Journalist and author Brendan McNally joins the Plutopia podcast this time as we discuss his latest book, Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage, which tells the story of Martha Dodd, the daughter of an American ambassador in 1930s Berlin who became a Soviet spy. McNally spent years researching declassified CIA files and interviewing people with knowledge of Martha and her amazing story. McNally reveals how Dodd’s promiscuous entanglements with Nazi elites and later a Soviet diplomat drew her into espionage, leading to years of FBI surveillance, a failed spy career, and an absurd exile in Communist Prague. His meticulous research, drawing on declassified CIA, FBI, KGB, and Venona project files, plus interviews with old spies and exiles, paints a darkly comic portrait of espionage driven by flawed, colorful personalities.
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Brendan McNally:
I found what was essentially a hot babes of the Third Reich website where somebody had devoted a whole website to Nazi girlfriends and wives and mistresses, and there she was, Martha Dodd. And as it turned out, she had been lovers with so many different Nazis, it would make your head spin — including the head of the Gestapo. And similar along the line, she fell in love with a Russian diplomat who turned out to be a Soviet spy, and he recruited her for the Soviet intelligence. For a year or two, she was Stalin’s top gal, top spy in Berlin.