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. Lavrentiy Beria sent news of her recruitment to Stalin himself.

Martha’s entry into the world of espionage came several months after she accompanied her parents and younger brother to Berlin and quickly began cutting a romantic and sexual swath through its social scene. An occasional newspaper writer, she had few accomplishments to boast about—other than her willingness to sleep with any man whom she ran across. In America she had bedded Carl Sandburg and Stephen Vincent Benét. In Germany she turned her sights on political figures.

Vain, rash, and politically naïve, she had very public affairs with a variety of diplomats and several high-ranking Nazis, most notably Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo. He was only one of her conquests; when Thomas Wolfe visited Berlin, Martha latched onto him. Wolfe wrote his editor Maxwell Perkins that "Martha is like a butterfly, hovering around my penis."

Vinogradov soon won her affections, and she professed undying love for him, even indulging in the fantasy of marriage. She requested permission for the Soviet government to allow it. (He was already married and frustrated that his bosses encouraged her fantasies. Even after he was transferred out of Germany and later sent to the Gulag, the Soviets had him write letters from prison to keep her on the hook.)

After returning to America Martha wrote two bestsellers, an edited version of her father’s diplomatic diaries, and a sanitized account of her Berlin adventures (Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933–1938 and Through Embassy Eyes). Anxious to resume her work for the Soviets, she was frustrated by delays in assigning her a case officer; purges of the intelligence agencies had reduced the availability of the NKVD staff in New York. And, without any access to secrets, she had little of value to impart. Plans to have her get close to Eleanor Roosevelt went nowhere.

The Soviet contacts she did have were frequently hard put to control her exuberance. Although warned to keep her distance from left-wing organizations and individuals, she gravitated to them. On her own she told her new husband, Alfred Stern, about her recruitment by the NKVD and proudly informed the secret police that he had agreed to work with her. Stern was wealthy, having extracted a million dollars after his divorce from a Sears Roebuck heiress, and the couple lived an extravagant lifestyle. Martha explained that their goal was to contribute enough money to the Roosevelt campaign that he would become ambassador to the USSR. Like most of her fantasies, it did not happen.

She did recruit one friend, Jane Foster, a socialite who had joined the CPUSA after living with her wealthy husband in Indonesia for several years. Foster managed to snag a position in the OSS, and her second husband, a Lincoln Brigade veteran, worked for U.S. military counterintelligence in Europe. But most of Martha’s suggestions for people to recruit were quickly rejected by the NKVD as unsuitable. The Sterns did become very friendly with former vice president Henry Wallace, who owned a farm near theirs in Connecticut. She threw herself into his 1948 presidential campaign and pleaded with the NKVD to give her guidance on what she should put in his speeches, a plea that apparently went unheeded. Oddly, McNally claims that as secretary of agriculture in the 1930s, Wallace was, after FDR himself, the second-most powerful man in Washington.

The one concrete action the Sterns took to assist Soviet intelligence turned into a fiasco. In the early 1930s, Vasily Zarubin, a high-ranking NKVD officer, offered Boris Morros, a B-list Hollywood musical producer, the opportunity to send aid packages to relatives in Russia in return for providing him with credentials as a representative of Paramount Studios in Germany as a cover for his espionage there.

When he returned to the United States in 1941 as station chief in Washington, Zarubin concocted a scheme to have Morros set up a music business that would provide covers for foreign communists to enter the United States. In return, Morros’s father was allowed to emigrate. The money for the venture came from Alfred Stern. Morros, however, was an accomplished scamster and spent the money on another business; most of it was frittered away, resulting in a protracted dispute between him and Stern. Recalled to Moscow, Zarubin turned the fractious duo over to Jack Soble, who oversaw several low-level Soviet spies, mostly specializing in infiltrating Trotskyist and Jewish organizations. Unbeknownst to Soble and the Sterns, however, Morros had agreed to assist the FBI. After several years during which it dutifully tracked his agent network the government arrested most of them in 1957.

By this time, the Sterns had left the United States to avoid a congressional subpoena, settling in Mexico. Concerned that their indictments would be followed by extradition on espionage charges, they decamped to Czechoslovakia, where their wealth allowed them to live a luxurious lifestyle. Despite efforts to move to Moscow, they were rebuffed. For several years they lived in a penthouse in a Havana hotel before returning to Prague, where they lived isolated, depressed lives (McNally argues that Martha was sympathetic to and financially supported Czech dissidents after the 1968 Soviet invasion). They enlisted an American congressman to help them come back to America and even met with the FBI; their indictments were eventually dropped but they opted to remain in Czechoslovakia. Alfred died in 1986; Martha survived until 1990.

Curiously, McNally never mentions one remarkable discussion that is amply documented in a source he used. After debriefing Martha and hearing about her "International Brigade" of lovers in Berlin, an American courier wrote to Moscow that he gave her a lecture on "middle class morals, proletarian morals, when sex is permissible in our kind of work, when not. … I lectured on more than I knew."

McNally is also not an entirely reliable guide to Soviet espionage. The FBI’s investigation of the Comintern Apparatus started in 1943, not 1945. He hints that Zarubin’s efforts to have Morros set up a music business were linked somehow to obtaining information on the atomic bomb. He also claims Zarubin instructed Steve Nelson about the need to gain sources in Berkeley’s Radiation Lab in April 1943 but Nelson had been working on atomic espionage for several years before that. Neither Morros nor Stern had anything to do with atomic espionage and including this speculation is a distraction. McNally also claims that NKVD spymaster Elizabeth Bentley had been running "the Sound," Moscow Center’s name "for its American sources." But "Sound" was Jacob Golos’s code name, not that of his ring. Nor was the Sterns’ Mexican friend Morton Halperin (a State Department official involved in the investigation of the Pentagon Papers leak), but Maurice Halperin.

Martha Stern’s amateurish efforts at espionage are testimony to the foolishness and stupidity of a political idiot. Soviet intelligence was tantalized by the possibility of using her wealth and society connections to gather information but eventually learned it was a fool’s errand. The FBI happily used her incompetence to roll up a minor Soviet spy ring that was more focused on disrupting anti-Communist dissidents than obtaining sensitive information.

While Martha and Alfred never went to prison for their activities, they were forced to spend decades living in unhappy exile in the miserable Communist countries they had once imagined to be paradises. While they never served time in jail, that was a small measure of justice for their activities.

Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage
by Brendan McNally
Icon Books, 384 pp., £25

Harvey Klehr is the author of numerous books and articles on communism and Soviet espionage.