The recruitment of Baker as an “honorable correspondent” reflected this pragmatic adaptation. She was not the kind of person the Deuxième Bureau had traditionally worked with; she was exactly the kind of person the specific intelligence problem required. The embassy circuit in Paris in 1939, where information about Italian and Japanese intentions was available to the right social participant, was not accessible to a French military intelligence officer operating under professional cover. It was accessible to a world-famous entertainer who was invited to those parties as a matter of course.
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## The Deuxième Bureau in Wartime
The fall of France in June 1940 created a catastrophic problem for the Bureau and for the broader French intelligence apparatus. The formal French state had capitulated; the Vichy government was now the official French authority; the Deuxième Bureau, as an institution of the French military, was absorbed into Vichy’s control, which meant that it was at least partially compromised from the perspective of the Free French forces in London.
The intelligence networks that survived the fall of France were the informal ones — the cells and contacts that had been built on personal loyalty rather than institutional affiliation, that could function below the level of institutional identification, and that could pass information to the Free French in London without going through channels that Vichy could monitor or block.
Baker’s position in this landscape was a function of her status as an individual asset rather than a Bureau employee. She was not part of the institutional structure that Vichy had absorbed; she was a personal contact of Abtey’s, operating on the basis of personal loyalty to France and personal relationships with the people she was working with. When she left France in November 1940 — traveling through Spain to Portugal and then to North Africa — she was carrying intelligence through channels that the Vichy apparatus could not easily monitor.