The Misadventures of Martha Dodd, Part 1: The Pink Lady | KGB
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This episode contains adult themes and strong language throughout. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Welcome to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. Once a mighty hub of European power, it's seen better days. Because this is 1987, and the Iron Curtain around this corner of Europe has almost rusted through. Just two short years from now, a velvet revolution will sweep communism aside.

Roll on blue jeans, Hollywood, and the end of history. Nazdraví! But not just yet. In the meantime, Dora Slaba is job hunting. She wasn't Czech. Dora Slaba wasn't Czech. She was a Sudeten Jew from the Sudetenland. There weren't any Sudetens left in Czechoslovakia, and all the Jews had been killed. So she was a total, utter double rarity.

Dora's family had fled the German-speaking Sudetenland when the Nazis marched in. They found refuge in London, where Dora learned English. Later, the family had returned to Czechoslovakia and settled in the capital. Dora's language skills earned her a job at Radio Prague, the state broadcaster. And so, for 15 years, Dora worked for the station's English service, until, in 1968,

Young protesters took to the streets in opposition to the communist authorities. Moscow sent in tanks. And Dora Slava, who'd towed the party line through years of witch hunts, show trials and purges, was moved to act. Her reporting during the uprising known as the Prague Spring shone a harsh light on the Kremlin's brutality. Naturally, she paid for it. Her punishment came courtesy of the Labour Ministry.

They reassigned her to a basement office in the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she settled in for a stultifying stretch as an English translator. By 1987, she was desperate for a change. An unusual ad in the morning paper caught her eye.

You don't have job ads in the classifieds. That's where you go to buy used bicycles and bird cages and stuff you can't get in the workers' paradise except under the table. Dora Slaba one day sees this ad, and even though she doesn't believe it, she's so tired of her current situation because she's been punished for sticking her neck out during the Soviet invasion for being a hero. The job, a secretarial gig, seemed...

Undemanding. But if it gets her out of the basement... She sends in her CV, and one day this woman calls, like two days later, and she ultimately goes to work for her. And she noticed going to work, going up to the house the first day, she notices, like, suddenly, in this block, no cars are parked, except for one white four-doored Lada, which anybody in that country would tell you was an undercover STB car.

The STB are the Czechoslovakian secret police. Clearly, someone in this quiet neighborhood is worth watching. Or guarding. And there's two nasty-looking men inside with the motor running. You know, it's got the motor running, they're sitting there, smoking cigarettes and just, like, looking at her. Dora does not ask questions. She knows where that gets you, and it's nowhere good. She arrives at the villa of her new employer. A housekeeper opens the door. So what?

Rich people have servants. But this is communist Czechoslovakia. Having help is not the done thing. Still, Dora Slaba does not ask questions. But she does look up.

And there stands a figure so inimical to communist ideals that Dora is tempted to blink her away. This old woman who's standing at the top of the stairs in a pink pantsuit with like done-up hair, looking very American, realizes she's like going down the stairs with her arms out, like almost like a showgirl descending the stairs. Dazed as she is, Dora realizes something.

I've seen that pink pantsuit before. It was an episode of Columbo, Inspector Columbo, one of the few American shows that could get under communism. And it was always worn, maybe one episode, many episodes, who knows? It's always some rich murderess. When Dora recovers, she takes stock of her new employer. Firstly, she is American. That much is clear.

She's around 80 years old and has the air of somebody who dearly wishes that they weren't. And money clearly is no object. She is offering her all kinds of money, like double her current wage. Things start off well, but they quickly go downhill. So suddenly she had money coming in hand over fist and the price of it was dealing with this old nasty woman who would be sometimes friendly but unbearable.

The American proves to be overbearing, needy, self-obsessed. A writer who, as far as Dora can tell, hardly writes. She'd written two bestsellers, and at one point she finds one of her books and starts reading it.

he realizes this book is garbage. By the summer of 1989, Dora's had enough. Dora ends up quitting. She won't take more money. She won't take anything she wants out. She's gone. That summer, it all happens. And in November, it's the big revolution. The Velvet Revolution ushers in the first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1946.

The communist project has failed, and Dorislava, now in receipt of a healthy pension, is free to live her life as she pleases. The old lady in the pink pantsuit, Doyenne of the first impression, fades from view, a relic of a Prague and a world that no longer exists. And so, in the fullness of time, she returns to her first love, journalism.

She runs a team of translators at the Prague Post, an English-speaking newspaper. It's here that in 1992, she begins working alongside a defense correspondent called Brendan McNally. It was a summer. I had just come to Prague a couple of months earlier. Brendan's your guide to this two-part true spy story. It's one that spans six decades, as many countries, and at least three ideologies—

For Brendan, it all began with Dora Slaba. Following an interview on the other side of Wenceslas Square, I noticed that a McDonald's had just opened up on the bottom of Wenceslas Square. It was the second one in the country. Faced with an opportunity to introduce his colleague to the fruits of American capitalism, Brendan had to take it.

And I kind of facetiously invited her. Let me buy you lunch. Let me buy you a Big Mac. And it was her first ever Big Mac. You know, talk a while. She tells me about her life and all the problems she had encountered. She asked me if I'd ever heard of a woman named Martha Dodd.

who was a writer, had been living in Prague. And I said, no, I never heard of her. Who is she? And she goes, I don't know, but I worked for her for about a year and a half or so, right before the revolution. And I said, you worked for her? Yeah, I was her secretary. She lived in a house in Prague 5, and she had servants. I thought, they don't have servants under communism. And Doris looked at me and like, well...

No, and yes. And that was as far as the conversation went. I thought it was very interesting. I'd like to look into it, but the next five years, six years in Prague were just booga booga, pedal to the metal reporting. I never gave this Martha Dodd character another thought for about 10 years, honestly, until I was back in Dallas working on a book about the end days of Nazi Germany. By now, it's the early 2000s.

The internet is still a wild west, where anybody with sufficient nous can devote their precious man-hours, and they're almost always man-hours, to what we'll call niche pursuits. Whenever I typed up, I end up at a, basically a hot Babes of the Third Reich website that somebody had set up. And there with all of, you know, the Gehring's mistresses and all these other girlfriends and wives and mistresses is Martha Dodd.

Intrigued, Brendan reads on.

And it turns out she'd been the ambassador's daughter, the American ambassador's daughter, had caused huge scandals during her time in Berlin, had slept with an inordinately high number of high Nazi officials and stormtroopers and anybody else that she liked. And then it stated that she'd fallen in love with a Russian diplomat, who was, of course, naturally a spy, who had recruited her into the NKVD. And for a while, she had been one of Stalin's top agents in Berlin.

Eventually, Brendan sold his book on the Third Reich and brought his family back to Prague. And I'd hunted Dora down and asked her what she remembered about Martha. And she remembered quite a lot, but she didn't know. I said, well, did you know that her father had been the American ambassador? She goes, I knew he was somebody important. I didn't know what the deal was. Did you know that she'd lived in Nazi Germany? No. Did you know that she dated Hitler? No. Did you know that she'd slept with all these top Nazis? No. I said, well, what was she like? She goes, well...

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The Misadventures of Martha Dodd, Part 1, The Pink Lady. It's 1933. We're in Chicago, the hard-drinking, lindy-hopping jewel of the Midwest. This is Martha Dodd's kind of town.

Martha Dodd is the daughter of an American academic, a famous, eminent historian and presidential biographer. He's the head of the history department at the University of Chicago. And he knew Roosevelt. They had friends in common. Martha was his 25-year-old daughter, basically a flapper. Her dream was to be a famous writer. She'd grown up around writers. Her father was, of course, a writer.

She actually had just gotten a job as the assistant books editor at the Chicago Tribune. And it was a plum job. It was the middle of the Depression. Jobs did not come easily. But life isn't all roses for Martha. And as soon as she had it, she hated it because it involved like reading six books a week and writing 200 words. And if her professional life was dull, her love life was the opposite. This was true to a degree that was becoming problematic.

She was married to a guy that nobody knew about. Her father, she'd never told her parents that she'd secretly married him a year earlier. She wanted out. She had other boyfriends. She loved them all, but come on. But Martha's due a rare opportunity, a chance to put an ocean between herself and all those petty indiscretions. One day, late in June 1933, her father gets a call right after lunch saying,

And it's President Roosevelt offering him the ambassadorship to Germany. It's interesting timing. Germany has just come under new management. Roosevelt really didn't know what to make of Hitler. Professor Dodd thought what the press was saying about him was probably wrong and that what was happening to the Jews was probably what they deserved. Having few qualms about the Nazis' treatment of German Jews, Professor William Dodd accepts the post.

Shortly afterwards, the Dodd family boards the SS Washington and makes sail for Europe. 25-year-old Martha didn't have high hopes for Berlin's once legendary social scene. She was told it was moribund, that ever since the Nazis had come in, there really wasn't anything left of it. The Depression, and then Hitler, had put paid to the permissive spirit of the 1920s. That much is true. But it was still entirely possible to have a good time in Berlin.

You simply had to know the right sort of people. And as an ambassador's daughter, Martha was somebody people were very keen to know. She immediately starts getting people driving off cards, visiting cards at their hotel, and she starts accepting invitations and going out with people, and suddenly she's at the top of a social world in Berlin. Her corner of Berlin society revolved around an Italian restaurant called Die Tavern in a seedy part of the city.

It hosted regular gatherings of bright, young, English-speaking things at its sturdy, wine-stained Stamptisch. The Stamptisch was a big table where all the American and British journalists would go to hang out and drink and be together after they'd finished their stories and done their round of parties for the night. So it was open late and she would come in there and hang out with these guys. This restaurant was also where the German film industry people hung out.

It was a very popular place. People went there to listen in on the Americans and be with the film stars. Martha's surrounded by some of the most intrepid journalists of their generation, working one of the most unpredictable beats on the planet. This is her opportunity to file the bylines that ink a writer into posterity. Everybody assumed she'd gone to Berlin to follow the stories.

According to Brendan, they were wrong. She actually had no interest or intention of doing it at all, but she found the company of these reporters was just so much fun that she got herself among them and she actually started filing, occasionally filing some stories too. But Martha's contribution to Berlin's journalistic life was, more often than not, as a well-placed source. She takes reports from her dad's desk and

and she'll read them to the crowd and maybe sometimes guys asked for copies of it, she would give them out. In whatever form it came, Martha's journalism took a decisive backseat to her many friendships outside of the crowd at D-Tavern. She'd grown close to Mildred and Arvid Harnack. The couple were academics who led a small anti-Nazi resistance movement and would later inform for the Soviet Union.

But despite repeated warnings from the Harnacks and her friends at the Stamtisch, who were covering the various abuses taking place around the country,

She didn't see fit to exclude well-mannered, high-ranking Nazis from her set. Now she's going out with all these Nazis, including Ernst Udet, who was a famous World War I ace and had done all kinds of stunt work in Hollywood after the war. He was one of the most popular Germans there was. And suddenly she's going out with him and it's getting into all the papers, causing a scandal. And the people at the

People at the embassy who did not like the Dodds at all started referring to Martha as the Nazi penetration of America. Ernst Udet, who would go on to help develop the Luftwaffe, was joined in Martha's little black book by one Herr Rudolf Diels.

who was a bright young lawyer with dueling scars that she was just gaga over. Very nice guy, lots of fun, very witty, spoke perfect English, married, but who cares? She had a crazy relationship with him. Diels was a protégé of arch-Nazi Hermann Göring, who in 1933 was the heavy hand of the law in Prussia.

Germany's largest and most powerful state, and the home of the capital, Berlin. Earlier that year, Goering had consolidated Prussia's various law enforcement agencies into one fearsome secret police force, the Gestapo, and Rudolf Diels had been chosen to head it up.

As you can imagine, Martha's relationship with deals was instructive. What he shows her is that the Gestapo is bugging everybody. They have American-made dictaphones stuck into walls everywhere. And she learns the basis of spy tradecraft through him. She learned certain things. She learns that everybody's being watched. Everybody's under suspicion. Nothing is out of bounds.

At this stage, you or I might have reconsidered carrying on with Rudolph deals. Martha Dodd, as far as Brendan can tell, did not.

She learns how diabolical the Gestapo is, and it really doesn't bother her at first. She finds it exciting. She's very pro-Hitler, very pro-Nazi. That's even more surprising when you find out that around the same time as her affair with Diels was blossoming, Martha had witnessed the regime's brutality up close. It was sometime in the summer, right after she had gotten there. She and her brother had gone on a road trip with...

with this reporter named Quentin Reynolds, who is famous, forgotten now. They went together on a road trip all over Germany, and they loved everything they saw until they got to Nuremberg. In Nuremberg, Martha, her brother, and Quentin Reynolds, one of the Stamptisch set, settle into their hotel. Music, snaking through the summer evening's half-light, draws them to their window.

and they realize there's something festivities going out on the street. It's already like 9:30 at night or something. They go out to see what it is, and it's this festive crowd and bands playing and people in uniform and torches and all kinds of good stuff. And the center of it is this, what she originally thinks is a clown. And it's a woman in what's left of her dress. Her hair has been cut off and covered. Her head has been covered in some kind of white powder.

And she's carrying a sign saying, I have given myself to a Jew. Her name was Anna Rath. Martha Dodd looks on. And she sees how all these nice Germans that she was so crazy about, just how vicious and brutal and hateful they are to this poor woman who just looks dazed and humiliated. And what does Martha do? She pleads with Quentin Reynolds not to write about it.

And little does she know, he does anyway. Instead of causing immediate attention by wiring it home, he sends it by letter. When the story hits, it's big and he gets in a lot of trouble.

and he doesn't last that much longer in Berlin. She thinks it's not representative of the Nazis. They're not really like that. And his point is that, no, this is exactly what they're like. This is not just something happening on its own. This is being directed from the top. But Martha was inclined to give the Nazis the benefit of the doubt.

They were too nice. They liked her too much. She was having a wonderful time. She's having the best time of her life. Probably having incredibly good sex. Going to parties all the time.

Back in Berlin, she'd have attended a good many of those parties with a man called Putzi Hanfstengel. Who had been one of Hitler's friends early on. He spent the war in the United States, interned or something, and he came back and became a super patriot. And he recognized in Hitler that he was the man that was going to turn everything around. And he went from being not anti-democratic to pro-Nazi very, very quickly.

And Hitler attached himself to Hans Stengel because Hans Stengel was from a very wealthy family in Munich. They were art publishers, had a lot of connections, and he started Hitler's connections with the important people that had money and power.

During his long rise to power, Hitler had spent a lot of time at the Hanfstangl household. He had this kind of a chastely in love with relationship with Hanfstangl's wife, Helen, who was from New Jersey. And it was a New Jersey housewife that had talked Hitler into not blowing his brains out following the Munich beer hall push, which went bad. After Hitler attained power, he started distancing himself from Hanfstangl.

Hansen had to, like, you know, stay in close. So he appointed himself the foreign press guy. As Hitler's foreign press chief, Puzzi ran in Martha's circle, and he was eager for the international papers to paint the Führer in a positive light. But at a time when marriage was a powerful norm, Hitler's perennial singledom represented a PR disaster. They were pretty sure that Hitler was homosexual.

This is Europe. They kind of knew these things. The truth of Hitler's sexuality is likely more complex. But the fact that he displayed little to no interest in the opposite sex was enough to set tongues wagging. His behavior was consistent. Hans Stengel believed that if Hitler got the right woman, everything would settle in. What did he need?

Best thing would be a non-German woman. He thought Hitler should have an American wife. An all-American girl on the Fuhrer's arm would tell the world that this was a man with whom the Western world could do business. Luckily, Puzzi knew just the woman. In fact, he'd recently enjoyed a brief fling with her himself. Who better than a witty, sexy mama Martha Dodd? After a lot of nagging, Martha relented.

She agreed to go with Putzi to meet Adolf Hitler. So he set up a date and drove Martha to this hotel where they knew Hitler would be out on the terrace, and they went for the date. And she had about a half hour, 15 minutes to a half hour drinking tea with this guy, and, you know, she didn't really speak German, and he certainly didn't speak English. It's like they say, when you know, you know.

And instantly, Martha knew. He was nobody she would have sex with, even to be nice. Though she thought his eyes were really, you know, mesmerising. Other than that, he was just this really kind of pathetic-looking guy, you know, with bad skin. The date ended quickly. Martha Dodd's future was not as Frau Hitler. One of the very few good decisions. Nor would she hitch her wagon to that lesser light on the Nazi tenenbaum. Rudolf Diehl's.

By 1934, he was very much a star on the wane. What had happened was Diels, who was the head of the Gestapo, the SS had been very quietly grabbing all the police agencies in Germany under its umbrella. The only law enforcement thing that did not belong to the SS was the Gestapo, and they wanted it. And they started pressuring Diels to give it over.

The SS was Heinrich Himmler's brainchild, a wide-ranging instrument of state terror, espionage and violence.

And a weird battle was fought between Deals and Himmler, which went on for months. And Deals would occasionally win rounds, but he was never going to win the battle. And he found out that the SS was going to send somebody by to assassinate him. Martin went and visited him that day and saw this guy weeping in his house. He had a couple of pistols and a map with all of this genius intelligence set up.

for the Gestapo and saying, you know, I know too much. They're going to get me. And she realizes that the only way Deals can be saved is if Deals' boss, Hermann Goering, can work out some sort of an accommodation with Himmler where Goering hands over the Gestapo to Himmler in exchange for something else and make it all look nice. Looking at her distraught lover, Martha sees fear stamped in bold type across the crisscross of those fearsome dueling scars.

She realizes that she's in a position to help. She demands a meeting with George Messersmith, head of the American consulate in Berlin. As an ambassador's daughter, she can do that sort of thing.

Everyone knew that Messerschmitt and Goering were friends to some extent. And she went to Messerschmitt and went to his office and just pleaded with him to save her boyfriend, whom he knew quite well himself. And he tore into her, cut her a new one for her, you know, screwing around like she was doing. And...

sent her away and said, I can't do anything for you, but then realized he could. Took a taxi to a club where he knew Goering was going to be, met with Goering, talked with him and got him to do something. And basically Goering saved Deals' life and got him kicked upstairs into a nothing position. Anyone who's into the history of Nazi Germany probably doesn't know about Deals because he kind of disappeared in 1934. Deals had left Berlin, but his absence didn't exactly leave Martha bereft.

She had other irons in other fires. Take Armand Barad, the dashing young third secretary at the French embassy. The fact that he was widely assumed to be the French secret service's top man in Berlin made their dalliance all the more exciting. But more exciting still was a handsome Russian by the name of Boris Vinogradov.

who was the press secretary at the Russian embassy. Everybody knew him. Everybody liked him. He had a great manner. It was a lot of fun. He dressed well. He drove a convertible, I think a Ford. He had motoring gloves. You know, all the good stuff. I know what you're thinking. Boris doesn't sound like the model Soviet. In fact, he sounds positively decadent. Well, look, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. And Boris was a man who made friends easily.

He was a Romeo spy and that was his job. He was the only guy at the embassy who got out. Yes, Boris Vinogradov was a spy, an officer of Stalin's NKVD. The free-spirited daughter of the new American ambassador was an obvious target for his affections.

The fact that she regularly doled out embassy correspondence over drinks and nibbles was just a cherry on top of an extremely useful cake. They have a passionate relationship where they're fighting and making up and fighting. Everything's at 11. They're just crazy for each other. Of course, they're both tomcats. They both have numerous things on the side. He doesn't like her screwing around. She doesn't care what he does.

And Martha loved these other guys, but just with Boris, it was just off the charts. It's hard to say how crazy he really was about her. What he'd written in his KGB reports seemed much more balanced. Martha was just nuts for the guy. Marth is in love, but she isn't stupid. She's well aware of what Boris really does for a living.

And when the couple come up for air, the conversation often turns political. They apparently have a lot of discussions about the struggle. And slowly but surely, Boris begins to win Martha over to his worldview. At the same time, her friendship with the academics-cum-resistance organizers Mildred and Arvid Harnack is deepening. She says she started turning anti-Nazi in 1933. I'm not sure exactly.

In March 1934, Boris asks Martha to do him a favor. He asks her if she'll go to Paris alone and meet some friends of his. It was going to be her recruitment process. And it doesn't seem that Martha went there. She hated Paris to begin with. She hated the French.

She had a French boyfriend. She didn't go. My guess is that she'd figured out that giving in and becoming recruited the way they wanted, she would probably end up in a support position. Moscow Center needed lots of couriers and people to carry stuff back and forth. They had an incredible operation going on. And the suspicion was that maybe she would just get relegated to one of those lower positions. She wanted to go in on her own terms. So what she did instead was book a...

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Hello, my name is Matt. And I'm McKinley. We are the father-son team that brings you History Dispatches. History Dispatches is a short daily history show where we talk about topics from all over the world and all throughout history. We talk about people, places, events, and even objects. While anything is fair game, we have a soft spot for you.

for the weird, the wacky, and the obscure things you may have never even heard of. Do you have any examples? How about Wojtek, the bear who rose to the rank of corporal in the Polish army? Or the Great Emu War? Or how about the biggest treasure take in the history of piracy? That sounds cool, but do you have a story about the head of Oliver Cromwell? Or one about the ancient library of Alexandria? And a story about the first woman to climb Mount Everest would be cool.

Well, we got those as well. Every weekday, there's something new and fun. Sweet. So how do I get this trove of goodness? All you have to do is go to historydispatches.com or just look for History Dispatches in your favorite podcast app. In the summer of 1934, the Night of the Long Knives rocks Berlin. It's a stunning purge of Hitler's enemies. Despite the name, the violence actually rages for three days.

Even if she'd been giving the Nazis the benefit of the doubt up until this point, she couldn't help but notice that the gloves were off. It was a fabulous opportunity for a change of heart.

Shortly afterwards, newly minted Stalinist Martha Dodd arrives in Russia. And Moscow Center guys are waiting for her and she has a nice little conversation for a couple of days with them and goes back on the boat. And she meets Boris. Boris is there too. And she thinks that she's going to go on vacation with Boris in Crimea. And Boris actually got somebody else lined up, possibly his wife and daughter. And so she's very pissed off and she spends the next month on this stupid boat with these stupid people.

Martha doesn't think much of Mother Russia, but she carries on with her recruitment.

As of now, she's an asset of the Soviet Union. So from 1934, 1935, '36, she's apparently a top agent up there. And she got a lot of really good information during that period. In those years, Martha does what she does best. She socializes, meets important men, and maintains the flow of information from her father's desk to Moscow Central.

She even starts a relationship with a member of the Prussian royal family. This does wonders to allay rumors that her public affair with Boris Vinogradov, who's since been relocated out of Berlin, was anything other than romantic. Communists don't sleep with princes, after all. In truth, Martha was still in regular contact with Boris. Too regular by half, if you ask the NKVD.

It's so crazy that Moscow Senator Aky at one point tells them to knock it off. Love letters aside, the value of the information she's able to pass back to Moscow is on the wane by the late 1930s. Her father, the ambassador, is an increasingly isolated figure in the diplomatic community. More generally, Berlin is beginning to feel more and more hostile to Martha and her glittering gang of international pals.

She expresses all this, and likely more, to Boris. In 1937, she goes to visit him in Warsaw, where he's been moved, reassigned, and then goes to Moscow, and she has much more like formal conferences with Soviet intelligence there. In the Soviet capital, Martha is granted an audience with some serious players inside Stalin's intelligence agency. Obtaining permission to marry Boris is high up on her agenda.

But she's got bigger plans than that, too. And she basically is saying that, like, yeah, I know I'm not coming up with anything now. You know, my usefulness as a spy in Berlin are over. I will be going back to Washington, back to the United States, and I could do my magic there. And she talks them into her usefulness as a spy in America. Again, another bad decision. If they would have

been perfectly willing to let her just go back to America and be forgotten. But she wanted to continue the revolution. So she convinces them of her usefulness, and they get the idea that, I got it, this is what Martha can do. When she goes back to America, she can infiltrate the inner circle of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In part two of The Misadventures of Martha Dodd, our heroine, okay, protagonist, comes in from the cold.

Join us next time for Midnight Escapes, Red Scares, and Squandered Fortunes on True Spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

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It was August 1943. Two letters go out from the Soviet embassy. One goes directly to Stalin. It wasn't signed, but he's claiming that Zarubin was actually working for the Germans, but mainly the Japanese, and that he had all this betrayal of the Soviet Union. He was using his wife as a courier, and it was being taken to Los Angeles, where their agent, Boris Moros, was operating an illegal radio station, sending the information to Japan.

Stalin reads it, starts an investigation, but they're being very careful. They don't want to start a purge. At this point, the purges had been a couple of years earlier. They don't want to go through that again. There's a war on. They can't afford to start massacring people. So they start an investigation and Zarubin, since he gets named, is told to wrap up things and hand off his agents to somebody else and come back to Moscow.

True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.

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