Agent Josephine, page 8
Thanks to wiretaps planted by Cazin d’Honincthun – the same individual who had alerted Abtey to the spy known as ‘Georgette’ – the fiendish espionage games being orchestrated out of Japan’s Paris Embassy had been partially exposed. In 1938, a prominent Paris figure had been persuaded to provide blueprints of a new French fighter aircraft to a Japanese contact. At the last minute Paillole’s team had been able to intercept those classified documents, so preventing a rerun of the Aubert affair, only this time betraying the secrets of the French Air Force. The man carrying those blueprints was stopped by Paillole’s agents, even as he was about to board a train at Gare de Lyon station.
Invited into a side room, he protested that he had diplomatic immunity, but Paillole’s men demanded that he open his case regardless. Diplomatic immunity was all fine and dandy, but not for stealing state secrets and especially ones such as these. The Japanese diplomat and his purloined blueprints were hustled into custody. The man who had leaked this priceless intelligence turned out to be none other than the boss of one of France’s foremost aviation industries. The case was so serious it was raised with the French prime minister. Even so, when Renzo Sawada duly extended his apologies, the French Government agreed to forget the unfortunate matter. Worse still, the French industrialist – the traitor – was allowed to walk free. The entire affair was hushed up, to Paillole and Abtey’s disgust and despair.15
But stealing French state secrets didn’t amount to an alliance with Germany. Japan’s seeking military advantage by any means didn’t constitute a pact with Nazism. Hence Josephine being tasked to find out the true intentions of those based at the Paris embassy, and of the wider Japanese nation. Working her high-level contacts, she soon winkled out the truth. Japan’s leaders had no intentions of maintaining a coalition with the Allies, as they had during the First World War, when Japanese forces had played a key role in containing the German Imperial Navy in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. In 1936, Japan’s prime minister, Koki Hirota, had signed an ‘anti-communist’ pact with Hitler, much of which remained cloaked in secrecy. It was a thinly veiled first step to a formal alliance and as Josephine discovered, Tokyo was determined to march firmly in step with Berlin.
She reported her findings to Abtey, who immediately passed her warnings up the chain of command. When intelligence was shared with political taskmasters, invariably the source was treated as sacrosanct. It was often graded as to quality and reliability. With British intelligence, the very lowest quality was from a ‘New and Untried’ source. More proven sources were graded from ‘C.3’ through to ‘B.0’, with the very highest reliability occasionally straying into the ‘A’ range.16 Material gathered directly by agents of an intelligence service – including HCs – generally fell into the higher-grade category.
In London, the War Cabinet gathered. It was 13 November 1939, and Neville Chamberlain was still prime minister, Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, and Sir Dudley Pound was Admiral of the Fleet. As they studied the shifting patchwork of global alliances, things seemed to be growing ever darker for the Allies. The Dutch royal family was seeking sanctuary in Great Britain, should Germany invade Holland. Of far more concern was the rising power of Japan and her hostility to Britain and the USA. ‘If Japan began to expand outside the China sea zone [sic],’ the War Cabinet noted, Britain and the USA would need to mount ‘a powerful movement to stop her’.17
Two weeks later, the War Cabinet met to discuss Russia’s invasion of Finland, a hugely worrying development. If Russian aggression expanded still further, the British Government ‘might be forced to declare war upon her…’18 And if Japan struck a treaty with Russia, just as Germany had done, it would cement the Axis still further.19 In due course, the War Cabinet circulated a memo, marked ‘SECRET: TO BE KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY’, and headlined ‘COMPARISON OF THE BRITISH AND JAPANESE FLEETS’. Its preparation had been overseen by Winston Churchill, and in it he suggested a high-stakes gamble to free up British naval power, in an effort to counter the growing threat of Japan, leaving the French fleet to safeguard ‘Home Waters’.
By now Japan’s true allegiances were crystal clear. The lines were drawn.
Josephine’s intelligence had proven most useful, but in Paris she was far from done. Empowered via her HC role, fired up by Hitler’s meteoric ascendency, Mussolini’s perfidy and Japan’s growing hostility, she was busy like a whirlwind. Hobnobbing at the Portuguese embassy in Paris, she learned of Berlin’s plans to occupy that neutral nation. Its ports would serve as prime U-boat bases, from which to paralyse shipping across the length and breadth of the Atlantic, placing a stranglehold on Great Britain and ultimately on the USA.20 Working her high-level contacts without let-up, she tracked Abwehr agents across the length and breadth of the City of Light.
Despite their lack of proper funding and staff, Abtey and Paillole were aware that their recruitment of the Honourable Correspondents was paying dividends. The Deuxième Bureau had upped their arrest rate ten-fold – from a paltry few dozen enemy agents in 1935 to over six hundred in 1939–40.21 But still it proved a zero sum game. The more adversaries they took off the streets, the more the Abwehr recruited and the more they pumped in. They had money to burn, and the financial rewards on offer were generous indeed. For everyone involved, the work of tracking, tracing and breaking those enemy agents proved relentless and fraught.
The citation for one of Josephine’s war decorations would state of her work at this time: ‘Provided valuable information, notably on the possibility of Italy’s entry into the War, on Japanese policy and on certain German agents in Paris.’22 Echoing such sentiments, French General Pierre Billotte, a notable war hero, would write that Josephine was ‘an ardent patriot’, who put her ‘great talent’ at the service of the Allies. ‘She has, moreover, with exceptional intelligence, used her very numerous international relations to send highly valuable information to qualified organisations for National Defence.’23
For such a recent recruit this was praise indeed. But there was one slight impediment to Josephine Baker’s and Jacques Abtey’s burgeoning espionage partnership. They were fast falling in love. It was perhaps not the ideal relationship for a spymaster to forge with his newest recruit – especially as both of them were still married.
In April 1928, when he was twenty-two years old, Abtey had tied the knot with Emma Kuntz, at Bourbach-le-Haut, a village lying on France’s north-eastern border with Germany.24 They had the one son, Jean Louis, born a year into their marriage. But when war was declared Abtey had sent his family to the countryside, on the strong advice of his superiors at the Deuxième Bureau. ‘My duty, I was told, was to get my wife and child away from the capital, without delay.’25 Paris was vulnerable to bombing by the Luftwaffe, hence such precautions.
But that had left Abtey distanced from his wife of ten years, even as he grew close to his newest recruit. As for Josephine, her marriage to Jean Lion had almost never stood a chance. When Lion had first announced the engagement, his Jewish parents had practically had a heart attack, but over time they had warmed to their singular daughter-in-law. In many ways the newlyweds had seemed the perfect match. Theirs had been a whirlwind romance – a coup de foudre, as the French call it. Lion had taught her to fly, and it was during one of those lessons high in the air that he had proposed. It had been a fairy-tale romance and they had been the toast of Paris.
The chief problem had lain in their competing – some would argue towering – ambitions, his mostly in business and politics, hers in showbiz. Neither had seemed willing to play second fiddle to the other, and over time they had drifted apart. That was the first nail hammered into the coffin of their relationship. The second was when Josephine had become pregnant – she had long dreamed of having a child – but had sadly miscarried. The final nail was when she had discovered that her husband was having an affair.
Feeling hurt – wounded deep in her soul – she had left Paris for the French countryside, ending up in the captivating Dordogne region. There she had stumbled upon a stunning if rundown fourteenth-century edifice, one steeped in history and legend – the Château des Milandes. As luck would have it the place was up for rent. Le Beau Chêne had been her Paris home with Jean Lion, and she felt temporarily alienated from the place. Spontaneous as ever, she decided to rent Milandes. It was a decision that would have deep ramifications for her fortunes throughout the war years and beyond.26
On some levels Josephine was famously needy; she craved love. But at the same time she was fiercely independent and determined to rely on no man; to trust no one but herself. She used to say that her closeness to animals was driven by similar sentiments; far less complex than humans, they were so much more ready to offer unconditional love.27 She had always had a special connection to the animal kingdom. As a young child she had been kicked out of the family home for filling the bedroom she shared with her three siblings with hordes of pets.
Sent to work at the age of eight as a maid in the home of affluent white folks, the lady of the house, Mrs Kaiser, proved cruel. Beaten on a whim, Josephine was made to sleep in the cellar with the dog. She took to sharing her food with him and he became her confidant. She nicknamed her canine companion ‘Three Legs’ for he had been injured in a car accident. Her other friend was a white rooster who lived in a cage in the house. She named him ‘Tiny Tim’ and fed him devotedly. His small round eyes seemed full of love for Josephine, though they struck her as having a faintly mocking air too.28
One day Mrs Kaiser weighed Tiny Tim and declared the time had come for him to die. Josephine must kill him. Mrs Kaiser threatened to stop her pay unless she ended the life of her feathered friend, and there were her younger siblings at home to look out for. Numbed with shock, she forced herself to grip the rooster between her knees and cut at his neck with some scissors, as she held back her tears and begged his forgiveness and his hot blood drained into a bowl.29
That had proved the final straw with Mrs Kaiser. Josephine ran away, yet even then she could still feel Tiny Tim’s life and horrible death weighing heavy on her soul.30 A decade or so later she’d chosen to turn her Paris theatre dressing rooms into a veritable zoo, just as she had with her childhood bedroom. Snakes, a piglet, parrots and parakeets slithered, oinked and squawked at every turn, until her fellow performers complained of the unbearable stench. Despite their wayward toilet habits, Josephine’s love for her animals remained undimmed. When filming one of her movies, she was directed to stroll along arm-in-arm with a sailor, only to pause to admire a flock of caged songbirds. Heedless of the director’s instructions, she had unlatched the cage to let them fly free. It seemed to Josephine that if she were made to repeat the scene several times over, so many wild animals would earn their freedom at her hand.31
In the aftermath of losing her baby and then her marriage to Jean Lion, Josephine was hurting and she was hungry for love. By coincidence, Jacques Abtey looked remarkably similar to her husband – athletic, blond and with a vibrancy and energy – plus he was about the same age. With several marriages and love affairs behind her, Josephine hated to be alone, without closeness and affection. She found it preferable to ‘live without food than deprived of love’. Life was ‘richer, surer, deeper’ with a partner to share it with, she would write, ‘a trusting heart’.32 Her attraction to Abtey, fuelled as it was by the heightened tensions and emotions of war, proved irresistible.
She commissioned a special present for him, from the luxury jewellers Cartier (the same as Dunderdale favoured). It was a military-style ID bracelet hand-crafted in silver, with his name inscribed upon it. Misspelled, as it happened, but as Abtey was using the cover name ‘Fox’ that was hardly surprising. On the inside was engraved the acronym ‘PFQA’. Plus fort que l’amour. What exactly was ‘stronger than love’ remained open to interpretation. Their relationship? The coming struggle? The cause?
Abtey had laughed good-naturedly upon receiving the gift, declaring, ‘You cannot expect me to wear that with my name upon it. I’m a spy!’33
Regardless, the die was cast. Even as the spying game grew deadly serious, the handler and his special agent became lovers. Theirs would prove an intense and tumultuous affair, but one with a special magic all of its own. Whether it was professionally healthy and conducive to getting results remained to be seen. As Abtey himself would say, ‘Espionage is such an ugly thing, it should only be entrusted to gentlemen.’34 Was this love affair gentlemanly behaviour? Or would it fatally compromise their clandestine activities?
One thing was for sure, Josephine Baker was tough and resolute: it would take a great deal to stop her.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Most Sensational Woman
When Josephine Freda McDonald – to use her full name at birth – was still just an infant her mother, Carrie, had split from Eddie Carson, a man who was both her on-stage and her life partner before then, and very possibly Josephine’s father, too. With Carrie – tall, elegant, striking looking – working in a struggling song-and-dance act, interspersed with waitressing and cleaning jobs, and with Josephine and her younger brother to feed, the family were forever moving home, and often getting evicted due to unpaid rent.
Since anyone could remember, ‘Tumpy’ was the young Josephine’s informal name. She had been nicknamed ‘Humpty Dumpty’ due to her being a decidedly chubby baby, which had been shortened to ‘Tumpy’. Somewhat on the rebound after the Eddie Carson split, Carrie had married Arthur Martin, a powerfully built black man who worked as a labourer. Arthur had adopted Tumpy, and her younger brother Richard. The family lived in the poorest part of St Louis. It was little better than a disease-riddled slum, tenements crammed between stinking factories churning out shoes, carpets, coffins and carts, plus one of the few products that St Louis was then famous for – ‘German’ beer.1 Their quarters became even more crowded when Carrie gave birth to two more children, Josephine’s younger sisters Margaret and Willie Mae. Willie Mae was a lot like Josephine – feisty, quick to talk and to learn – and they became close.
St Louis was a city founded by immigrants – waves of Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks and Syrians were intermingled with former slaves, those freed from the Southern states of the USA. It was a natural melting pot, awash with a mix of cultures, languages, music and dance. Despite the poverty, it had a vitality, energy and drive, but the family’s shiftless, rootless existence left an indelible impression on Josephine. The four children had to share the one mattress on the floor of their parents’ bedroom. During the coldest months her adoptive father would trudge off to work with old newspapers tied around his shoes. At five in the morning, Josephine and Richard would race down to the nearby market to collect any vegetables or fruit that might have tumbled from the stalls.
For Richard, Tumpy was a fantastic big sister. Ringing on rich folks’ doorbells and offering to sweep their steps, she didn’t exactly make a lot of money, but what little she did she’d share with the family. As the oldest child, Josephine was responsible for their welfare, too. After the deprivation of her childhood, it was not surprising that she cherished the comfort and security of her French home, which would take on a totemic significance for her. However fragile, it was a fortress in an often hostile world. With war coming to Europe, the Nazis threatened to take away the country and the city that she had come to love; France and Paris, her home. The onslaught from Berlin would need to be resisted with every essence of her spirit and her soul.
Born and brought up on the harsh but vibrant streets of St Louis, Josephine had learned to weather the hard knocks of life. From her earliest years, she’d hungered to sing and to dance. When she was aged seven a small music hall, The Booker T Washington, had opened near her home. Every week it ran a different-themed act – cowboys, Egyptians, Africans and the like. Inspired by the shows, Robert McDuffy, an older brother to one of Josephine’s friends, decided to open his own theatre. He fitted out the family basement with old fruit cases for seats, candles for lighting and a curtain cobbled together from cast-offs. He had two chorus girls – one, his sister Joyce, and the other, her best friend Josephine.
They called the theatre ‘McDuffy’s Pin And Penny Poppy Shows’. It cost a penny to enter and was for the neighbourhood kids. Soon, Josephine was running her own version in the family basement, making a ‘dramatic’ entry down the cellar steps. Then, in 1916, when she was aged ten, a travelling medicine man drove his rainbow-coloured wagon into her part of town. Such amateur ‘doctors’ were a common enough occurrence in impoverished communities, where proper medicines were beyond the reach of most. A white guy sporting a smart grey beard, a Stetson and a waistcoat groaning with ‘medals’, the medicine man tried to adopt the air of a wealthy Southern gentleman. For Josephine his arrival was extra-special, for he carried with him a mobile theatre of sorts.
The street theatre was a cheap and easy way to attract customers to his ‘medicines’. Setting it up at dusk, with the scene lit by kerosene lanterns, he invited any would-be stars to perform. Josephine sat in the audience entranced, as the medicine man announced the highlight of the evening – a dance competition. A makeshift band began to play, and before she knew it Josephine was up on the stage, throwing her arms and legs about just as the rhythm dictated. The audience roared and clapped with delight. When she was done, the ‘gentleman’ gave her a celebratory pat on the head and presented her with the winner’s prize – a dollar bill. Josephine raced home and presented it proudly to her mother.
In that instant she realised something of huge significance: by dancing, she could possibly earn a living. It sure beat sweeping steps or stealing coal. When she was fourteen Josephine joined a travelling song-and-dance troupe and left St Louis on tour. A natural and a gifted performer – many of her routines were inspired by the moves of her pets – she adored being on stage. But being on the road at such a young age proved unsettling and bewildering. She felt like an orphan. In time she realised that getting a part on Broadway was the only way to break through, and she managed to blag an audition as a chorus girl for the hit New York show Shuffle Along. But while those running the show loved her moves, they figured she was far too thin and small to be a chorus girl.
