The Misadventures of Martha Dodd, Part 2: The Left Behind | KGB
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Get an expert now at TurboTax.com. Only available with TurboTax Live Full Service. See guaranteed details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees. 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. 1937. There's ten sleeps till Christmas, and New York City is swathed in that special brand of Macy's magic.

As her ship comes in, Martha Dodd watches the skyline work free of the clouds. She's back, and not a moment too soon. There's work to be done. She liked being at the center of the Game of Thrones and Game of Nations states. She liked being in the middle of it. As the daughter of the American ambassador to Nazi Germany, Martha has spent the last four years in Berlin.

There, she mingled freely with the city's power players, including a number of high-profile Nazis. But the love of her life, so far, anyway, comes from the opposite end of the political horseshoe. He's a Stalinist spy, name of Boris Vinogradov. And Boris is specialized. He's what's called a Romeo spy, charged by the Kremlin to seduce and recruit women in useful positions.

Martha Dodd, a would-be journalist, who was already somewhat profligate with the contents of her father's desk, was one of them. She became an official asset of the NKVD in 1934 and, for a time, was one of the most valuable Russian informants in Berlin. But those days were behind her. Her German sources had run dry and her father, the ambassador, was retiring.

She'd made a compelling case to her handlers, asking to continue her work in the USA. She convinces them of her usefulness, and they get the idea that this is what Martha could do. When she goes back to America, she could infiltrate the inner circle of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Which was a nice idea, if completely unrealistic. They really didn't understand that much about America, certainly not about American politics. Eleanor Roosevelt was very, very important.

Her inner circle was of who knows. I'm not even sure it was an inner circle. So she goes back to America in end of 1937 and she waits. And waits. And waits. See, there's protocol to follow here. An asset like Martha doesn't do anything without running it by her case officer. Having a case officer is the most important thing. To her, it means that the Soviets know that she's valuable, worth handling with care.

Back in Berlin, she'd already had three. Boris, this guy named Bukartsev, and another guy named Gnaden or something. She didn't like Bukartsev, and they took him back to Moscow and shot him. Anyway, so she comes back to America. She's waiting for her new case officer before she starts the assignment, and the case officer doesn't show up. Martha seems to have been misplaced. Miffed isn't the word.

But she doesn't have all the facts in front of her. The purges are just denuding Soviet intelligence. No, all is not well in Moscow. The USSR is in the throes of the Great Purge of 1938, Stalin's attempt to wipe out any potential opposition. And the entire section that had assigned her, that was doing this gambit with Eleanor Roosevelt, had all been taken out and shot.

Unbeknownst to Martha, her lover Boris has met the same fate. Her last letter to him is doomed to go unanswered. Then again, he might not have been completely thrilled by its contents, because in the summer of 1938, Martha had already married another man.

She marries a rich guy, Alfred Stern, who is a rich financier. Stern, somewhat paradoxically, was also a devoted socialist. He had, over the years, put his money where his mouth was. He was a generous benefactor to left-wing causes and had personally delivered aid to anti-Nazi organizations in Germany. We don't know exactly how they met,

But it's safe to assume that it was at one society fundraiser or another. Once they were married, it didn't take much to get Alfred excited about working for the Russians, too. Together, that's just what they'd do, up to a point. Welcome back to The Misadventures of Martha Dodd, Part 2, The Left Behind. And she spends years, like, waiting for Godot. Yeah.

That's the voice of defence journalist and author Brendan McNally. His book, Traitor's Odyssey, is the first biography of Martha Dodd. And, like Brendan, she was a writer.

So, as the years flicker by in NYC, Martha keeps herself busy by putting pen to paper. She writes two bestsellers. The first, 1939's Through Embassy Eyes, is an account of her years in Hitler's Germany.

And as America enters the Second World War, 1941's Ambassador Dodd's diary hits the shelves. Supposedly his office diaries, though that's not really true. But it's an important document of the time and it's still read and referred to even though there's aspects of it, stuff that you can't be trusted because she was behind it. Now and again, she does get the odd crumb from Moscow Central.

Without an official handler, big operations are off the table. But that doesn't stop her from talent spotting for potential recruits among her well-off left-wing friends.

Now, a couple of those friends might just come into play further down the line. But here, in the early 1940s, Martha's having an unremarkable war. You look at the records from Soviet intelligence in the New York residentura, and they are continually telling the guy in charge, find something for this woman to do. She's important. And he's got stuff on his plate. Everybody's got stuff on their plate.

The Soviet resident in New York has absolutely no idea why this person, codenamed Liza, keeps coming across his desk. The top guy, his name is Vasily Zarubin. He's one of the most interesting people I've ever heard of. He was the one who really started the effort against the Manhattan Project. The effort to steal the atomic bomb was really started by him. Now that's a story worth hearing.

Let's leave Martha in her doldrums for a moment, because Vasileza Rubin, by contrast, is having a very good war indeed. I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger, so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit.

Incoming transmission.

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 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.

April, 1943, California. There was a communist agent, a guy named Steve Nelson, who was the head of the Communist Party of Alameda County, California. He hears about funny things going on at the radiation laboratory at Berkeley. Steve Nelson passes these rumors up the ladder. And one day, this guy shows up calling himself Cooper, and he's from the Soviet residentura.

Cooper, the FBI learn, is really Vasily Zarubin. Nelson tells Cooper what he knows. Unbeknownst to everybody, the FBI has got that place bugged. The FBI starts an investigation called SINRAD, which is Communists in Radiation Laboratory. And this is where they first find out about Soviet efforts to steal the atomic bomb. This is a big catch for the FBI.

Obviously, they're not surprised to learn that a Russian diplomat is interested in nuclear secrets. Nonetheless, they keep an eye on Zarubin and the people he meets. Vasily Zarubin, after meeting with Steve Nelson, goes down to Los Angeles and meets up with Boris Moros, the Paramount film producer. And the FBI catches that as well. If you're a student of Hollywood's golden age, you might know the name Boris Moros.

He was a movie producer and musical director whose gift for fast talk had taken him from St. Petersburg to Tinseltown. He was at Paramount Pictures. He'd done John Wayne movies. He'd done two or three of the most famous Laurel and Hardy pictures, Babes in Toyland, March of the Wooden Soldiers, and Flying Deuces. Morris had been recruited by the NKVD in 1934. The idea being that he could provide other Soviet agents with cover identities that

as globetrotting studio employees. And a little under a decade later, Boris Moros met a certain Martha Dodd in Hollywood, where she was working on a doomed film adaptation of Through Embassy Eyes. They meet in Hollywood. They have an interesting half hour or so talking, and she brings back her husband to meet him after that. That was in, like, April 43, 2004.

As far as Brendan's research bears out, neither Morris nor Martha are aware of the other's secret role. But soon, they'll get to know each other a whole lot better. Later that year, a couple of days after Christmas, Vasily Zerubin and Boris Moros are driving through the snowy lanes of upstate New York, bound for a cozy farmhouse on the border with Connecticut. They're on their way to pitch an exciting business opportunity.

Here's the short version: The NKVD needs a way of bringing its agents into the USA from South America. NKVD asset, Boris Moros, owns a dormant music company, little more than a shell corporation. The music industry at large is short of recording engineers. There's a war on, after all. Vasily Zorubin puts these facts together.

He instructs Moros to put his music company into gear and start bringing in agents undercover as sound men. Simple enough, no? But Boris Moros is the kind of man who knows that money makes the world go round. An operation like this needs funding.

And smart as he is, Zarubin's a communist field operative. They never thought about money. They didn't have to. They didn't have money in their pocket. The next day they would. It took care of itself. They didn't care about money. Faced with this distasteful quandary, Zarubin thinks back to the asset that Moscow Central seems so keen for him to use in New York, the one with the rich husband. Codename, Liza. Time to make contact.

And when they get out of the car and walk, Martha comes out of the house to meet them. At this point, you might expect a flash of recognition to dart across Boris Moros' shrewd features. After all, it was only a matter of months since he'd first made Martha's acquaintance. She certainly seems to know him. But no, he's drawing a blank. That's awkward. On the plus side, and much to his own surprise...

Vasily Zarubin does recognize his asset. And according to Moros, she and Zarubin see each other and go like, you! Zarubin appears to have been what was in Berlin at the same time as Martha, pretending to be an American with Paramount Pictures. There's that Moros connection again.

Small world. And it's likely he hung out at the same restaurant, and it is likely that he and Martha met and possibly started up something there. And she just runs into his arms and showers him with passionate kisses in front of her husband, who doesn't like it, but he's apparently had to deal with it before. Once inside, the foursome begin to hash out a plan.

They negotiate a business arrangement, a business deal for this company that they will both own part of, that will be used to infiltrate people. Before long, it's apparent that Boris Moros and Martha's husband, Alfred Stern, might not be ideal bedfellows.

The husband is a know-it-all businessman. Apparently, people can't stand him. He's just a boring, demanding guy with a lot of money. So people have to be nice to him. But he makes some comment about the music that they're going to be promoting in this company. And Boris Moros, he's a music producer. He does movies, music, entertainment.

And this guy is suddenly acting like he knows everything about Angus. They should be doing some proper like folk music and not garbage like this popular stuff like a song Chattanooga Choo Choo. That is just garbage. That's so popular. Chattanooga Choo Choo, performed by Glenn Miller, became the world's first gold selling record when it was released in 1941. Boris Moros wouldn't hear a word said against it.

And Boris Moros is like, Chattanooga Choo Choo is my baby. He claimed to have been practically its godfather. And according to him, that's when he starts realizing, you know, maybe the Soviet Union is not such a great thing. Anybody who doesn't like, you know, Chattanooga Choo Choo is no good. Nonetheless, Alfred Stern agrees to front Moros $130,000 to get the company up and running. That's nearly $2.5 million in today's money.

You know, communist millionaires are this incredible thing. Operation Cord, as it's christened, is go. Boris Moros returns to California and begins putting Alfred Stern's money to work.

And this company that they set up immediately goes bad because the husband believes it's going to be in the sheet music business and infiltrate people in that way. And Boris is like, screw sheet music. We need to put out records. The money in the business records. You make records. Now that there's a continent between Boris and the rest of the conspirators, the wily producer conveniently forgets about the actual purpose of their new business.

There's money to be made. And against everybody's orders, he buys a record factory and they start pressing records. While all this is going on, a grand total of zero Soviet spies are being infiltrated into the USA. Alfred Stern tries in vain to keep tabs on his partner from afar, eager to know exactly how his money is being spent.

But on the long-distance line, getting a straight answer out of Boris Moros is like juggling live eels. The boy from St Petersburg is a redoubtable flim-flam man, and for all Stern's vehemence and pomposity, he's just not playing in the same league. In the middle of 1944, the operation sustains another blow.

Vasily Zarubin, erstwhile case officer to Morris, Martha and Stern, is recalled to Moscow. And the reason for his sudden departure? Actually, not so sudden. It had been a long time coming. The seeds of Zarubin's downfall had been sown almost a year earlier.

In, I think it was August 1943, two letters go out from the Soviet embassy. One goes to Stalin, directly to Stalin, from somebody there. They don't say who. 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. And he was using his wife as a courier, and it was being taken to Los Angeles, where they're

Agent Boris Moros was operating an illegal radio station, sending the information to Japan. Stalin reads it and it's like, this is nuts. Starts an investigation, but they're being very careful. They don't want to start a purge. At this point, you know, 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 come back to Moscow. He has to wrap it up and hand off his agents to somebody else and go back. He's found innocent. He's not shot. But his career is basically over. Here, your first question is probably, who wrote the letter? It doesn't take a genius to work out that it must have been someone with a grudge against Zarubin.

Well, what nobody knows is that this was written by two of his underlings that are in Washington on diplomatic cover. And apparently he had driven them to the brink of madness because he was such a ball buster. Bad bosses of the world take heed.

These guys had high-level diplomatic cover, probably receptions every night. You know, they had the nice stuff. He was a man of action. He did not do death squads. He hated them, drove them crazy. In the depths of their, like, insanity, they write to Stalin, denouncing Zarubin. But remember, there's two letters. If one went to Stalin, who got the other?

What nobody knows is that they wrote an almost identical letter and Senator J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, on a Russian typewriter. And since they don't have an H in Russian, they got a G. So it's Mr. Hoover. Which is why, in the annals of espionage history, this episode is remembered as the Hoover letter.

So Hoover sees this letter, realizes it's the work of somebody crazy. But he also realizes that they're telling us real information here. They've named a whole lot of top agents that the Russians have. And then they mention this guy's Boris Moros. And they're going, everybody knows who Boris Moros is. That's like finding out that Dino De Laurentiis is like a Soviet agent. Boris Moros, I'm sorry, what? It turns out that he'd already shown up in an earlier investigation, actually that linked to the beginning of the Manhattan Project.

Remember Vassily Zarubin's covert meeting with American communist Steve Nelson back in April of 43? The NKVD man had gone to see Boris Moros afterwards. There was no evidence of wrongdoing, but the FBI tail had, as a matter of course, opened a file on the movie producer. And now, here was his name again, on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover himself.

It didn't matter that the allegations made against him in the unhinged Guveleta were part of a vindictive fantasy. No smoke without fire. They start an investigation. What's funny is it was their first peek into what Soviet intelligence is doing in America. Meanwhile, the NKVD's Operation Chord went from merely spurious to actively disastrous in early 1945. A new case officer...

Jack Sobel was brought in to replace the departed Zarubin. Jack Sobel is a Moscow Center operative. He was a Lithuanian Jew. His family and kin were all involved in the Bor-Brussel import business. After a successful but stressful career in the NKVD, Sobel had emigrated to Canada, hoping in vain for a quiet life.

Until, in 1942, a fatal misstep. And then he sees an ad for boar bristles and he answers it.

and he does a boar-brizzle trade. The next thing he knows, Moscow Center's got him back on their radar, and he gets called in to move down to New York, and using money that his father had put in the bank for him, a couple thousand dollars, buys this crummy eatery in Manhattan, and it becomes a document drop. It's where agents bring stuff, and apparently they're very busy. He is forced to be Zarubin's dog's body for about a year or so,

And then when Zarubin gets called back to Moscow, he hands him a lot of his agents, basically his losers, including Martha and her husband, who he's told he'll probably never even meet because they're doing something with Boris Moros. And a couple of months later, he finds out that Martha's husband's complaining to the embassy about something. He has to go deal with it. Jack Sobel is forced to accompany Alfred Stern to Los Angeles to pay Boris Moros a visit.

The financier is determined to find out what his fortune has paid for. When the pair arrive, they're unpleasantly surprised. And when they finally come and see it, it's like, oh my God, what is this garbage? Boris had implied, and you can't spell that without lied, that he'd built an impressive recording studio with Stern's cash. The reality is otherwise.

It's like this old building with record pressing machines. It's not a recording studio, it's a record plant and it's an abandoned mattress factory.

Undeterred by his visitors' obvious displeasure, Moros doubles down. These things are all shellac. This is the war still. And they're already making vinyl records for the GIs, these things called V-disks. So they've already got the technology for vinyl records down. They just haven't started making them for the market. And he's going, we just need some more money. We start making vinyl. Vinyl is the future. And they don't care.

By now, Boris Moros had spent the better part of $200,000 of Stern's money.

It's hard to say if anybody ever actually got infiltrated. Officially, no one ever got infiltrated. That might not be the case. You can't believe the FBI on this sort of thing or KGB or anybody else. All the records are there. They're probably all lying. But this deal to smuggle in people never happens, apparently. It falls apart. It's now clear to all involved that Operation Cord has been a costly and embarrassing failure. Everybody else in the world does.

did something during World War II. Martha and her husband did not apparently do anything. So I wrote a book about them. Jack Sobel seeks permission to kill Operation Chord and gets it. Boris Moros is forced to pay Alfred Stern back to the tune of 100 grand. They go their separate ways, poorer and unhappier.

Now, surely the NKVD wouldn't touch an agent like Boris with a long stick after this debacle, right? Wrong, actually. He remains in their good graces. This is because both Vasilisa Rubin and Jack Sobel have been telling Moscow Central that he is worth keeping around. The reason for this is simple. Fear. See, Boris Moros claims to have a very powerful friend.

And he might even be telling the truth. Boris Moros is just not a very good agent. No matter what Zarubin was saying, they were making him up to be really the best. And he's actually not very good at all. The problem was Boris Moros had claimed that he and Beria had worked together in, I think, Baku in the 1920s.

That's Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's feared NKVD chief, and in his spare time, a monstrous serial killer. And apparently Beria believed that. He thought he had worked with him. So Boris Morozov was actually protected and Zerubin didn't want to mess with him for that reason.

Sobel knew Boris Moros was no good. He couldn't be trusted. And he actually, at one point, I think after that whole deal with Kordes was over and done with and settled, he requested permission to retire Boris Moros as an agent.

and he received permission. And almost as soon as he got the permission, an order came in saying, forget what we just said. That has been canceled. He is to stay. Sobel had heard the rumors about Moros' link to Barrier 2 and followed Zarubin's lead in only saying very nice things about him, regardless of his actual performance. So Moros was kept on the NKVD's books.

What happened to him next began with a friendship between two women. One of them was Martha Dodd, who I'm sure you've missed during her brief absence from the narrative. Only thing Martha does of any value in this whole post-Nazi Germany life of hers is become friends with a woman named Jane Foster. Martha and Jane had met in New York before America entered the war.

When the war starts, she went into the OSS and had already declared herself a communist, her willingness to be a Soviet agent. After the war, Martha renews their friendship and successfully re-recruits Jane Foster for the NKVD. Martha hands her off to Sobel. Jane and her husband, George, who works with US Army intelligence, make their home in Austria.

They quickly proved themselves to be incredibly effective spies. Moscow Center realized they finally hit gold. The NKVD want Jack Sobel to run these bright young agents.

But he'll need to be on the ground in Europe. And to do this, they buy him a boar bristle brush factory in France, where he can live and that'll finance his operation. And go wherever there are boar bristles, which is everywhere, and run this operation with these two crazy people. He goes there and hands the networks that he'd been running in America to Boris Moros. As far as Moscow is aware, Boris Moros is a safe pair of hands.

But Jack Sobel knows better. Before he leaves for Europe, the NKVD man offers Moros some words of encouragement. You're going to take over the network while I'm gone. And you better not screw up on me, damn it, Boris. You know, you better not. And it kind of lets him know that this thing could end up in a bullet in the back of your head if you mess me over. And for the first time, Boris Moros is worried about getting killed by the Russians.

Unbeknownst to Sobel, this is a bad time to put Moros on edge. It's now 1947, nearly four years since the Guver letter put him on the FBI's list of "ones to watch" in Hollywood. In that time, high-profile Russian defectors have confirmed director J. Edgar Hoover's suspicions that there are, in fact, "reds under the bed."

And so the investigation into the spy ring comprising Boris, Martha Dodd, Alfred Stern, Zarubin, Sobel and others becomes a priority for the embattled counterintelligence chief.

Sometime in 1947, he realizes that the investigation hasn't gotten anywhere in a long time, and he tells his field stations throughout America to get back there and go over what they have and maybe see what turns they have not really investigated. The Los Angeles field office looks at what they have, and there's Boris Moros, and they go, well, he knows a few things. They've investigated him a little bit already. They see that Moros is...

at least talking to. So they call him. It was during the summer in July or August 1947. They call him in just to see what he knows, maybe get him to talk. So they're not expecting much out of it. And what

What they don't realize is that Moros had been recently threatened by Jack Sobel before he leaves for Europe and the brush factory. And when the FBI suddenly shows up, he sees that as possible redemption. He drives down to the field office downtown and spills his guts. The interview goes on for four days. Moros has a lot to say.

Hoover is alerted, so is everybody else, that they suddenly have a major investigation. They call it the Moros case or Mo case. To this day, the Moros case files apparently make up hundreds of file cases of boxes, which are all still out of the hands of researchers. They're still classified. By the time Jack Sobel returned to the United States in late 1947, his network had been blown wide open.

Martha Dodd and her husband were put under constant surveillance. They expected to get cleaned up within a month because they knew these people were Soviet agents and nothing happened. As had been the case for so many years, Martha and Alfred simply weren't being utilized by Moscow. In truth, there was very little to surveil. They had the phones tapped constantly.

the mail tapped. It was an empty farmhouse adjoining their property that they would crawl into and spy on them. And Martha and her husband would have these dinner parties. If it was, you know, nice weather, people would be mostly outside and they'd be like looking at them and following them around. It was a very, very big operation. All those years, they didn't

This went on until 1953.

In the meantime, Boris Moros relished his new role as a counter-spy for the US government. Years later, he'd even write a book about it. Had Martha known, she might have felt vindicated. Martha always had her suspicions about him. He was just too, too, too, too. And she told that to Sobel, I believe. She wrote a letter to Zarubin to tell him her suspicions and said,

Both Sobel and Zarubin chose to ignore it. Now, Moros was providing the FBI with the means to crack down on the Soviet penetration of America. Hoover, I would probably say the FBI, knew from the get-go that this guy was a liar. He was an incredible fabulist, and they knew his testimony would never stand up in front of a jury. But in front of a grand jury? Eh, that's a different story. In front of Congress?

Bring him on! His stuff wasn't admissible. His stuff wouldn't stand up before a jury of people. But anything less than that, yeah, he could do his song and dance and people would eat it right up. And Hoover used him to provide evidence to a grand jury and to Congress, and they ate it up, and Hoover ultimately widened this very narrow court order

for surveillance and for bugging and wiretapping martha and her husband they widened it basically to include anybody he was left-wing in america not just other communists other socialists anybody to the left to the till of the hun and this was the beginning of the the red scare had been going on but the real mccarthy what we call the real mccarthy you know terror really started then

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The House Un-American Activities Commission, or HUAC, wasn't actually run by Senator Joe McCarthy, but it did share his values. Communists and subversives of all stripes were to be identified and expunged.

Who is extremely opportunistic because it's all congressmen that got to get reelected in two years. So the committee in Congress starts thinking about calling Martha and her husband up to testify. And Hoover is very worried about that because that's going to blow what he thinks he's got going.

Unfortunately for Hoover, that particular cat is all but a whisker out of the bag. There are gossip columns in the newspaper that keep mentioning Martha and Alfred. Then this column called the Lion's Den suggests the daughter of an important American ambassador, former American ambassador, is expected to get called up to testify before the congressional committee. And when Martha and Alfred see this, they realize the jig is up.

It's the summer of 53, and Martha Dodd is finally getting a taste of the excitement she's been missing since her return from Berlin. They turn around, buy two station wagons loaded with all their stuff, as much of the stuff as they can, and using their African-American servant as one of the drivers, drives down to Mexico right under the noses of the FBI. So over the Fourth of July weekend, maybe the FBI was a little light there at the time. We don't know, but they completely miss it.

and don't find out about it until they're photographed outside of Mexico City. With their money, they buy a plot next to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo's house. And that attracts the FBI, and people start noticing that there appears to be FBI agents doing either surveillance on Frida Kahlo or their new neighbors, the Stearns. Of course, if that was so, the FBI would be out of their jurisdiction.

So they do their best to bring Martha and her husband to court by the book. The couple had no intention of obliging them. They had actually been presented with subpoenas and they'd fought the subpoenas for a while and the government had to come back to them and give them both subpoenas and money, like $1,200 to pay for air tickets so they can come to Washington. And they take the money and I'm sure spend it on something.

Living it up among artists, Hollywood exiles and other interesting people in Mexico City, Martha and Alfred must have felt pretty good about getting one over on Uncle Sam.

But they knew they were on borrowed time. One of the communist American exiles living there, he was wanted for his association with the Rosenbergs or something. And they just sent in the Federales who grabbed him, stuck him in the trunk of a car, drove him to the Texas border, where he was handed over to the FBI, I'm sure for a goodly amount of money. So the Sterns were afraid that this was going to happen to them. By 1957, this scenario was starting to look more and more likely.

The Moe case investigation, still ongoing, had gathered enough evidence to arrest Jack Sobel and his wife back in the States. Martha felt the net closing in.

They realize they're going to get kidnapped. And the FBI starts another little effort about kidnapping them. And they start planning something. And sympathetic ears in the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico let the Sterns know about it. Word gets out. They buy passports, Paraguayan passports, and one day fly out to Prague via, I think, Montreal and appear in Prague, denounce America and praise Czechoslovakia's commitment to freedom of

Prague was never supposed to be permanent. Martha and Alfred did their best to move to Moscow. But despite all her years of service and devotion, the Soviet authorities turned her away. The Sterns were too decadent, too American for the country they had sworn themselves to.

They give her a big welcome, but they won't give them citizenship. They try to get permission for them to go to China. Martha and Alfred believed that China had the same basic climate as Mexico. And so they'd want to move to China. And the Chinese are going like, who are these people? We don't know them. No, they can visit, but they cannot live here. We're not going to give them citizenship.

And ultimately, they go back to Prague and they don't really like it, but they had a house offered to them on a very friendly basis, a very nice house. So they bought this house. They were miserable. They couldn't make any friends. Everywhere they went, they had lots of friends because they were fun people. They liked to drink. They liked to party. And they could not connect with anybody in Czechos.

In 1963, the pair up sticks to Castro's Cuba, which was much more to their liking. But five years later, near the end of that turbulent decade, they found themselves flying back east. First thing, they flew back by way of Moscow. They landed in Moscow and Moscow had changed so much since they'd last been there. It's 1968.

And the communist dream is on its long march to total collapse. They were just appalled at how bad it was, what a complete hole it was, how the Russian people were just complete pigs about everything. And everybody was doing dirty work. Everybody was like trying to get money. Everybody was searching for dollars in Deutschmarks. And they hated it. They just absolutely were disgusted with Russia. And they went back to Prague.

Prague, likewise, is in a state of upheaval. Young people have taken to the streets, demanding a kinder, gentler socialism. For diehard Stalinists like Martha, this felt like a betrayal. The Prague Spring, which had just started when they got there, they were appalled by that. There was all this, I guess, debauchery. Somebody else's debauchery didn't please them necessarily, so they didn't like it.

Eventually, Moscow sends in tanks to stamp out the unrest. Martha and Alfred are oblivious until a phone call from a relative tips them off. And they open up their windows and they can hear the sound of armored vehicles going down the street. 82 people were killed in the Prague Spring, with hundreds more injured. They are appalled by it. The times were changing, and so was Martha Dodd.

Martha had by chance met this woman named Rita Klimova, who was a former Stalinist economist from a family of economists. And she and they had all had their road to Damascus moments and they realized this was bad. They stopped supporting socialist economics as they knew it.

and lost their careers, and she got relegated to crummy pickup editorial jobs. Somehow, she and Martha got to know each other and became friends and was probably Martha's only friend. And she apparently talked Martha down, and that's when Martha started, in a sense, opposing communism and realizing that she'd made a mistake being a Stalinist.

In an impressive about-face, she even becomes a secret benefactor to the underground resistance movement that Rita Klimova is part of. But one revolution has already been crushed. Another one could be a long time coming. Right now, Martha wants out of Prague. Their friends in America that they stay in touch with, she maintains a lot of correspondence. Some of her friends, she has a couple of lawyers that are

trying to talk the administration into like cutting them some slack and coming up with a settlement, a way of dealing with them. And under the Nixon administration, it was like nothing. But then Carter becomes president and it starts changing a little bit. And this congressman named Don Edwards works out a deal with the Justice Department. In 1979, more than 20 years after they fled the USA,

Martha and Alfred travel to a beach town in Slovenia. They leave their sandals at home. This is business. They are met by a group of men from the Justice Department and FBI. And for several days in this beach town, they question them and they spill their guts as much as they can. They tell them what they know, though they swear they never did. And a

A couple of months later, President Carter basically offers them a pardon and the charges against them are now dropped. Also, there's a recognition that the people who could testify against them, like Boris Moros, they're all dead. Everybody's dead. There's no point in continuing it. The Sterns were free to return to the USA. And they would have, if only they hadn't been greedy. Remember those subpoenas in Mexico?

The tax issues are massive. Having taken the government money for their plane flight back to America from Mexico, they owe that back. And over 20, 30 years, it's become a considerable amount of money. Plus their taxes, which he hasn't paid. So they actually owe probably more money than he has. And they realize they can't go back to America as much as they're dying to. They're extremely homesick. They can't.

The Stearns never returned to America. In 1986, Alfred dies of cancer and their English-speaking secretary retires soon after that, Mrs. Sparileva, and she's just left alone.

in this big house with servants who can't speak English. She can't speak Czech. And her life just stops moving, except for letters to people. The letters you see from them is she's just, every day is nothing. She's lonely. She's bored. There's nothing going on. Like I say, the secretary is retired. The lawyer puts an ad in the paper for a new secretary. It shows up in the classifieds of Mladá Franta Dines.

The ad is answered by a lady called Dora Slaba. We met her in part one of this story. A few years later, she'll be Brendan's colleague at an American newspaper in Prague and give him his first glimpse inside the life of Martha Dodd. But right now, Dora's looking for any job that will get her out of her current one, translating academic texts into English. She gets the gig.

and finds that her new boss can be as infuriating as her old one was dull. Three years later, the Iron Curtain is on the brink of collapse, and Martha, Dora notes, appears to be up to something. March 1989, it's the year of revolution.

And Dora knows about that occasionally, very occasionally, Rita Klimova comes over for something. One of the things is that every week Martha gets a copy of People Magazine and the Sunday New York Times appear, usually like Tuesday mornings in the mail, but won't let Dora touch either of them. Dora really wants to look at the New York Times, the Sunday New York Times.

It's for the revolution. It's for the resistance. And every week, either Rita Klimova comes or sends somebody to pick it up. So she never gets to touch it, which fuels her resentment further. And Rita Klimova views Dora as...

Probably STB, which is a pretty fair assumption. Dora knows that she and Klimova are planning something or they're discussing things out of her earshot. In November, the Velvet Revolution sweeps through Czechoslovakia. Decades of totalitarian rule are over in what feels like an instant. Following a final disagreement with her employer, Dora has left Martha Dodd's service.

Months after the revolution, she hears from Martha at one point and Martha calls her up and just asks about something. And they just chat for a few minutes and it's all kind of friendly. And she explains to Dora that she, yeah, she's got a secretary who speaks English. And she says, after a fashion and they, you know, they talk for a few minutes and it's over.

And the revolution and the end of communist rule really hasn't affected Martha at all. Except now more people are coming to her door. All these American journalists, they had been chewing up through the 80s. People hoping to get an interview with her.

And they show up at her door and Martha turns them all away. For years she wanted publicity. It's over. It's too late. She doesn't want it. First of all, most of the historian types, historians, they all want to know who she had sex with. That was never what she did. She never kissed and told. About the only real change in Martha's life, which had never been austere, was that the white secret police car semi-permanently stationed outside her house was gone.

Months later, in August 1990, nine months after the revolution, word comes out that she has died. It makes the papers. It's announced on Czech television and on a lot of front end, the Czech papers. It makes the American papers. Her obit shows up in the New York Times. People mostly don't know what they've never heard of her. When you think about Cold War and McCarthy era, she's not one of the names that comes to mind at all. She just got marginalized a long time ago.

One day, months and months later, Dora is at her home in Zhishkov, and she runs into Honza, of all things, on the street. Honza had been Martha's driver. He was also, it had to be said, very cozy with the STB surveillance team. And, you know, Honza brings up, I'm going to hear about the old lady dying. It's too bad, da-da-da. And then he says to her, you want to hear what really happened? And Dora's like, what? What really happened was that those STB guys, the boys...

heard she had gold, and they were now out of jobs, and the STB was disbanded. And one night, they broke in and robbed her. They found out she didn't have any gold, and they left her tied up on the floor. And it wasn't until the next day that the maid came in, they find her on the floor, they call the ambulance, and she never recovered. She died. So the same STB guys who had been guarding her all those years had come back and this time robbed her and basically inadvertently killed her.

It was a sad end for a woman who had, for all her faults, lived a remarkable life. It had followed the arc of the 20th century's great themes: the rise of fascism and its defeat, the drawing of the Iron Curtain and its collapse. Along the way, she'd had a lot of fun, achieved a little, and stayed rich throughout. It really wasn't all bad. Brendan McNally has complex feelings about his subject.

I'm sorry, but she was a lightweight. Kind of respected because she wouldn't bend until the very, very end. I respect the fact that she had her road to Damascus moment and actually kind of did something about it. But that's the thing about true spies. They're human, after all. Martha Dodd was no exception. If you'd like to make your own mind up about her, you can pick up a copy of Traitor's Odyssey by Brendan McNally, available now.

Join us next time for another dangerous liaison with 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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Exiles are a very good group of people to think about when it comes to espionage because exiles are of course expelled from the territory where they've been living because they have committed some sort of crime and now they are expelled from that territory and they need money. And so one way of sustaining their life is to go and say to another ruler I have information that you want

But then what is really interesting is that most exiles, of course, make their way back to the territory where they've come from. And very frequently when they come back, they say, I know quite a lot about this territory where I've been living. And I can tell you about all of his troops and how he trains them and where he keeps his ships and everything else. True Spies, The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.

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