True Spies Debriefs: Prof. Hanna Diamond on Josephine Baker
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Free delivery on a fine purchases of $396 or more. Offer valid April 3rd through April 23rd. U.S. only. See store online for details. Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to True Spies, The Debrief. When she went to work as a spy for the French Secret Service, Josephine Baker was one of the most famous celebrities on the international stage.

But even now, her contributions to the French resistance are underappreciated and little known. So says Hannah Diamond, professor of French history at Cardiff University and author of the new book, Josephine Baker's Secret War, the African-American star who fought for France and freedom. Hannah spoke with True Spies producer Morgan Childs about Baker's complex role in French history and her untold legacy.

Did you enjoy reading the book? I did, and I was thinking what fun you must have had researching it and writing it. I did, I did. It was, I mean, obviously I'm totally in love with her, but one has to be a little bit dispassionate. And I think some of the things we'll be talking about is how we deal with her emotionally.

because there are so many stories, aren't there, about her. You feel like existing work is not quite as dispassionate as it should have been, perhaps. Yeah, I think, as is the case with many memoirs, what I set out to do was to try and really cross-check that with as many other sources as I could find. And sometimes I could, and sometimes I couldn't. So how did you come to this subject matter?

Actually, I was commissioned to write something. They came to me and commissioned me to do some research about Josephine Baker during the war, to write a long form essay, which was the first thing I wrote, an 8,000 word essay about

kind of telling the story of her life during the war. And this was in about 2017, 18 time. And they used it as the basis for a film script that has never seen the light of day, actually. But while I was doing the research for that project and writing it up,

I became amazed, A, by the story that I'd known nothing about Josephine Baker, and B, the fact that it had never had any scholarly treatment. That, you know, there are books about the importance of her trajectory coming to France in 1925, the way in which she took to the stage, the way in which

she was received and the whole notion of the colonial unconscious around the huge success that she had and her exotic dancing. And there is also a very big attention paid to the way in which she was able to transition from essentially being an exotic dancer to a serious music hall star and film star. Yeah.

And then there's a kind of gap in her life story and we jump to the post-war period and the extraordinary story of her adopting the Rainbow Tribe of Children and her involvement in the civil rights movement and the way in which she became so important to the African-American community in America. And that sort of

of her wartime existence has been really overshadowed by those other two very powerful moments of her life. And I think reputationally, the French knew about her pre-war life and the Americans knew more about her post-war life. Yes. So that when Macron...

In 2021, chose her for what they call in France pantheonization, this great national honor of transferring her ashes to the pantheon.

A lot of the rationale he gave for this choice was the fact that she'd been involved in wartime actions on behalf of the French, helping the Allies as a spy in the French secret services, which was a huge discovery for the French at the time.

And I think also for some many Americans. So, yeah, I was very struck by the way in which this story hasn't really penetrated to the public entirely, I think. And of course, in the UK, we don't know her very well at all.

Right. I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is that she was this important chapter of her life was sort of overlooked for the same reasons that she was sort of overlooked as a spy. Is that fair? I think in many ways, possibly. I think, yes. I think

I think part of it is also down, I mean, she was recognised in the post-war period. She got medals. She was given the Resistance Medal in 1946, although the Légion d'Honneur, which she very much wanted to have for military acts, for her spy work, because she saw herself very much as a soldier, was

was quite a long time coming. And I think part of the reason for this was some of the work she did during this period was quite murky in terms of the affiliations that she had through Abte. But she herself did not talk a great deal about her spying activities. She was quite silent about it and actually...

I've done quite a lot of work on the Second World War, women in the resistance. My PhD thesis back in the day was about women who became involved in the French resistance. And when I was doing this research, I was lucky enough to meet a lot of women.

who would all say to me, oh, but I did nothing out of the ordinary. You know, everything I did was completely normal. When in fact, of course, it wasn't at all. And we do hear Josephine Baker saying very similar things like that on television in later life. I just did what had to be done. You know, I helped where I could, but, you know, others were much braver than I was. And this...

This process of sort of talking oneself out of the picture somehow is something that I've seen women do a lot about this wartime period. So to that degree, I think she was overlooked. I also think the fact that she was black, that she was African-American, probably contributed that in terms of resistance, right?

Recognising women's role in the resistance has come late, came in the 80s and 90s.

And the contribution of women from different ethnic backgrounds has been even later than that, you know. So I think that is also another reason why certainly the historiography and the way in which this has been communicated to publics has been very slow to come. I think we should back up a little bit for the listener who hasn't just finished reading this amazing story that you've put

put to paper. I think we should talk maybe a little bit about how this very talented woman from St. Louis, Missouri ended up in France in the first place. And I'm especially curious because, of course, France at the time was still very much an imperialist power.

Was France at the time really so liberal compared to the US? Well, the US was, there was segregation in the US. And one of the things that when Josephine Baker came to Paris in 1925 as part of a

to do a show, she was selected to be part of a performance, a music hall performance of what they called at the time Black Bottom and dance. What really struck her as soon as she arrived in Paris was that she was being treated like everyone else. The porters in the stations would come and ask her if they could help her with her luggage. And this was something that

She'd never experienced in America. So it really was a huge eye opener for her. And she really, she really never forgot that. I think that is, that was a baseline to her whole experience of living in France, that she was able to achieve everything.

stardom celebrity that would have been completely impossible for her in the United States. And this marked her very deeply. Well, she spoke so passionately about her patriotism, but she also, and of course, she saw herself as somebody who could fight against discrimination around the world. But there were times in which those two motivations sort of came into conflict with one another. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes, I think one of the very interesting things that I have uncovered about Josephine Baker's very real dedication to France, she became French in 1937 when she married Jean Lyon.

And he was actually her third husband. And as part of that ceremony, she was able to take French nationality. And she was very proud of that. And she felt, I think, once the war had broken out, there were at that time in Paris, many other African-Americans, jazz artists,

who had come to France between the wars and who had had success, perhaps not as much success as she had had,

but had benefited from a real interest that there was in interwar France for what we call the Harlem Renaissance, the kind of jazz movement of that period. But when war looked imminent in France in 1939, most of them left.

Even though some, like friends of hers, did hang on till the very last minute, they were very strongly advised by the American embassy to leave, that Nazism had particular risks for African-Americans and the Nazis were very hostile to the decadence that they saw in the jazz movement.

But Josephine Baker, with her French nationality and her sense of belonging, I think, to France at this point, she stayed. She stayed in France and she wanted...

To be a patriot. Very quickly after that, she became brought in to support for de Gaulle. De Gaulle, who was the leader who fled Paris at the moment of the defeat of France and went to London and called on French troops.

well, the French military initially, to join him in an ongoing battle to carry on in the face of the armistice that had been agreed by Marshal Pétain. So yes, during the phony war period from after the declaration of the war, when Baker was very keen to do everything she could to support the war effort,

She was approached by Jacques Apté, who would become her handler, because she was singled out to him as...

who potentially could support him in his work with counterintelligence. I mean, one of the big worries during this period of the Phoney War was the presence of undercover German agents. And the feeling was that Josephine Baker might have something to offer because she was very well networked

And she had access to a number of consulates and diplomatic events and evenings, and that she could prove useful. Yes, and our listeners might remember what happened to Mata Hari, whose story ends in a very different way. Yes, I'm sure. And actually, Abte, when Josephine Baker's name is first suggested him, allegedly, she

He was a little reticent because the French secret services had this history of difficulty with Mata Hari. That said, I did uncover other female celebrities. There's one actress in particular that the French counterintelligence services did send to Germany.

because the Nazi hierarchy really enjoyed mixing with actresses, and they did have other individuals who would report into them. So taking Josephine Baker...

on to do this kind of work was not completely without precedent, I would say, even despite, if you like, the bad press of the rather disastrous experience with Mata Hari during the First World War. I think another really paradoxical position we find is because she was representing the

And de Gaulle was very anxious to keep a handle on the French Empire, to keep a hold of it. He wanted to make sure that France remained an international player on the international stage, which meant...

Really flying in the face of, in the short term, the ambitions, the independence ambitions of the Moroccan and other North African populations, which meant that while Josephine Baker was

keen to fight for freedom. And I also found that she articulated really a good deal of support for what she referred to as her race and hoping that the post-war period would present better opportunities for African-Americans.

We see that paradoxically, in supporting de Gaulle, she's taking a very strong positioning against those who were calling for independence during the Second World War. And in particular, in 1944, in Morocco, she's advising people against their calls for independence.

So we see her caught up in a rather paradoxical landscape in this context. I think it's important to understand that Josephine Baker may not always have known the exact contents of the intelligence that she was transporting. We understand that it was probably in code.

that some of the time it was also the story is that it was written in invisible ink on her scores and that this was a way for her to transport them. But I think it's also important to understand that Abte, Jacques Abte, he did take, I think, some quite serious risks.

and they were sometimes, the actual nature of their affiliations comes through from the sources as having been somewhat murky. Although she was able to help the Allies, I've evoked the way in which she helped the Americans, she also undoubtedly passed on information to the British. Her own status within the French secret services was,

She was working directly for Abte, who in essence, after the defeat, was working for the Deuxième Bureau, which was answerable to Vichy. Now, this puts their position as being somewhat awkward in terms of what comes later. And we can see from the sources that Abte...

was not entirely trusted by any of these organisations. You know, when it came to his need to travel around North Africa, he was suspected by the Vichyite protectorate authorities. There are also intelligence reports which suggest he was a little bit considered to be a little bit of a maverick and his motives were suspected by the Gholist authorities. So he is a figure...

who did have to defend his position in the post-war period when it came to trying to get recognition. He did succeed in getting it for the work he did in 1940 to 41, but there was clearly some doubt about where he was situated. Now, Baker was caught up by necessity because Abte was her handler,

She was following orders. She did what she was told. But she then, I think, was caught up in some of the complexities of the process

positioning of the secret services in this very complex underworld that was the French secret services that I think has not been perhaps fully understood. She did important work for the Allies, but her own positioning through Jacques Abté

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Well, the archives that are held in the French military archives about Josephine Baker are a little bit disappointingly thin, it has to be said. A lot of the medal citations, the...

The files that have survived, which relate the work she did, are a bit thin. And I suspect they're very much based on Abte's own memoirs, his own account of events. And I think his account has uses, but it's also...

kind of difficult historical source because it's a memoir and because he had his own reasons for writing it. But I did...

around and I did find access to others. Particularly useful, I found some oral interviews, oral interviews with other members of the French Secret Service, particularly Paul Payol, who was Abte's immediate superior. I found that his take on the situation gave a

It allowed me to cross-check, if you like, a lot of what Abte had to say in his memoirs and also to look at Abte's...

his own military files, the ways in which he presented in a more formal way the experience of the Second World War. And interestingly, although he does mention Josephine Baker, she's much less present in his own war story than Josephine.

she is in the book. And I think we have to wonder why he hitched his own story so directly to hers. He tells his own war story through writing a memoir, which is essentially about his relationship and involvement with her, which is also something we have to be conscious of, I think. So when I was researching in France, I did find it more difficult to unearth

detailed material about their activities. There is some helpful material, but the nitty gritty of what they did, it may not have been recorded because it's intelligence and it is by its very nature secret. But it did leave me with a hunger to find out more. And I did find going to the American military archives, there I had

lots and lots of volumes of reports, intelligence reports that were being sent in because from spring 1941 into 1942, when the Americans were preparing for the invasion of North Africa, which would be Operation Torch, they sent out a series of operatives. In fact, there were 12 operatives

particularly important operatives who were known as vice-consuls, who were sent out there under the aegis of a trade agreement that had been set up at that time because Roosevelt was keen to try and persuade the Vichyite military to

to be some more supportive of the Allied effort. And he thought by putting together a trade agreement might give him the means to sway them over, away from the Vichyite military, which was supportive really essentially of collaboration with Germany, to bring them over to the Allied cause. And as part of that agreement,

He was able to place these 12 men who were vice consuls in North Africa who were reporting in what they saw and heard about what was going on there. And at this time, Baker and Abte were also themselves in Morocco. They were based between Casablanca and Marrakesh.

And they both became involved in supporting these American agents. They were actually part of the OSS, the kind of nascent organization which would become the CIA ultimately. Now, around this time in the summer of 1941, Josephine Baker actually became really very ill, very dangerously ill.

We're not exactly sure what was wrong with her. She had problems in her abdomen due to, and there were a number of interventions and operations, and she was very close to death. But she did recover. And the story is that throughout this recovery, she was in the clinic. She was visited by these individuals, these operatives, these vice consuls, and they were able to use her room

as a meeting place for exchange of information. Josephine Baker was very well networked with the local Moroccan elites.

who also were able to meet with them and pass on information. There were various individual members of the military who were supportive of the American effort and some resistance groups. So that these meetings were able to use Josephine Baker's illness as a cover, if you like, for those meetings. Yes.

Now, sadly, much as I would like to have done, I read reams and reams and reams of intelligence reports to go back to your question about doing this kind of research. But I did not find any mention of Josephine Baker or Jacques Abte in these reports.

It is possible that because the OSS had a policy of not citing their informers, they would just give these informers like kind of impressions of their reliability, A1, B2. And it is possible that they were there, but they were hidden behind this anonymous way of annotating the information they provided.

But it seems that I did find that members of the organisation, the Deuxième Bureau to which Jacques Apté belonged, did help them and they do acknowledge this. And it may well have been that they had Jacques Apté and Josephine Baker in mind when they mentioned the Deuxième Bureau. I

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I'm reminded hearing you talk that you make a note early in the book about the fact that, you know, for the vast majority of what was recorded about Josephine Baker while she was alive, and certainly while she was working on the part of the resistance movement, was recorded by white men. And I'd love to hear you talk about that and how you think that that influence may have

changed the way that we perceived her until even recently or still now? Yes, I think there is a sense in which Josephine Baker's celebrity...

And the fact that she was African-American meant that she was underestimated. She was not suspected. It added to her cloak of disguise, if you like. And I think particularly the white men. And she was, I mean, it struck me really very keenly when you see pictures of her. This is often after Operation Torch. She was working at that stage much more closely with the go-list men.

government, you see her surrounded by white men.

And it's clear that when she was working in the secret services, she wasn't the only woman working in the French secret services because there were other women who recorded in the archives. But I'm pretty sure she was the only black woman who was there. So I feel that there was perhaps a lack of understanding there.

about what was really going on. And I think she really was able, I think one of the ways in which she became such an effective spy is that she was superb of projecting an image. And this was really part of what was going on, that the men certainly did not think to see her for what she was. She was totally unsuspected.

Talk to me about the fact that she was such a famous fabulist, because I can only imagine from your perspective, trying to write a book about somebody who wrote a lot about herself, but not all of it was true, might have been somewhat tricky for you.

Yes, I didn't. To be completely fair, the memoirs that have been published recently, I didn't actually take them very seriously as a historical source initially. I did come back to them later as a kind of oral source because there are many quotes in it that once I had decided about the veracity of the events, it was quite nice to have her voice, to hear her voice talking about them.

But I think one of the really important things to understand about Josephine Baker is she did project an identity. One of the greatest achievements I think she had was she understood very early on how to appeal to a public, how to fashion a persona. Mm-hmm.

and offer it up to a public readership, which she does in these memoirs very successfully. Sometimes I kind of joke that she was one of the first celebrities. She knew how to cultivate a celebrity culture. She was helped and she...

She knew how to surround herself with people who could help her build this image. But, for example, Henry Varner, who was one of the directors of Music Hall, he gave her this extraordinary cheetah and said,

she would wander down the Champs-Élysées with this cheetah in a diamante collar and really feed this passion that her fan base had for her to be doing all these wonderful and exotic things. So I think this comes back to why she was such a superb and unsuspected spy. Although she was a celebrity,

quite the opposite of the ordinary spy who would hope to pass unnoticed. Her own personality was sort of hidden very deep under those layers of projection that she created. Mm-hmm.

And she was very expert. And I think if you read about, particularly, I read many of the accounts of the soldiers who went to, she did many, many camp tours and she entertained homesick soldiers, homesick American soldiers, loved to go and see her because she was a reminder of home. And for Parisian French soldiers, she was also, they felt very much that she was part of

their country and their identity, she made them feel that she was giving them insight into a very intimate, personal involvement when they went to these concerts, when in reality this was a projection. Dealing with her memoirs is we have to understand that they were

and designed to appeal to her audiences, and she did so very successfully. They're not really historical sources in the way that we can read them as truths on the page. It's a fascinating story, and your enthusiasm for it is just infectious. I'm so happy to get to talk to you, and I'm wishing you the best on the book. Well, you're very sweet. I think it's really important that,

to tell this story because she really is such a fascinating character and there is this bit of the puzzle that's been missing for so long. Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief.

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