She tried Hollywood in 1936, hoping that the success she had achieved in Europe might translate across the Atlantic. She appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies revival that year — the most prestigious variety format on the American stage. The reviews were hostile and sometimes vicious. American critics, writing in a country still operating under formal racial segregation and deep cultural prejudice, did not give her the same reception that Paris had given her a decade earlier. She returned to France.
The United States that refused her was the same United States that had burned across the river from St. Louis in 1917. The France that welcomed her back was the France that had given her citizenship. When war came, the choice of which side she was on was not abstract for her.
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## The Deuxième Bureau and Jacques Abtey
In September 1939, France declared war on Germany. Within weeks, a French intelligence officer named Jacques Abtey arrived to meet Josephine Baker.
Abtey was an officer of the Deuxième Bureau, France’s military intelligence service. The Deuxième Bureau — literally “Second Bureau,” the second section of the French army’s general staff, responsible for intelligence — had been France’s primary military intelligence organization since the late nineteenth century. It was not, by the standards of 1939, an organization that typically recruited women, let alone American-born entertainers. But Abtey had assessed the situation with more flexibility than his institutional norms might have suggested.
Baker’s fame was not a liability for intelligence work; it was an asset. She could attend embassy parties, diplomatic receptions, and social gatherings at the highest levels of European society without anyone wondering why she was there. She was invited. She was expected. Powerful men who might have been cautious about what they said to an intelligence officer — who would not have discussed troop movements or airfield locations with an obviously government-affiliated professional — could become careless or even boastful in conversation with a world-famous entertainer they were trying to impress.