The Spy Was a Femme Fatale, But Came Away Empty-Handed
Martha Dodd’s remarkable life as a Nazi paramour and would-be top Soviet spy is re-told with extended espionage details
THE BEST AND MOST TIMELY LESSON WE CAN TAKE from Traitor’s Odyssey, the latest biography of wartime Soviet mole Martha Dodd, is that, with luck, sometimes a well-placed U.S. turncoat can end up being an abject failure. Otherwise, Dodd, the daughter of William Edward Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany at the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, might have done serious damage.
As thoroughly revisited by Brendan McNally, Martha was a 25-year-old assistant literary editor at the Chicago Tribune when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose her little-known father to serve in Berlin, mostly because other more prominent choices had turned down the job. Martha quit work, abandoned a secret marriage to one of many suitors, and set sail for Germany in the summer of 1933 to accompany her father on the new diplomatic assignment along with her mother, Mattie, and ne'er-do-well brother, Bill Jr, 27. They hadn’t even left port in New York before she and her family caused a minor furor aboard the SS Washington when they appeared to pose in a “Heil Hitler” salute. Or perhaps, said Erik Larson, author of a best-selling account of the Dodds, In the Garden of Beasts, it was only an unintended “mid-Heil.”
The young woman’s arrival in Germany was the start of her life-long romance with Europe—and European men of all stripes. Not that she was partial only to Europeans. She had bedded many others besides her lovesick husband.
There was poet Carl Sandberg, her father’s longtime friend; possibly FDR Jr., who happened to be traveling to Europe that summer on the SS Washington with the Dodd’s; and eventually the author Thomas Wolfe, who wrote to his editor, Max Perkins, that the ambassador’s daughter was “like a butterfly, hovering around my penis.”
McNally, also the author of Germania, a madcap 2011 novel set in the last days of the Third Reich, takes delight in describing as many of Martha Dodd’s serial trysts as he can track down. His choice is logical: Martha Dodd’s love life is central to the spy story. At first, she just adored the jib and contours of those fancy Nazi uniforms. There was the Luftwaffe fighter pilot, Ernst Udet, and Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Hermann Goering and an early head of the Gestapo.
Martha also prominently consorted with Hitler’s long-time friend, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a flamboyant Harvard graduate and member of the university’s Hasty Pudding Club, at the time serving as the Nazi regime’s foreign press spokesman and liaison. Hanfstaengl, who had no problem sharing Martha with others, came up with a great idea—his friend Adolf needed to get hitched.
Putzi called Martha one day and “spluttered and ranted grandiosely,” wrote Martha later in a memoir. “Hitler needs a woman. Hitler should have an American woman—a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe. Martha, you are that woman.”
A meeting with Der Führer was arranged at a luxurious Berlin hotel restaurant. Hitler and Martha “had tea and he talked with her a little,” writes McNally. “In her very bad German, she more or less understood what he was saying.” Sadly or not, there was no chemistry and they did not meet again. Other than his “mad burning eyes,” Martha wrote later, “he seemed modest, middle class, rather dull and self-conscious.”
Ambassador Dodd, meanwhile, doted on his daughter and appeared to be oblivious to her many romances. Not so for others at the U.S. embassy, who came up with the perfectly droll gibe for her exploits: “The Nazi Penetration of America.”
While Martha maintained and alternated cavorting with her various Nazi lovers, she became disenchanted with the violence and barbarism of Hitler’s regime. Soon she met a man who would help reorient her life, Boris Vinogradov, a Soviet diplomat who with all certainty was an agent of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.
Moscow Center soon saw the advantage of having an agent so well-situated as the daughter of a U.S. ambassador. Martha, code-named “Liza,” was soon purloining letters and messages from her father’s embassy desk and passing them on to Boris. But poor Boris soon committed a cardinal, if common sin in the espionage business: He fell in love with his agent. For her part, Martha considered him one of the great loves of her life, not that she gave up all the rest of them.
Martha returned to the United States in December, 1937 when her father was recalled after four years in Berlin. (Martha’s mother died of natural causes half a year later and Ambassador Dodd succumbed to illness in February 1940.) Martha went to Connecticut, where she married Alfred Stern, a wealthy businessman and fellow left-wing traveler, which allowed her to live a carefree bourgeois life throughout the war period while protesting in favor of Communist egalitarianism.
As World War II ended, Martha had done nothing much for the war effort on any side, a lazy courtesan without portfolio. Here, McNally’s narrative extends beyond the tale already told famously by Larson In the Garden of Beasts, as well as other fiction and non-fiction works that also have dealt with Martha. (William Shirer gave her passing mention in his monumental Berlin Diary.) Dodd herself wrote three books and edited Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933–1938, the wartime memoir of the father whom she spied on and betrayed for the Soviet Union.
Traitor’s Odyssey focuses on Martha’s postwar attempts to be a faithful Soviet servant, despite being thwarted by lack of assignments. Moscow spymasters kept her on the rolls, but decided that although Martha had access to top Americans, the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, she was almost useless as a spy. Her best access was supine—on her back, first with Nazis, then with Soviet control agents.
In that regard, she was also a jinx for her spymasters. Several of her Soviet handlers were called back to Moscow for questioning, then upbraided and summarily shot. Nevertheless, her professed love for Boris Vinogradov had not abated. She even wrote a letter to her Kremlin overseers, requesting permission that they be allowed to marry. She received a letter in return from Boris, who had been recalled to base, pledging “eternal love” and closing, “don’t forget me.”
McNally writes that in all likelihood Boris had written the letter at gunpoint just before he was executed.
McNally, a defense journalist by trade, offers a surprising sketch of the extensive post-war Soviet spy operations in the United States from the late 1940s and decades afterwards. One key spy aligned with Martha, he writes, was Boris Morros, a Paramount Pictures producer and music executive whose credits included Laurel and Hardy films, work with Bing Crosby and Ginger Rogers, and producing music by Hoagy Carmichael. Morros eventually was caught and turned by the FBI. He soon was informing on Martha and husband Stern, among others, all members of a New York-based Soviet spy ring led by a Lithuanian-born illegal, Jack Soble. Soble was eventually convicted and imprisoned on espionage charges.
Martha Dodd had been able to do a little damage those years, mostly by identifying other potential turncoats for Moscow. But most of her stateside espionage sojourn was spent waiting for a phone call that never came, hoping that her Soviet handlers would ask for her help. Her spy network devolved to endless garden parties and dinners with fellow American Communists and others who railed against capitalism and did nothing more.
Eventually, in 1957, Martha and her husband were rolled up in the FBI’s anticommunist dragnet, but the couple’s espionage efforts turned out to be so minor that the Justice Department eventually dropped the charges. By then, they were long gone.
Czech Mates
Martha and Stern fled the United States in 1953 at the height of the red-baiting McCarthy hearings when a New York Post column revealed that “the daughter of a US Ambassador would soon be subpoenaed.” They fled first to Mexico, Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, then Cuba for a time before settling permanently in back in Prague. The Sterns did not return to the States even after the separate federal charges against them were dropped, because they had evaded a subpoena and owed the government $25,000 each plus interest for contempt of court.
In light of today’s alarms about Russian subversion here, it is somewhat comforting to see that despite all the successes the Soviet Union achieved against America in both the hot and cold war espionage realms, Moscow had its screwups. Its agents had been able to seize and copy U.S. blueprints for the atomic bomb, for sure, in a triumph of converting sympathetic Americans into turncoats. However, the inept Soble group was so minor league that it found out about high-level Soviet espionage on television and in the newspapers.
The story is often fascinating, but the narrative sometimes leads us down dead ends populated by too many names and details that have been plucked too faithfully, and at too much length, from dusty FBI file reports. Nevertheless, Traitor’s Odyssey will be welcomed by readers who revel in stories of wartime espionage, especially these particular chapters.
Martha lived out the rest of her life in Prague, doddering and forgotten. She died there in 1990, a few days after former Communist goons broke into her apartment, apparently assuming she was rich and hoping to steal everything she had. They left her tied up and helpless after finding, as everyone else in her life had found, that she had nothing valuable at all.
SpyTalk Contributing Editor Peter Eisner is the author of a nonfiction trilogy about World War II: The Freedom Line, The Pope’s Last Crusade, and MacArthur’s Spies.