Josephine Baker: the superstar turned spy who fought the Nazis and for civil rights

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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/apr/06/josephine-baker-the-superstar-turned-spy-who-fought-the-nazis-and-for-civil-rights

Josephine Baker: the superstar turned spy who fought the Nazis and for civil rights

Book highlights performer’s wartime contribution and how she used her fame to provide cover and promote equal rights

Jon Henley Europe correspondent
Sun 6 Apr 2025 09.00 EDT

She was, according to US wartime counter-intelligence officer Lt Paul Jensen, “our No 1 contact in French Morocco”, supporting the allied mission “at great risk to her own life – and I mean that literally. We would have been quite helpless without her.”

The British intelligence agent Donald Darling had her down as an especially “cherished agent of [Charles] de Gaulle’s government”. Well aware of her importance, the UK foreign intelligence service MI6 called her “the pet lady agent” of the Free French.

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The picture that emerges, Diamond said, is of “an incredibly able, shrewd, committed” Black woman who “saw very clearly that she could exploit her celebrity for a cause and, often with very great courage, then just went ahead and did so”.

During the war, Baker mobilised her talent as a performer, on and off stage, for Free France. After it, she applied what she had learned, effectively harnessing her celebrity to protest against the racial segregation policies of her native country.

“Knowing more about her wartime experiences helps us see how she herself came to understand what she could achieve,” Diamond said. “It was the war – the intelligence work and the performing – that made her aware of her power.”

Josephine Baker’s Secret War: the African American Star Who Fought For France And Freedom is published by Yale University Press