Abtey himself was in a similarly exposed position: a Bureau officer whose institutional allegiances were with de Gaulle rather than Vichy, operating outside the formal framework of an intelligence service that had been partially captured by the collaborationist government. His travel as Baker’s personal secretary was not a simple cover story; it was a form of genuine concealment, placing him in a social category — the entourage of a celebrity — that did not map onto the professional categories of intelligence work that security services watched.
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## Morocco in Wartime
The Morocco that Baker and Abtey arrived in during January 1941 was a French colonial territory in a complex political position. France’s protectorate over Morocco — established by treaty in 1912 — made it formally French territory, but the fall of the metropolitan French government in 1940 had created a situation in which the colonial administration was nominally under Vichy authority while significant portions of the French military and civilian population in Morocco were either passively or actively resistant to the Vichy agenda.
Casablanca, the principal commercial city of Morocco, was a hub of the intelligence activity that accompanied this political complexity. Representatives of the Vichy government, the Free French movement, the British intelligence services, the American intelligence services (particularly after American involvement in the war began to be anticipated), and various other interested parties were all operating in the city with varying degrees of openness. It was, in the specific sense relevant to intelligence work, a productive environment: a place where information was available because many different actors were trying to gather and trade it.