If Martha Dodd Stern had been a minimally important or competent Soviet spy, her story would make a rip-roaring Hollywood movie. But despite Brendan McNally’s effort to inflate the damage she did to American interests—Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage—the fact remains that her career as a spy was relatively brief and largely unsuccessful. Soviet intelligence agencies had high hopes for her, mostly because of her society connections, but were disappointed enough that they eventually tried their best to fob her off on other communist countries.

Even calling her a traitor vastly misstates what she did. Martha never gave aid and comfort to enemies of the United States. Her most sustained assistance to the Soviet Union came in the mid-1930s when she regularly ransacked the Berlin office of her father, William Dodd, FDR’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, and handed confidential memos and letters to her lover, a low-level Soviet diplomat and KGB foot-soldier named Boris Vinogradov. It was surely espionage, but hardly treason. The Soviets were impressed, however. Lavrenti Beria sent news of her recruitment to Stalin himself.

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