Women occupied a complex position in Second World War intelligence operations on all sides. The formal intelligence services — the Deuxième Bureau, the British SOE and MI6, the American OSS — were primarily male institutions, but they relied extensively on women in various roles: as administrators, as couriers, as field agents, and as assets like Baker who gathered information through social access that male agents could not achieve in the same way.
The specific access Baker had was shaped by the intersection of her celebrity with the social norms of the era. A woman of her fame could attend parties at Italian and Japanese embassies in Paris in the late 1930s without anyone wondering why she was there or what she might remember of the conversations. The social invisibility of women — the persistent underestimation of what women in social settings might observe and retain — was part of what made her valuable as an intelligence asset.
Her race added another dimension. The white European and American officials she was gathering information from were operating within a racial framework that placed Black women at a specific remove from political and military power — a framework that made them seem, to those who held that framework, definitionally unlikely to be engaged in serious intelligence work. The racism that had limited Baker’s options in America was, in the specific context of wartime intelligence, an operational advantage. She was underestimated because of her race, and she used that underestimation.
She knew this. Her comment that no one would dare search her — the specific confidence with which she predicted that her celebrity and her person would not be subjected to serious investigation — was not simply about fame. It was about the specific social calculus that produced a situation in which a Black woman carrying classified intelligence documents across European borders in her undergarments was safer than a white male intelligence officer carrying the same documents in a briefcase. The systems of power that had historically worked against her were, in this specific context, working for her mission.