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## The Specific Art of Not Being Searched
The intelligence operation that Josephine Baker conducted across the borders of occupied and neutral Europe in November 1940 was, at its operational core, an application of a principle that she had understood long before she met Jacques Abtey: some people are not searched because the people who might search them cannot imagine what they might be carrying.
This principle operated on multiple levels in Baker’s case.
The celebrity level was the most obvious. World-famous entertainers were treated as spectacles at border crossings — people to be recognized, perhaps to have their travel documents examined with special care in the direction of ensuring that everything was in order for a person of importance, rather than with the searching suspicion reserved for people who might be threats. The attention paid to Baker at border crossings was the attention of people managing an encounter with fame, not the attention of people looking for hidden documents.
The gender level was less obvious but equally operative. The formal infrastructure of border control and customs inspection in 1940 — German-controlled border points, Spanish customs officers, Portuguese immigration officials — was staffed primarily by men. The social norms governing what male officials could do in searching a female traveler were real constraints; a thorough physical search of a woman by a male official required either female personnel or a level of justification that routine suspicion did not provide. Baker’s calculation that “no one would dare search her” reflected this social reality as much as her celebrity status.