Damien Lewis on AGENT JOSEPHINE
"A long process of detective work."
Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES. My latest guest is Damien Lewis, the British war correspondent turned prolific non-fiction author and documentarian. Last summer, I devoured his book about the espionage exploits of flapper legend and expat performer extraordinaire Josephine Baker. (AGENT JOSEPHINE is the American title, otherwise known in England as THE FLAME OF RESISTANCE.) Now the paperback is hot off the presses, and I have a feeling your stack of beach reads may get a little bit taller after you breeze through the conversation below…
Tell me about how you first stumbled upon Josephine Baker’s clandestine World Was II service while visiting a medieval French château.
Well, I first came across the story of Josephine as a kind of wartime spy in a tiny little reference somewhere online. I can't even remember the source. It was about ten years ago. And then—this is the really bizarre part—my father lives in France; he moved there two decades ago and renovated a 14th century château, and he now lives in it. So he is big into châteaus. He just called me one day and said, Hey, I've just been to this amazing place. It’s called Château des Milandes and it's the former home of Josephine Baker. I basically thought, Weird coincidence, I've been building up a file on her for the last, like, seven years.
So you were already at work on the research?
Not on the book, no. If there’s something I’m really interested in, I keep a file. To be frank, I didn't actually believe there would be enough source material for a book. But my father organized a trip, and we went down as a family to visit the château. It's just a living memorial to her, and it makes a huge play on the importance of her work for the resistance and the allies during the war. I then managed to contact the château owner, and I said to her, In my view, the most important part of Josephine's story is the wartime story. It's never been told. She said, I couldn't agree with you more. So that was kind of like an imprimatur.
After that, what were the first places you started digging?
There were several. One of them was managing to track down Jacques Abtey’s son. Jacques Abtey was the guy who recruited her from the Deuxième Bureau, her espionage partner and lover for most of the war. They were incredibly close. And by a very, very long and convoluted route, I managed to find that his son was still alive, and I managed to get in contact with him.
What was the route?
Basically, my wife and I started just looking for—you know, it's an unusual name, Abtey, so we started looking for people with that name. There were mentions of various children, and it was just, putting those names into search engines, trying to find hits, and we found several. Then it was a process of actually writing physical letters to most of them, because people of that generation don't tend to have much of a digital profile. Lots of those were dead ends, but eventually his grandson responded, and it was his grandson who then put me in touch with his father, Jacques's son. So that’s how the connection was made. A long process of detective work.
That’s amazing.
Yeah. So Abtey was key, and another seminal moment was, Josephine’s British handler was Commander Wilfred Dunderdale at the British Secret Intelligence Service. He was her boss and commander for most of the war, without a shadow of a doubt. In fact, even when Josephine was doing a lot of espionage work for the Americans, Dunderdale was still the point of contact. There's a guy who lives in the States, a British guy named Paul Biddle, and I do not know how he found out what I was doing, but this guy contacted me out the blue—I'd never heard of him before—and basically said, Look, I understand you are looking into Josephine Baker's wartime story, and that brings you to Wilfred Dunderdale, and I own Dunderdale’s private papers.
Was he being discrete about it?
No. He knew of my work, he’d read some of my books, and he basically said, I'd like to offer you access. And I was like, that's the most extraordinary thing. He copied it all for me, because he was in the States and I'm here, and this was during Covid lockdown, so I couldn't go anywhere. That's the other thing. All this research I'm talking about—I was using a French researcher in France, an American researcher in the States, a German researcher in Germany, and I had a researcher in London, because I couldn't even go to London. So yeah, Paul Biddle copied everything digitally, and he emailed me, I mean, just completely essential material.
When you say he copied everything, how many documents are we talking?
Dozens and dozens of pages of documents, including letters from his bosses at MI6. I mean, no files are ever released by the British Secret Intelligence Service. It's not like the CIA, where you do get lots of wartime files made available. It doesn't happen here. So to actually get your hands on that kind of material is very, very unusual.
Did Biddle enlighten you about how he came to be the steward of the Dunderdale papers?
No, but there's another individual who was really helpful, a guy called Tim Spicer, who's a former military guy. We knew each other, but he reached out because, I'd already written the book, and he was just starting writing Dunderdale’s biography. There’s never been one, and Dunderdale was one of two or three individuals who Ian Fleming based James Bond on. Spicer said he wanted to go and see Paul Biddle and various other people in the States who I'd been in contact with. So I made that connection and he went over, and he eventually found out that Paul had basically bought that archive in a private auction. He's this collector of really, really rare archives. Look the guy up, he's just got the most amazing stuff you could ever imagine.
I’ll definitely look him up.
So that was another kind of major milestone. And then, the absolute key was this: the French government decided to release a batch of files—and they did it during lockdown—on Josephine Baker and Jacques Abtey and Paul Paillole, the key characters in the book. They released a batch of intelligence files from the war, and Josephine and Jaques and Paul happened to be amongst them.
When was this?
Probably 2021? But I couldn't go to France, so I asked my French researcher to go to the historic French military archive just outside of Paris, housed in this massive château, to access them. They were the most important thing of all, because they are prima facie documents, documenting what happened during the war in terms of their espionage work. More importantly, they absolutely proved the contention of the book, which was that Josephine was—of course she was a standout spy for France, but she was equally, more so, a standout spy for Britain, and just as importantly, a standout spy for America. Those documents proved that kind of chain of custody and provenance.
I didn’t realize so much of your research was during lockdown. I imagined you doing a fair amount of globe-trotting.
No, I couldn't go anywhere! I didn't even go to London, and there was a really amazing discovery made by my London researcher, who found the smuggling fleet files, this amazing linkup that Josephine and Jacques Abtey made via the U.S. mafia—an alliance between the New York mafia and the American military to further defeat the Nazis, and then an intelligence-gathering and arms-running network via their smuggling networks. That whole set of files, he just sent it to me one day and said, I think this is what you need.
Did it kill you that you couldn’t be the one physically discovering these things?
It's always better to be there in person, but to be honest, the most powerful emotion I was feeling was relief, relief that there was enough material to tell her wartime story. Whenever these things dropped into my inbox, my overriding feeling was, Thank God. She was a forgotten hero and it's an important story, so my big fear was that it just wasn't gonna be doable.
Many of the relevant records were destroyed during the war or in its aftermath, but you write about how remarkable it is that some things actually survived.
I mean, one of the most remarkable things to survive was the smuggling fleet file. You're a hidden arm of the British state, set up to fight the war in all the ways that are illegal. You go and get a load of genuine smugglers. You tell them, Carry on smuggling, but we what we want you to do is carry agents for us back and forth from the places you smuggle stuff into, and also sometimes weaponry and radios and intelligence. But you really have got to keep on smuggling, because it’s the perfect cover. That it became a self-financing intelligence-gathering operation, I mean, that's just utterly extraordinary.
Are there files that you know were destroyed which would've benefited you?
Well, the thing is, you don't know that they've been destroyed, because there are no records of what might have been there. And it's not just that they've been destroyed. A lot of these files are misfiled or filed under such esoteric titles, you have no idea what they contain.
How did you square the various competing accounts of Josephine’s espionage service, including one that’s a thinly veiled work of documentary fiction? [IT CAN’T ALWAYS BE CAVIAR]
To give you an example, if you've got an account in It Can’t Always Be Caviar of, you know, an espionage mission, and you read Jacques Abtey’s account, and the tradecraft and the dates and everything is pretty much exactly the same, and then you read a report, and although it's in much more paired down, basic language, the dates and the basic details are the same, you can deduce from that, pretty reliably, that it’s an accurate description.
Josephine, for the most part, took her own account to the grave. That must have been maddening considering she's the central character.
There was so much she did that you can't write. I'll give you example. In several accounts, there are these descriptions of her in Marseille in late 1940, early 1941, as much more of a proactive kind of espionage boss, out on the streets, you know, really tough, fronting up to the Gestapo. There are several accounts like that. There's not enough to actually write it, because you just can't substantiate it. But I believe it to be true. Had she written her account, it would've been very different. But the thing about it was, you were supposed to stay quiet about espionage work for the French secret intelligence service, certainly for thirty years after the event. So Josephine, you know, she played it by the book. She said nothing, really. And she went to the grave within those three decades.
If you could ask Josephine one thing to clarify parts of her story that alluded you, what would it be?
The top of my list would be when she was in Casablanca for eighteen months in a clinic, when she was supposedly so desperately ill. Was she really that ill, or was that cover? Everybody says she's at the heart of it all. She's got this perfect clearinghouse for intelligence, because she’s Josephine Baker, and she's ill. Anyone can visit her, from the beggar on the street, to a king and a royal prince, to an American politician. And they can’t just raid this clinic, because she's on her death bed and she's an international star. It was this perfect place to do all that stuff. So was she really ill for all that time? Was she as ill as the accounts make out? Or was it a really smart intelligence operation which they deliberately put in place? I mean, so many people say, what she did during those eighteen months was really special. So to find out more about that, what they were really intending there, would've been great.
A friend of mine is actually the one who reviewed AGENT JOSEPHINE for The New York Times, and she wrote that “Josephine remains unknowable.” Do you feel that way?
Yeah, to a certain extent. Look, you want to hear it from the horse's mouth, and it's hard to get that. There are lots of other individuals who comment on her, who she was, how she thought, what made her tick, what drove her. But they're generally also men, and they’re white men, because that was the world in which she was swimming. She was swimming in a world of white male espionage. There’s not a great plurality of views, and so to get to the heart of who she was, yes, it's challenging. But that's the nature of the beast.
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