Martha Dodd
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Martha Eccles Dodd (1908 - 1990) (Soviet code name LIZA) was the daughter of William Dodd, who served as the United States ambassador to Germany between 1933 and 1937. Dodd was later accused of being a Soviet spy.
Martha Dodd was born in Ashland, Virginia. She was in her early twenties when she accompanied her father to Berlin, and initially supported the Nazi government of the time. As the daughter of a foreign ambassador, she made a number of friends in high circles, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, an aide to Adolf Hitler, reportedly tried to encourage a romantic relationship between Hitler and Dodd. Dodd is alleged to have had numerous relationships while in Berlin, including with Ernst Udet (a senior Luftwaffe officer) and Louis Ferdinand.
As time passed, however, Dodd changed her views on the Nazis, and an earlier admiration of Hitler faded. Some sources describe her as becoming distraught and hysterical, and it was reported at the time that she made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.
Dodd then became active in left-wing politics after entering into a romantic relationship with Boris Vinogradov, a Soviet intelligence official. Dodd fell in love with Vinogradov, and the two even wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin for permission to marry. Through Vinogradov, Martha Dodd decided to assist the Soviet Union and offered her services to the Russians, becoming an agent-recruiter for the NKVD. Dodd also opened her father’s mail and passed it on to the Russians, along with other information she was able to garner through her love affairs and embassy gatherings. Vinogradov was later executed by Stalin, according to some sources because he had been hopelessly compromised by Dodd as susceptible to foreign influences. Dodd returned to the United States when her father resigned his position in 1937. She later wrote a book about her life in Germany, Through Embassy Eyes.
Dodd is believed to have encouraged or recruited several U.S. employees from the OSS and other U.S. agencies into espionage work for the Soviet Union, including the 1938 recruitment of OSS officer Jane Foster Zlatovski and her husband, George Zlatovski.
In 1939, Dodd married Alfred Stern, a wealthy investment broker, later identifed as a member of the Soble ring. She was associated with Vassili Zubilin, a diplomat at the Soviet embassy and a covert NKVD agent. In 1957, after the exposure by Boris Morros of the Soble spy network, Dodd and her husband were accused of being Soviet spies, and they fled to Prague, in Czechoslovakia, via Cuba. Charges against Martha were dropped in 1979. They remained there for the rest of their lives. Dodd died in 1990.
[edit] References
- Haynes, John Earl, and Klehr, Harvey, Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics, Cambridge University Press (2006)
- Haynes, John Earl & Klehr, Harvey Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999).
