marched down the boulevards of Paris, and before long, a Nazi flag was flying from the pinnacle of the Eifel Tower. The speed and ferocity of the invasion astonished the world, and there’s little wonder why. As Lewis puts it, “By taking Paris, the Germans had succeeded in doing in thirty-eight days what they had failed to achieve in the entire First World War, which had lasted four years and cost two million lives.” Hitler himself took a trip to the City of Lights a week or two after it fell to the Nazis to savor his latest conquest.

Soon, the Nazis hammered out an armistice with French officials, whereby France was divided in two. The invaders controlled the north, more than half of the country. Meanwhile, France’s prime minister, Marshal Phillippe Pétain, a decorated veteran of the First World War, would lead the south, referred to as the Free Zone. Pétain’s government was headquartered in the southern spa town of Vichy. Despite the terms of this treaty, many French men and women were not prepared to capitulate to Nazi Germany. Across the country, small cells formed with the aim of undermining the Nazis, through armed conflict, sabotage, espionage, and other means. Collectively, these groups were known as the French Resistance, and Josephine Baker was about to join the cause.

Resist

In the days and weeks following the fall of Paris, Baker could do little more than hunker down at Château des Milandes. She swore never to sing or dance in Paris until it was purged of the Nazis, certainly not while theaters were marred by signs with advisories like, “ACCESS FORBIDDEN TO DOGS OR JEWS.” But plenty of performers and impresarios went ahead and plied their trades, even if it meant catering to foreign adversaries. Cinemas, cafés, and nightclubs reopened and did a brisk business. Baker was of a more defiant disposition and wanted to fight back, but how? Her prospects of spying were dim at the moment; she had lost contact with the Deuxiènne Bureau. For all she knew, her handler, Jacques Abtey, was already dead, pumped full of lead by SS-thugs.

Left to her own devices, she transformed the Château des Milandes into a bastion of resistance. Soon, it housed a small cell of like-minded men and women. There was a guy named Joseph Boué, a French air force pilot. Another château habitue was the village blacksmith, Georges Malaury, who lived across the way from des Milandes. Baker befriended him and took his two small children for joyrides around town (maybe not the safest pastime given the singer’s speed-demon tendencies). As the Nazi occupation dragged on, Malaury came to despise the Germans and teamed up with Baker and the rest of the Milandes crew. The blacksmith operated a covert radio transmitter in one of the castle towers, a device capable of sending dispatches to Britain. Meanwhile, Baker and her team took steps to prepare for mortal combat with the occupiers. Bit by bit, they stockpiled weapons in the château’s cellar, ready to be distributed to nearby members of the Resistance if necessary.

Baker was unaware of it while she was adjusting to her new life at the Château des Milandes, but the Deuxiènne Bureau was also lending its services to the Resistance. Back when the Germans were bearing down on then French capital, Joseph Paillole, head of the Bureau, ordered the destruction of all nonessential documents in an effort to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy. Then, he and his men packed what was left and evacuated the agency’s Paris headquarters.

At this point, members of the French intelligence service scattered in all directions, leaving the Deuxiènne Bureau fragmented. After a helter-skelter retreat, Paillole landed in the southern port city of Marseilles, where he oversaw espionage in support of the Resistance. This was not so simple as opening new facilities for the Deuxiènne Bureau—the Germans would rain down on him like a volley of mortars. Instead, he would need a multi-layered cover that could conceal his activities. To that end, Paillole established a bogus agricultural organization called the Travaux Ruraux, the TR for short. Gradually, word spread among intelligence circles as well as Resistance groups that the TR was up and running.

One of the agents who reunited with Paillole at the TR was Jacques Abtey. Like Paillole, Abtey was committed to combatting the Nazis in whatever way he could, but it was not immediately clear how he should go about it. Eventually, Abtey and Paillole caught wind of a modest cell of Resistance fighters based out of a medieval château in the Dordogne region, helmed by none other than Josephine Baker. Abtey had changed his mind about Baker’s potential as a spy since that nerve-racking drive through central Paris. She had grown more disciplined, more cunning, before the Nazi takeover of Paris. To name one example, she had obtained valuable insight into Japan’s intentions to enter the war.

Discussing the matter with Paillole, Abtey concluded that he could do the most good for the TR by joining the crew at the Château des Milandes. This would allow him not only to collaborate with Baker but also with other supporters of the Resistance in the vicinity. With Paillole’s blessing, he jumped in his car and headed for the Dordogne.

Baker was overjoyed when Abtey materialized out of the blue at the château. “Fox of misfortune, where the hell did you come from?” she called out to him. (As I mentioned in the previous episode, Abtey was introduced to Baker under the alias of “Mr. Fox.” Hence, the “Fox of misfortune” bit.) “I thought you were dead,” she went on, “buried with a kilo of buckshot in your back. Come on! A quick trip to the barbers, a brush of your boots, and you’ll be fresh and ready.” As it happened, Abtey had already made a big change that Baker needed to know about. Mr. Fox was no more. He ceased to be as soon as Pétain cut his collaborationist deal with the Nazis. From now on, Abtey would answer to the name of Jack Sanders. Jack, he explained, was the citizen of the United States, a conveniently neutral country at this point. He even had a passport to go with his new identity.

“Hello, Mr. Jack Sanders!” Baker laughed once he had filled her in. They cracked jokes about sneaking off to London to hang with a mutual hero of theirs, General Charles de Galle, as Baker showed him around the château, introducing him to her house guests as well as her assorted four-legged friends. She also would have taken him downstairs to the subterranean arsenal that she and her compatriots were slowly amassing. The château made a congenial homebase, Abtey thought.

Then again, Baker and her brothers- and sisters-in-arms were never entirely safe. As Abtey would have warned her, the Germans were dispatching soldiers, Gestapo goons, and SS brutes by the truckload to the “Free Zone,” the southern part of France where the château was located, partly for the purpose of ferreting out members of the Resistance. It would have seemed probable—maybe even inevitable—that one day the enemy would arrive on their doorstep. We’ll hear more after a quick break.

The Uninvited

It was about lunchtime one afternoon, and Baker was in the dining room, conversing with two visitors to the château. Both were former agents of the Duxiènne Bureau, now in service to the TR. Jacques Abtey was out fishing on the Dordogne River, a favorite hobby of his, leaving Baker on her own with the spies. She and the intelligence men were putting their heads together about how best to establish a chain of communication with the British Secret Intelligence Service. The TR agents had also come with details about German plans for a hostile takeover of the Free Zone. In preparation for just such an invasion, they had brought with them a cache of deadly munitions to be added to Baker’s subterranean armory. She and her guests were as good as dead if caught in possession of this intelligence and these weapons.

So it was when a burst of sharp raps came at the heavy oaken door to the château. Baker would later speak of them as terrible blasts that threatened to unhinge the door. A moment or two passed, and Baker’s housemaid, the dependable Libellule, (“dragonfly” in French) rushed into the dining room, ashen-faced. “There are six of them!” she intoned. “An officer, a non-commissioned officer, and four soldiers.” There was not a moment to lose. Taking charge of the situation, Baker directed her visitors, plus a handful of other Resistance members present in the château, to make themselves scarce and shut themselves up in the furthest recesses of the property. With her orders issued, Baker turned to her housemaid and instructed her to show her uninvited guests to the library, where she would be waiting. The library was the singer’s favorite room in the castle, its handsome bookshelves and perennial quiet never failing to put her at ease.

A minute or two later, Baker heard the echoes of boots ascending the stone staircase that led to this level and nearing the library. Finally, La Libellule entered with a German officer in tow, his uniform emblazoned with a swastika clasped in the talons of an eagle. Baker later described the colonel as cold and stiff as a corpse. Nevertheless, the young man exuded a terrible power. Spying Josephine, he came to a stop, clicked his heels, and gave a Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler!” he declared. The lady of the house did not follow suit.

After a brief silence, the colonel explained his reason for calling in immaculate French—think Christoph Walz in Inglourious Basterds. “Madame, I am a member of the Armistice Commission and I have special responsibility for controlling arms depots in the unoccupied zone.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a search warrant.

Arms depots? Could he possibly know about the stockpile in the basement? Had somebody tipped him off?

“The officer cannot be speaking seriously, if he thinks I am hiding weapons here,” she replied in a steady tone. She hazarded a joke:

“It is true that I have Native American Indian grandparents, but they left the warpath a long time ago.”

She didn’t get a laugh. The colonel pocketed the warrant but remained in place. It would take more than a casual wisecrack to get rid of this guy.

“You were taking coffee?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“My apologies, but do you have any coffee?” This was a power play, nothing more, an attempt to coerce hospitality out of his unwilling hostess.

“We have a little,” Baker conceded. She had little choice but to play his game for now.

“And some sugar to put in it?”

“Very little sugar.” Baker had seen an opportunity to needle the officer, and she had taken it. It was precisely because of the German invasion and the chaos it had bred that commodities like sugar were scarce and expensive.

“Ah, the war is terrible,” he sighed.

“If it were only a matter of sugar and coffee . . .” Baker needled again.

“You must miss the theatre a lot, madame.” He was changing the subject—what was he angling at now?

“I would not have the heart to go on stage, when there is so much suffering,” Baker retorted, in her most direct acknowledgment of the pain the Nazis were inflicting on France.

“We did not want this war—”

“So let the German Army leave France!” Baker broke in.

The officer laughed. Was it a show of contempt? Did he think her naïve? Or was he perhaps the slightest bit nervous? Taken aback by her naked defiance?

“I see you favor simple solutions,” he smirked.

“I think they are always the best,” she countered, meeting his condescension with cheeky defiance. The colonel pursed his lips, changing tack once again.

“Are you telling me you have no weapons here? To tell the truth, madame, we received a denunciation.”

So somebody had talked. What she said next could mean life or death for her and her friends. Thinking quickly, Baker parried his question with another.

“

What is worse, to denounce, or to believe those who denounce?”

“This is war, madame.”

“Then long live peace.”

The colonel gave another laugh and fell silent, contemplating his next move. Clearing his throat, he went on, “I will not trouble you any longer. But be careful.” With that, he gave a salute by way of a farewell, turned on his heels, and exited the library. Baker emerged from the interrogation unscathed but was very much unnerved. The colonel may have left the premises, but there was not a doubt in her mind that he would put the castle under surveillance.

Another Unexpected Visit

Scarcely more than twenty-four hours had passed since Baker and that Nazi had engaged in verbal swordplay when another unfamiliar man arrived at her gates. La Libellule went out to greet him, sizing him up as they talked. He was younger than the colonel—in his late teens or early twenties by the look of it. He had a thick raincoat draped over one shoulder and a leather briefcase in his right hand. The newcomer demanded to speak with Madame Baker. Cagey though not at all impolite, La Libellule asked him to identify himself and declare his business. In a gesture that did little to reassure the housemaid, he declined to do so. “My name will not mean anything to her, because she does not know me, and I don’t know her personally,” he answered. “But please tell her I have come on a matter of the utmost importance.”

Libellule agreed to notify her mistress of his arrival, though not without adding that Baker may not wish to admit him this afternoon. A tremor must have passed up Baker’s spine when Libellue informed her of her unannounced visitor. Abtey was out of the house yet again (this time for business rather than pleasure), which meant that Baker would have to navigate this potential minefield on her own. And given the timing of this surprise, Baker was all but convinced that the Nazis were to blame. She told La Libellule to find out what he wanted.

The maidservant went back outside and found the young man where she had left him. “Madame asks you to let her know the reason for your visit. Madame is very busy.”

The stranger leaned forward with an earnest look on his face: “Please, tell your mistress that I must speak to her at all costs.”

“Come on, sir,” La Libellule began, losing her patience with his evasiveness.

But he broke in before she could say more. “I won’t leave this place without seeing her. If you tell me to leave, I will just find a way through the window!”

Seeing little alternative, Libellule showed him in and brought him to the kitchen, where the châteaulaine received him. As soon as the young man was alone with the singer, he let loose a torrent of words: “Forgive me, madame, for my approach, which must appear so impertinent to you, but you certainly will understand right away my behavior: I have some documents of great value for you to remit to the Intelligence Services.” He opened his suitcase and produced a sheaf of papers. “This is only a first delivery. I will make another in a fortnight, and after that I will ask you to put me on the road to England.”

The documents had certainly aroused Baker’s interest, but she hardly even glanced at them. She had played dumb yesterday and she would do the same today. “Good sir, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“But the Intelligence Services . . .” he protested.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” the singer doubled down. “I don’t know what this ‘Intelligence Service’ is, and as for getting you to England—why, I would be at a loss. I am an artist and I have only ever been concerned with my art.”

At that moment, Abtey strode into the kitchen, just back from errands he had run for the TR. Relieved to have an ally at her side, Baker turned to him, “jack would you check what this gentleman wants. I don’t understand a word he’s talking about.” Then, addressing the young man again, she assured him, “You may speak with him as openly as you would with me.” The visitor reiterated his reasons for coming to the Château des Milandes, and Abtey, like Baker, insisted that he had no involvement with Intelligence Services.

“This can’t be true,” he objected. “I know that I can’t be mistaken, because the person who sent me cannot have misled me—”

“Who sent you,” Abtey butted in.

“The Reverend Father Victor Dillard. You must know him—he’s in Vichy. For three weeks myself and a comrade searched for a way to join General de Galle . . . But we didn’t want to leave empty-handed. Chance served us well, and we were able to get hold of the secret codeof the Luftwaffe. Now, I’m handing it to you so you can get it to London.”

The young man paused, searching the eyes of Baker and Abtey for signs of recognition, excitement, camaraderie, anything that would indicate he had not undertaken his journey in vain. As Baker and Abtey stayed silent, he went on, “It was Father Dillard who told me: ‘Go to Castelnaud-Fayrac, near Sarlat. Ask for the Château des Milandes. There you’ll find the artiste Josephine Baker. Give her your documents and stay at the château until you leave for London.”

Abtey knew the name of Father Dillard, to be sure. At the same time, he was pretty sure the Germans did, too. The more the youth talked, the more it seemed like he was setting them up.

“I don’t know this religious man whom you’re talking about,” he responded.

“But I am sure he told me the truth,” he protested. “Besides, sir, you have an English accent—”

“Sir, please—calm down,” Abtey cut him off. “I’m sorry for your long journey, believe me, and perhaps I am sympathetic to your cause, but I’m not English. I’m American and a complete stranger to your war. Besides, I am an artist, like Miss Baker. Quite frankly, you have made a mistake. Keep your documents.”

“But—”

“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t want to know,” Abtey talked over him. “Have a strong cup of tea, some bacon and eggs and head home. There is a train at six p.m.—the only one before tomorrow. God speed—you’d best be on it.”

Seemingly deflated, the visitor gave it up and took a solitary meal in the kitchen before repacking his briefcase and leaving for the train station. With the mystery guest gone, both Baker and Abtey could breathe easily again. Yet no sooner had they relaxed than they found themselves caught in a Moebius loop of self-doubt. Had they just dodged a trap? Or had they turned away an ally? Surely, it was no coincidence that this stranger had popped up out of nowehere just one day after that grinning, gun-toting Nazi from the Armistice Commission had paid them a visit. But then, what if it was? He had seemed passionate about aiding the resistance. But maybe those emotions were insincere, just part of a ruse. After all, if the Nazis meant to ensnare the mistress of Château des Milandes, they would have sent their most adept double-crosser for the job. And wasn’t his age suspicious? Would any senior member of the resistance trust a man barely old enough to grow a beard with intelligence that could potentially fend off Hitler’s blitzkrieg? It was plain implausible. In some ways, they reasoned, twisting yet again in their logical contortions, the implausibility of it all might be the most powerful evidence of its genuineness. If the Armistice Commission were trying to trick them, why would they have deployed such an improbable tactic?

The more they mulled it over, the more they feared they had made a mistake. Their only option was to stop the young man before he caught his train. If they still had doubts after questioning him further, they could hand him over to the police as an agent provateur. And if he was who he said he was, they could bring him into the fold. But first, they needed to make hell-for-leather for the train station.

As the most seasoned intelligence officer among them, Abtey took the lead, racing to a nearby police station and filling in the chief, a secret ally of the Resistance. The two of them hopped in a car and sped to the train station. When they pulled up near the platform and surveyed the scene, however, the young man was nowhere to be found. Abtey cursed himself—he and Baker had waited too long to act. But he and the policeman still had a shot at intercepting the young man before it was too late. He would almost certainly change trains in the town of Siorac, and if they hurried, they could just possibly catch him.

Within the hour, Abtey and the police chief leapt out of the car at the Siorac train station, pushing their way through a crowd of travelers as they double-timed it to the platform. Looking every direction, Abetey finally spotted the young man in a rail-side bistro, passing the time until his next train came. The youth made eye contact with Abtey at the exact same moment, turning pale as he realized that Abtey was in the company of a police officer. He whirled around and broke into a sprint. Abtey gave chase, jostling past bystanders and yelling, “Police! You need to come with us! Police!”

Running as fast as they could, they finally caught up with the fugitive, who turned to face them without the slightest indication of fear in his eyes. Catching their breath, they led him to the police car and relieved him of the suitcase and overcoat he had brought to the château. When he was ordered to hand over his documents, however, the prisoner spat back, “Impossible. I do not have them anymore.”

“Where are they?” the police chief barked.

“Torn up and thrown away.”

“Where?”

“Near the château.”

“Driver! To the château!” the policeman bellowed. They motored back the way they came, the young man smoking in a corner seat.

Silence pervaded until Abtey spoke up, “What is your name?”

“Le Besnerais,” he murmured, ignoring Abtey’s gaze.

Abtey blinked. He recognized that name. “Are you related to the head of the SNCF?” he asked, referring to France’s state-owned railway company. It was headed by Robert Henri Le Besnerais, a mover and shaker in the French Resistance.

“He is my uncle,” came the terse reply.

Abtey studied him. “You know that you are risking a lot if you don’t tell me the truth.”

The young man stuck to his story, and finally Abtey dispensed with the performance. He had lied to him at Milandes, he confessed, and if he had been charged with intelligence as important as he claimed, the two of them could most assuredly work together.

“I believe you!” the young man exclaimed, suddenly reanimated. “But I didn’t tear up the documents or hide them near your castle. When I spied you at the station, I had an idea to get rid of them, so I slid them under the table in the bistro. You will find them there. But hurry, because they are very important!”

The driver did a U-turn and whizzed back to Siorac. Once arrived at the station, they conducted a sweep of the café and recovered the documents, seemingly untouched since the youth had abandoned them. Abtey and the police chief were as much relieved by the retrieval as impressed by the young man’s courage.

Reviewing Le Besnerais files, Abtey and company determined that while the young man had furnished valuable information, he had also mischaracterized it. The dossier held encrypted Luftwaffe messages—not the key to the Luftwaffe code, as Le Besnerais had told them. This was probably an honest mistake.

After a quick inspection, Abtey was able to decipher some of the contents; they included the locations of key Luftwaffe airbases along with lists of the aircraft at each one. The British would be grateful for this intelligence, but only if Abtey and company could place it in their hands. We’ll hear how he and Baker accomplished this dangerous feat after a quick break.

From Lisbon, With Love

Since the fall of Paris, spymaster Joseph Paillole and his network of agents, including Jacques Abtey and Josephine Baker, had acquired intelligence that could prove nothing short of vital to the British in their fight against the Germans. However, Paillole had no viable way of conveying this information to his allies. When the Nazis swarmed Paris, intelligence officers ran for the hills, and communications went silent between Paillole’s operatives and some of their closest allies, the British Secret Intelligence Service. Paillole needed to establish an information pipeline with the SIS, ideally one that would allow two-way communication.

Paillole decided that the safest place to make contact with British intelligence officers was the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. It was known in the spy world that the British embassy in Lisbon was home to a small team of SIS men. They had a direct line to their colleagues in London. Speed was of the essence. Up until now, Portugal had stayed out of the escalating war in Europe, making it easier for Allied spies to operate there. But Portugal could enter the fray at any time, and it wasn’t at all clear which side it would support. On the one hand, the Portuguese head of state, António Olveira Salazar, had renewed a commitment to the longstanding alliance between his country and Britain. On the other, Salazar was a dictator with a fascist bent aligning him with his Spanish counterpart, Francisco Franco, a friend of the Nazis. There was also the distinct possibility that Portugal might get dragged into the conflict against its own volition. This was because Portugal boasted bountiful supplies of tungsten. You probably know this tough, heavy, heat-resistant mineral as the material that light bulb filaments are made of. In times of war, though, you could also use tungsten to harden body armor or sharpen armor-piercing ammunition. The Germans lusted after Portugal’s abundance of tungsten, and it was feared they might invade the Iberian nation to take it for their own.

Planning the mission to Lisbon, Pailolle selected Jacques Abtey as the lead operative on account of Abtey’s contacts in the British Secret Intelligence Service. Paillole called upon Abtey to deliver a veritable trove of intelligence to the British embassy in Lisbon. This included not just what Abtey and Baker had received from Le Besenerais but additional documents that the RT had gathered. The dossier included a list of all known Abwehr agents (that is, German spies) operating in Britain, as well as the coordinates of key Luftwaffe airbases in France.

Then there were breakdowns of several German strategies to expand their stranglehold on Western Europe. One operation involved Gibraltar, a British-controlled island fortress located between southern Iberia and North Africa. British ships (as well as vessels from other nations) passed nearby while traveling through the Straits of Gibraltar, the waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea. The United Kingdom relied on this maritime corridor for trade. By mid-1940, German vessels had begun to gather off the coast of France, awaiting orders to invade Gibraltar. If the Nazis seized the territory, the Axis Powers would hold sway over the Mediterranean from Italy in the east to Gibraltar in the west.

And if the Germans installed heavy guns on Gibraltar, they could make the strait too perilous for use by British vessels, with disastrous implications for international trade.

It was Josephine Baker who devised a subterfuge that would enable her and Abtey to convey this intelligence to Lisbon. Even in wartime, perhaps especially amid such an upheaval, Europeans hungered for entertainment, and performers like Baker were eager to satisfy that appetite. As the singer well knew, she had thousands of fans in Portugal but had never performed there. If she announced her first-ever Portuguese tour, that would provide a convenient pretext for her to enter the country, the German war plans and other top-secret intelligence stashed in her luggage. This at first seemed like a viable maneuver, but they quickly hit a roadblock. Baker would require a temporary visa to visit Lisbon, and the Portuguese government was inundated with visa applications from refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. Crafty as a veteran counterintelligence officer, Baker devised a workaround. Abandoning the idea of engagements in Portugal, she instead proposed a tour of Brazil. To reach that country, she would have to catch a liner leaving Lisbon, the main point of departure for South American destinations. If they adopted this plan, she would still have a plausible reason for stopping in Lisbon. Because they would only be passing through Portugal rather than “touring” there, they could apply for a travel visa through the Brazilian government, a far quicker process. Baker just so happened to have high-level contacts at the Brazilian embassy as well as the kind of star-power that inspired the most sluggish of bureaucrats to work at warp speed. “I know the Brazilian ambassador very well,” she informed Abtey, “I’ll tell him I’m planning a tour of his country. He’ll be delighted. Once we have the Brazilian visas, the rest will take care of itself.” Baker, it turned out, was right; she had her transit permit in no time.

Baker’s supposed Brazilian sojourn in turn provided a cover for Abtey.

When an entertainer of her stature went on the road, she invariably traveled with a whole lot of luggage, plus a team of assistants who could help with pragmatics—booking hotels, coordinating transport to and from concert venues, handling the money, and so on and so forth. Abtey would pose as Baker’s tour manager. To that end, he assumed a new identity, the third he had adopted since meeting Agent Baker. Paillole secured him yet another passport, this one bearing the name of M. Jacques François Hébert, an erstwhile ballet master from Marseilles. Abtey would have to age himself by eight years to play the role—his fake passport gave his date of birth as September 16, 1899. This was no caprice on Paillole’s part.

The Vichy regime had implemented new restrictions prohibiting men young enough to serve in the military from crossing the border. The government introduced these measures to prevent opponents of the Nazis from enlisting in Allied Forces abroad. Crafting a disguise for Monsieur Hëbert, Abtey procured a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles and grew a prodigious moustache, the kind you might see the “average cretin” wearing on the street, Abtey wrote later. Not sure what his beef is with moustaches, but okay. To round out the illusion, the words “Accompanying Miss Baker” were stamped on the passport.

With the plan taking shape, Abtey transcribed the most sensitive intelligence with invisible ink. Both the Allies and the Axis were exploring how best to produce and use this covert means of communication, and some of their ideas were pretty creative. For example, the Abwehr (Germany’s military intelligence service) had pursued the possibility of inking secret messages on women’s undergarments. The thinking was: what self-respecting soldier or official would stoop so low as to search a woman’s underwear for secret messages? They say truth is the first casualty of war, but the Nazis seemed to think chivalry would stick around. The British had reached even further in their search for the ideal invisible ink and were especially intrigued by one that came from a “natural source of supply.”

On second thought, they hadn’t reached much farther than their belt buckles since what they were talking about was human testicles. Yep, at one time, British intelligence agents thought of semen as a promising form of invisible ink because it defied conventional means of detection. In the end, this source of supply proved limited. According to one report, efforts to fill reserves of this all-natural ink made life “intolerable” for those involved because it resulted in “excessive masturbation.”

And now for the pièce-de-résistance, the stroke of genius that makes this story as perfect as could be for this particular podcast. It's unclear what kind of invisible ink Abtey used for the Lisbon job, but we know that he used it to copy top-secret intelligence on musical scores for maybe Baker’s most famous anthem, “J’ai Deux Amours.” The title translates to “I Have Two Loves,” and Baker’s two loves are the United States and Paris, the first being the country of her birth and the second the city of her rebirth as a star. As she sings in the chorus, “I have two loves / My country and Paris / Always through them / My heart is thrilled.” She first crooned these lyrics at the Casino de Paris, in the wake of her disastrous Austrian tour. The audience went wild, and she would perform the barn-burner countless times throughout the rest of her career. With these preparations made, Baker was well on her way to Lisbon.

A Light in the Night

It was the middle of the night when Abtey awoke, alone in his bed at Château des Milandes, to the sound of a crash. It had come from outside, possibly the garden. Adrenaline coursed through him as he peered out his window and surveyed the grounds below. He could see no movement, no footprints, no signs of an intruder, nothing. But then his eye fell on the shuttered window of a chamber at the center of the château, a private room where Baker kept a safe. He could barely make it out from where he lay, but a faint light was flickering inside the safe-room. Had the noise come from there? Who would be up and about at this hour? Was somebody trying to break into the safe?

Determined to find out, Abtey climbed out of bed as quietly as he could and stole out of his room in nothing but his nightclothes. He tiptoed to the sleeping quarters of Emanuel Bayonne, a fellow fighter in the shadow war against the Nazis. Inside, Abtey roused Bayonne with a pinch on the nose.

“Huh?” Bayonne asked, half-asleep. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

“Shhh . . .” Abtey told him. “Bring your weapons.”

Now both armed, Abtey and Bayonne crept to the safe room, barefoot. Abtey recalled later that “nothing disturbed the darkness or silence” as they neared the door to the chamber. They could neither see nor hear evidence of forced entry.

For a moment, Abtey questioned whether he had imagined the whole thing—the commotion outside, the lamplight in the saferoom. But then, he shook his head and whispered to Bayonne, “I tell you I saw a light. Someone is trying to break into Josephine’s safe. We must wake her up.”

The pair backtracked and slipped into the châteaulaine’s bedchamber, shook her awake, and brought her up to speed. Rubbing her eyes, she leapt out of bed and looked out a window that afforded a view of the saferoom. Abtey most certainly had not hallucinated this light—she saw it, too.

“Oh! Oh! Look! Look!” she gasped.

The three resolved to investigate. Baker grabbed a candelabra and led them, single-file and in absolute silence. Outside the door, Abtey took the knob in one hand, clasping a grenade in the other. Inhaling deeply, Abtey threw open the door, ready to roll the explosive into the chamber if he saw the slightest hint of danger. Much to his relief, the hail of gunfire he half-expected never came. The room was still, cloaked in darkness. The lamp that both he and Josephine had seen was nowhere in sight.

Abtey hit the lights, his eyes immediately locating the safe. By all appearances, it was untouched. Now confused as much as they were concerned, the trio searched every inch of the room, checking beneath the bed and even inside the wardrobe. Not for the first time that night, Abtery second-guessed himself, entertaining the possibility that they had witnessed a ghost. Then, as if to reassure him of his sanity, a lamp on a nightstand in one corner of the room flickered on by itself. One of the three investigators wiggled the wire that connected it with the wall, causing it to go out. The realization came over them almost as quickly as the light had gone out: this midnight scare was the result of nothing but finnicky wiring.

Baker giggled, and soon the two men were chuckling, too. “You’ll wake everyone up,” she shushed them with a glint in her eye.

“What about the noise that woke me?” Abtey asked, suddenly more serious. He would swear on his mother’s soul that he heard it. They headed outside, scouring the garden for anything suspicious. Before long, they came upon a large flowerpot, fallen to the ground and shattered to pieces. What—or who—could have broken it? An animal? Was this what had woken Abtey? The disquieting truth was they would never know, and as they trudged back inside and up to bed, they did so with a renewed sense of urgency. The sooner they could set out for Portugal, the better.

The Path to Portugal

Not long after the late-night disturbance, Baker and Abtey finished getting ready for the Lisbon job, bidding farewell to Paillole. “You look good together,” the spymaster opined while sizing up the two agents. He put his arms around Abtey and gave him a long embrace before bending to kiss one of Baker’s hands. “Bon voyage,” he called to them as they turned to leave, struggling to suppress the emotion in his voice. There was a lot riding on this mission, and if it went south, Baker and Abtey would die a cruel death at the hands of the Nazis. “She had undertaken, of her own volition, to cover me to the very end,” Abtey remarked, “closing the door behind her and binding her fate to mine. I call that courage.”

Later, the twosome boarded a train that would depart from Pau in the southwest of France before chugging through the Pyrenees and across the border into Spain.

To make it all the way to Portugal, the spies would first have to pass through Canfranc, a mountain outpost in the extreme east of Spain. All trains stopped there, regardless of where their riders were destined, because Spain and France used railway gauges of differing sizes. Out of necessity, passengers disembarked and switched to a locomotive with the appropriate design before continuing on to their final destination. Yet Canfranc was also a closely-watched checkpoint, manned by Spanish and French officials and monitored by undercover German operatives. Even a minor misstep could trigger a search of their belongings, with cataclysmic consequences for their mission. Discretion was paramount.

When Baker and Abtey’s train reached Canfranc, the megastar descended onto the platform, resplendent in her furs, dazzling in the bright, Mediterranean sun. While a team of railroad employees unloaded her baggage, which concealed sheet music inscribed with classified information, Baker smiled and waved at a crowd of star-struck train passengers and officials, not to mention one or two plain-clothes German operatives. She breezed through security without a second glance from the guards, and nobody paid much attention to her manager, Monsieur Hébert, who shadowed his boss and kept his head down. At one point, Baker leaned over and whispered, “You see what a good cover I am?”

Soon, she and Abtey had settled into a cabin on an overnight express that would cut southward from Canfranc toward the Spanish capital, Madrid, some 300 miles away. Baker and Abtey kept to themselves, napping every now and again, careful to avoid any unwanted attention. In Madrid, they made inquiries about the Rapido, the high-speed railway linking the Spanish and Portuguese capitals. To their dismay, tickets were sold out for the next few days. Looking for another way to Lisbon, they popped over to Iberia Airways, an airline with direct flights to the Portuguese capital. As luck would have it, a couple of flyers had just cancelled tickets for a plane that afternoon. The only catch was that takeoff was just two hours away. The secret agents weighed their options. There would be checks between here and Lisbon no matter how they made the journey, Abtey reasoned, but it seemed probable that there would be fewer if they traveled by air as opposed to by rail. They bought the tickets, piled into a taxi, and booked it to the airport.

It was not until the cab came to a stop at the airfield that Baker and Abtey began to have second thoughts about the decision. They counted a dozen Nazi jets, instantly recognizable by the swastikas that adorned them. “The Spanish airfield could just as easily have been a German base,” Abtey cracked later. Seemingly unfazed, Baker strutted into the nearby building for check-in with “the casualness of a star among her girls.” Yet she could only make it so far before three men in dark caps blocked her path. These guards were nowhere near as impressed as their Canfranc counterparts. The two presented their passports, and the Germans eyed them with care, repeatedly checking their names against an assortment of lists. The Nazis reviewed their travel documents over and over again, causing a fear to creep over Abtey. Was their cover blown? Had they identified his passport as a fake? After what felt like an eternity, the Germans looked up, smiled, and waved them through. A short while later, they took a set of stairs into the plane, claimed their seats, and watched the propellors start to spin out the window. The aircraft, a DC3, turned onto the runaway, accelerating as its wheels left the ground. Almost as soon as they were airborne, however, a fighter jet flew alongside the fuselage. Baker regarded it with curiosity and concern. Was it a friend or a foe? Finally, the jet picked up speed and angled away from the larger aircraft, vanishing into the horizon. Abtey heaved a sigh of relief, gazing down upon a “lunar landscape” as the plane flew southwest. Within a few minutes, Baker had fallen asleep at his side, dead-tired after several days of life-or-death subterfuge.

Once they had safely landed in Lisbon, Baker and Abtey split up, with the entertainer reserving a room at the ritzy Aviz hotel while Abtey unpacked a short walk away at the more budget option of the Hotel Avenida. Baker’s sudden appearance in Lisbon did not go unnoticed by the press. A gaggle of reporters peppered her with questions in the Aviz lobby. What had brought her to Lisbon? How long was she in town? “I come to dance, to sing,” she answered. “I am stopping in Lisbon, but going to Rio, where I have further engagements.” She might have liked to leave it at that, but the newspapermen would not let her go without a comment on the Nazis. “Yes, I have sung for the soldiers at the front. [Here, she was referring to her turn in Paris-London.] Yes, I saw many sad things. No, I have not returned to Paris since the defeat. No, I don’t like the Germans.” At first, Baker and Abtey dreaded the sight of her picture splashed across Portuguese newspapers—it would only attract attention when what they most wanted was to keep a low profile. Yet soon they realized that the publicity reinforced their cover, broadcasting news of her Brazilian engagements.

The next step in the plan was to establish contact with the British embassy, the all-important portal to the British Secret Intelligence Services. Baker would lie low for this stage of the operation while Abtey delivered the intelligence. He certainly needed to watch his back. The streets and hostelries of Lisbon were crawling with Allied and Axis spies alike. In fact, intelligence men of the same nation tended to cluster in a preferred hotel. For instance, British operatives flocked to the Hotel Inglantera while Germans frequented the Hotel Atlantico. Still, spies from enemy territories invariably bumped into each other—and even wound up at adjacent tables during breakfast. According to historian Neil Lochery, “It was a classic case of watching you, watching us.”

We have scant information about what happened when Abtey handed over something like forty documents to a Major Bacon at the British embassy. That said, we do know it reached London quickly. Four days after the handoff, when Abtey was notified that a telegram had arrived for him at the British embassy, he practically ran there to pick it up. “I went there alone,” he recalled, “for under no circumstances were Josephine’s contacts with the British to be spotted by the Axis . . .” London was “delighted” by the coup that Baker and Abtey had executed. “You are much loved in London,” Major Bacon congratulated him. “Tell your friends at the Deuxiènne Bureau we are thrilled with your offer” to establish an information pipeline between the SIS and the French. Baker and Abtey had accomplished their mission.

Abtey and Baker had quite a few adventures together after the Lisbon job, and they also became lovers, as often happens when sexy spies risk their lives together. If you want to know more, check out Agent Josephine by Damien Lewis. After the Allies vanquished the Axis, Baker received the National Order of the Legion of Honor, the single most prestigious order of merit you could earn in France. The accompanying citation highlighted not only her cool-headed encounter with the Nazi colonel at Château des Milandes but also her daring mission to Portugal.

It’s a shame we don’t know more about how Baker viewed her stint as a spy. Though she gave countless press interviews about her experiences ranging from her early childhood to her late career and also published her memoirs, she tended to stay tight-lipped about her wartime heroics. Most of what we do have comes from the post-war writing of her handler, Jacques Abtey, and a handful of other intelligence officials.

What is clear, though, is that love of her adopted country is what motivated Baker to hazard life and limb. She will not be the last spy we talk about this season to engage in espionage for this reason.

Next episode, we’re joined by author Michelle Young to talk about another female spy of World War II. Unlike Baker, this one stayed behind in Paris to spy on the Nazis.