The specific dynamics of this vulnerability — the tendency of people in power to perform their own importance for admirers — had been part of Baker’s professional experience for years. She understood how men with power behaved in social situations, because she had spent fifteen years in rooms with them. What Abtey was proposing was simply a systematic application of knowledge she already had.
By Baker’s own account, she agreed without hesitation. She later said that France had given her everything she had, and that she was ready to give her life in return. She also cited a more personal motivation: her hatred of discrimination in any form, including the racial ideology that undergirded Nazism. The specific language she used in various accounts of this moment — “France made me what I am” — has been repeated so many times that it risks becoming formulaic; the commitment it described was real.
She was listed as an “honorable correspondent” — the French intelligence term for an unpaid civilian asset, a person who gathered and passed information without being a formal officer of the service. The designation was significant. As an honorable correspondent rather than an official agent, Baker had no government cover if she was caught. She could be arrested, tried, and executed under German occupation law without the French government being able to claim official responsibility for her. She understood this.
She was never paid for her wartime intelligence work.
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## Embassy Parties and Notes on Her Skin
In the months before the German invasion of France — the period of the “Phoney War” from September 1939 to May 1940, when France and Germany were technically at war but no major land engagements had occurred — Baker worked within Paris, using her celebrity to gather information at social events.