In Casablanca, she worked with existing Resistance networks, using her contacts and her celebrity to move through the city’s social environments in ways that gathered information and established relationships. One of the documented functions she performed during this period was using her Resistance contacts to obtain passports for Jewish people who were fleeing Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe — a practical humanitarian operation that required the same kinds of connections and social leverage that her intelligence work required.
The larger strategic context of her Morocco period was the Allied planning for Operation Torch, the November 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa that would eventually drive German and Italian forces from the continent. The intelligence about North African ports, airfields, beaches, local tides, and enemy defenses that was flowing through the networks she was connected to was relevant to the planning of a major military operation. The specific contribution Baker made to the intelligence picture that informed Operation Torch cannot be precisely quantified — intelligence assessments are assembled from many sources, and attributing specific operational decisions to specific pieces of information is rarely possible. What is documented is that she was an active asset in the networks that were providing this intelligence, and that American intelligence officers working in North Africa later assessed her contributions as significant.
Lieutenant Paul Jensen, an American counter-intelligence officer who worked in North Africa during this period, was later quoted as saying that his operation would have been quite helpless without her. The specific context and documentation of this assessment is not independently verified in the sources consulted for this article; it has appeared in multiple secondary accounts and has been attributed to Jensen consistently, but the primary document from which the quote derives has not been independently located.