Baker was born in 1912 to a wealthy Rhode Island family with collecting in its genes. His mother and sister collected stamps, and his parents accumulated antiques. Baker himself began with pennies and pocket watches. At age 11, he started writing journals. After graduating from Yale in 1935, Baker eventually settled in Washington, D.C. Throughout the 1940s, he worked as a research analyst for the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and the Office of Intelligence Research of the Department of State, then as a foreign affairs officer.

Stationed in Europe during World War II, Baker experienced air raids in London and documented his experiences in The Year of the Buzz Bomb: A Journal of London (written in 1944, self-published in 1952). He expressed a strange attitude toward potential peril: “I have a greater willingness to be hit while in my home than in a chance locality, like a cinema, a dancehall, or a little-frequented street.…To be obliterated in a bordello or even a butcher shop appears to me to be unfitting,” he wrote.

It’s difficult to decipher exactly what Brown did in the OSS and, later, the CIA. His diaries focus more on the social aspects of his time in Europe than they do on his actual work. In a book about the OSS, he was quoted saying: “We are supposed to be an assemblage of scholars and political analysts, but in fact we are a herd of baffled people under a barrage of silly orders from a top-heavy hierarchy of ambitious egotists.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Baker ultimately found this work unfulfilling, and retired from the CIA in 1949. He moved to New York three years later with dreams of becoming a writer. Though he received some commissions, he struggled to publish his work and turned instead toward the art world.



