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. Upon review of Soviet Intelligence/NKVD files in years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, evidence came to light that William E. Dodd, Jr., Martha Dodd, and her husband Alfred Stern, were Soviet assets in the years leading up to and during World War II, as well as during the height of the Cold War.
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.
In March 1934 the Soviet NKVD Center wrote to their Berlin Station the following:
"Let Boris Vinogradov know that we want to use him for the realization of an affair we are interested in.....According to our data, the mood of his acquaintance (Martha Dodd) is quite ripe for finally drawing her into our work."
NKVD Center soon became dissatisfied with Vinogradov's developmental handling of Martha. He was subsequently recalled to Moscow and eventually murdered during the Soviet military/intel purges of the 1930s; of course news of his demise was kept from Martha. NKVD center then put in place a new officer (operating under journalist cover, Izvestia) tasked with handling Martha. This new officer, Bukhartsev, successfully ran Martha until 1937, with her responding directly to NKVD tasking. She reported on secret US Embassy and State Dept business, reporting in detail on her father's reports to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Upon conclusion of her father's tour in 1938, she was picked up by the Soviet Station in New York city, being handled by NKVD Illegals Officer Itzhak Akhmerov.
In the summer of 1938 Martha married New York millionaire Alfred Stern, a wealthy investment broker who was later identified as a member of the Soble ring. Stern was at that time keen on becoming an American Ambassador and curried favor with the Democratic party (Martha made comments to her then handler that Stern was prepared to offer the Democratic party $50,000 to sway securing an Ambassador's posting, though he never received an appointment). By 1941, under Martha's tutelage her husband had become an active member of the Communist Party and several Communist-front organizations. In a 5 February 1942 letter to her Soviet contacts, Martha explained that she thought it would be a significant mistake to not bring on board her husband. At that time Stern reportedly had no idea of his wife's collusion with Soviet intelligence (then the NKGB). By March of that year Martha received Soviet permission to approach her husband on this matter. She soon reported that her husband responded with enthusiasm, stating, "he wanted to do something immediately. He felt he had many contacts that could be valuable in this sort of work." Most notably, Stern's primary contribution to the Soviet effort was his role in organizing a music publishing house which served as a cover employer for Soviet illegals (similar to NOCs) operating in the U.S. Stern's partners in this effort were the New York NKGB Station chief Vassily Zarubin and low-level Hollywood producer and NKGB asset Boris Morros (who was eventually recruited by the FBI and later actually testified in an FBI investigation of Martha and her husband after they had fled to Czechoslovakia).
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. A KGB document dated October 1975 noted that the Sterns spent 1963-1970 in Cuba. Life behind the iron curtain eventually proved to not measure up to the Stern's communist idealism, and in the 1970's an American attorney (under close KGB scrutiny) began attempts to negotiate a return to the US for the Sterns. These efforts proved unsuccessful. 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. She was associated with Vassili Zubilin, a diplomat at the Soviet embassy and a covert NKVD agent. Charges against Martha were dropped in 1979. Dodd died in 1990.
[edit] Works
- Dodd, Martha (1939). Through embassy eyes. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. OCLC 1331853.
- Dodd, William Edward; Martha Dodd; Charles Austin Beard (1941). Ambassador Dodd's diary, 1933-1938. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.. OCLC 395068.
[edit] References
- Haynes, John Earl; Harvey Klehr (2006). Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521857383. OCLC 70986245.
- Haynes, John Earl; Harvey Klehr (1999). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300077711. OCLC 40396483.
- Weinstein, Allen; Aleksander Vasiliev (1999). The Haunted Wood. New York: Modern Library. ISBN 0375755365. OCLC 43680047.
- The family/espionage information is derived from the following Soviet NKVD, NKGB, KGB files: 14449, 35112, 3463, 43173.
