Traitor's Odyssey E-Book

Brendan McNally

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 677

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A delicious, gossipy and thoroughly engaging romp ... heartily recommended.' Tim Tate, author of Hitler's British Traitors and The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold 'A captivating page-turner ...' Helen Fry, author of Women in Intelligence Ambassador's daughter, Nazi love interest, Soviet spy, FBI most wanted. Accompanying her parents to Berlin in the 1930s, Martha Dodd knew almost nothing about Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. Yet almost overnight, she stepped into the spotlight, and found herself at the over-heated centre of Hitler's 'New Germany', befriending and dating several high-ranking Nazis, including the head of the Gestapo. An affair with a dashing Russian diplomat saw her recruited as a spy, and so began a long and tumultuous career in both Berlin and America, including attempts to infiltrate First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's inner circle and playing a key role in Henry Wallace's disastrous 1948 presidential campaign. Betrayed by a Hollywood-hustler-turned-double-agent, Martha spent years under deep FBI surveillance - escaping twice - and went to ground in Cold War Prague, sad, lonely, rich and bored, living out her final decades in a Communist Sunset Boulevard. Largely forgotten, Martha Dodd began to emerge as an iconic historical figure in the early 2000s. While her scandalous behaviour and pro-Soviet leanings were never much in dispute, the actual matter of her guilt remained unresolved. Now, using recently released KGB archived information and FBI files, author and journalist Brendan McNally sets the record straight in Traitor's Odyssey, telling the full epic tale of Martha Dodd's life for the first time, casting her in a new and bright light.

Leseprobe

 

To Absent Friends

 

 

Published in the UK in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-032-2

eBook: 978-183773-074-2

Text copyright © 2024 Brendan McNally

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

CONTENTS

Preface

1.The Flying Hamburger

2.Skin in the Game

3.The Anna Rath Incident

4.The Devil You Know

5.Martha, the Fuhrer Needs a Wife

6.Iron Boots

7.Gestapo to the Rescue

8.The Man Who Knew Too Much

9.Recruits and ‘Iron Boots’

10.Rumors of a Coup

11.About Boris Morros

12.Night of the Long Knives

13.Jazz Records for Molotov

14.Zarubin in Manhattan

15.Suspicions

16.‘To Martha, My Wife!’

17.A Wolfe and a Bullitt

18.Replacing the New Case Officer

19.The Wife of a Wealthy Man

20.From ‘Boy’ to ‘President’

21.Dithering through the War Years

22.Enter Jane Foster

23.Meeting the New Business Partners

24.The New Case Officer

25.Life After Wartime

26.Fun with Jane and George

27.A Bristle Brush Factory in France

28.Soble Goes to Meet Zarubin

29.The World According to Ilo

30.A Little Weekend Bash

31.Someplace Nice for Lunch

32.Informants

33.A Turn for the Worse

34.Down Mexico Way

35.Prague

36.Six Months of Revisionist Debauchery

37.The Pink Lady

38.On the Good Ship Lollypop

39.A Death in Prague

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

PREFACE

I first learned about Martha Dodd during the summer of 1992. I was living in Prague and writing for one of the two ‘American’ newspapers which had popped up following the end of communist rule two-and-a-half years earlier. I had gone there because, for some reason, covering the Pentagon for industry newsletters was suddenly no longer fun or, for that matter, going anywhere. I knew if I was ever going to fulfill my dream of working abroad as a ‘foreign correspondent’, I’d either have to do it now or go and do what most of the people I’d worked with had already done and go into public relations. So I went.

It was in July or August, during what the Czechs call ‘Cucumber Season’, when absolutely nothing was going on. Everyone in Prague was at their summer houses, tending their gardens and sitting around their campfires at night, drinking wine, roasting sausages and singing songs. It oddly didn’t matter that Czechoslovakia, their nation, was at that moment being split apart. It didn’t matter because it was summer and everybody was on holiday. But the newspaper wasn’t on holiday and neither was I, at least not if I intended to eat during the following month. I needed to find some stories to report.

The Prague Post had its offices one block off of Wenceslas Square in a run-down, five-storey building, which was now headquarters for what remained of the Communist Party. Being now just a shadow of its former self, the Party had vacant office space they were willing to rent out to anybody with dollars or deutschmarks. We had a corridor with windows on one side looking out onto the courtyard. At the end was a large room used by the editors and advertising people. One door up from it was a small room with windows that looked out onto the side of a building, a bank of computers taking up half the wall, where it met with a bank of eight-foot wooden cabinets, half with bookshelves and drawers and where everyone kept their coats and bags. Occupying the center of the room was a rectangular wooden table with six chairs and a single red plastic telephone. This was where the freelancers worked.

At any given moment during the day, there’d be five or six of us sitting around the table with the red phone and one of the translators, taking turns calling different ministries and offices, hoping the translator could connect us and line up interviews for stories we were working on. On rare occasions, the person on the other end might directly answer questions the translator posed, but usually they’d want us to come to their offices and talk with them over coffee. This was, after all, Central Europe.

The freelancers would get their story ideas either by listening to the translators read out relevant articles they’d picked from Czech newspapers, which happened each morning at nine, or by combing the papers themselves and looking for interesting items and then getting them translated for us. If something sounded promising, we’d copy down the particulars, run it by the editor and then go to the big table with the red plastic telephone, wait our turn and try our luck. To call the process Darwinian would be an understatement. Most freelancers were gone after a day or a week. But some developed a feel for it and stayed on.

The translators were mostly kids; students or just out, and mostly, but not always from Prague. Running them was Dora Slaba, an old lady with a British accent who spoke many languages and was the head of research at the Prague Post. Not everyone liked Dora. Some said she was two-faced and backhanded and unfairly played favorites among the reporters, canning translators whenever she felt like it. One whom Dora fired told me afterwards he was sure Dora was StB. He might have been right. He’d grown up in Canada and said he’d learned to spot them at his dad’s printing plant back in Toronto, which was staffed entirely by emigres. There was a saying I’d heard a couple of the older Press Club-types say: ‘Never trust anyone who speaks English,’ and there was a certain amount of truth to it. Me, I could never figure any of it out, but Dora was always nice to me, maybe because she enjoyed the questions I would throw at her. She also liked the Chinese girl from Harvard and the kid from Philadelphia who was also a busker on Charles Bridge.

That morning in question, Petra was the translator at the table. Petra had dyed-black hair and was a skate punk. Her father, it later turned out, was in the Communist Party Central Committee. But that morning Petra was my only means to get an interview. I explained that the guy I needed to talk to was with the Agricultural Chamber, the professional organisation of farmers. I held the phone and carefully punched in the number, then listened to it ring. When someone on the other end picked up, I said ‘moment, prosim’ and handed the phone to Petra, who then rattled off something to the guy on the other end, then paused as she listened to what he had to say. Then, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she told me he’d said that if I wanted to come over to his office at two, he could talk to me for twenty minutes, but that I’d need a translator since he didn’t speak English. Petra indicated she could do it for me, so I was all set. I got up from the table and let someone else take my chair, as I went to find the business editor.

Noon came and Petra went off to lunch. By 1.45, she still hadn’t returned. I mentioned it to Dora. She looked at the clock and asked where the interview was. When I told her between Wenceslas and Vodickova, four minutes away on foot, Dora decided she’d do it. So we went.

The head of the Agricultural Chamber said he didn’t know where Czech agriculture was heading, but he knew what the key issues and the challenges were. Dora translated as he spoke and I scribbled everything down as best I could. When it was over and we’d said goodbye and were making our way back to the office, I knew I had most of what I needed for a story. It would not be anything special, but it would feed me and keep me in beer for a while.

As we crossed Wenceslas, I noticed a McDonald’s had just opened a few doors up from the bottom of the square. There was even a fenced-off area set up with outside tables. Feeling expansive, I asked Dora if she’d let me buy her a Big Mac. I could tell the idea amused her on a number of levels. Still, she hesitated. ‘Come on, Dora,’ I said. ‘Let’s live a little!’ Dora shook her head, rolled her eyes and gave a what-the-hell shrug.

I ordered us both Big Mac meals, and as we carried our trays outside, Dora commented that her two grandchildren had been badgering her to take them to the McDonald’s on Vodickova, which, coincidentally, had opened on the same day I’d arrived. As we sat down at one of the outside tables, Dora observed, half-sarcastically, that it was ‘just like a café on a Parisian boulevard’. With that in mind, she was suddenly in no hurry to eat up and go quickly back to the office. Instead, we spent nearly an hour there at our rickety table, leisurely chatting over our trays of empty food wrappers. Dora asked me what it was like being an industry reporter at the Pentagon, saying that it all sounded very exciting. It wasn’t, I told her, and explained how my time had mainly been spent reporting ‘programmatics’, like the Navy’s UYS-2 Enhanced Modular Signal Processor, and the SQQ-89 sonar and a dozen other new systems that all depended on the UYS-2 to work. As I expected, her eyes glazed over, so I changed the subject and asked, innocuously, how she’d come by her British accent. Was she English or Czech?

Dora explained that she wasn’t a Czech at all, but a Jew from what had once been called the Sudetenland and that her first language was German. In her hometown of Usti nad Labem, besides her family and the tiny handful of Jews living there, everyone else was a Nazi. She was six when the Nazis came in and took over. Because her father had a business partner in London, her family were able to flee to England, where they ended up spending the war. Dora loved their time in England, stayed afterward and might have stayed permanently, had it not been for the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948: Dora’s mother, who had gone socialist, declared they must return to Czechoslovakia and be part of the revolution. So they went back. It was a big mistake. Their home was blown up and flattened along with everything else in Usti. Everyone they’d ever known there, Jew or Nazi, was gone – dead or expelled. They found the revolution that was taking place extremely unappealing. People didn’t like them for being both German and Jewish. They tried to go back to England, but found they couldn’t. They were stuck.

They settled in Prague; her parents found jobs and somewhere to live. Dora and her sister went to school, took crash courses in Czech and became fluent. By the time she got into university, she was already working part-time doing announcing and other voicework for Radio Prague’s English-language service. Then it became full-time. She did that for fifteen years, from the early 1950s until the mid to late 1960s. Even though the job paid the same as everyone else’s, it came with numerous benefits, so by all standards, she was doing a little better than some people, but certainly nothing to show off about.

Dora said that for most of the 1950s, everything was pretty harsh with all the show trials, and all the denunciations and witch-hunts of communists against communists. Many were tried and executed, a lot of them Jews. Dora kept her head down and didn’t overreach or offend anyone. Stalin died. Shortly thereafter so did Klement Gottwald. He was replaced by a succession of colourless leaders and things became gradually less harsh. The secret police and the goons were still around, but as time passed the chest-beating faded away. It was mainly a question of keeping your mouth shut, and not going around asking any questions. And Dora did that very ably until one day in August of 1968.

Dora told me she’d always thought the Prague Spring was going to be trouble. It had been obvious from the beginning that the big boys in Moscow didn’t like it and weren’t going to put up with it for very long. Above almost everything, communist bosses do not like anybody challenging them on anything, and the Czechs, with their flowers and talk of love and free speech and ‘socialism with a human face’, were doing just that. They knew if they let the Czechs get away with it, it would spread like mould to Poland and Hungary and East Germany, then, what, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus? Russia itself? The republics? You began to understand that the people in charge were thugs and goons, and that thugs and goons all act the same way to anyone weaker challenging them. They come down hard. And they did.

She remembered looking out the window of her flat in the middle of the night and seeing an endless stream of two-engine aircraft roaring overhead, obviously flying into Ruzyne airport, which was normally shut down at that hour. The aircraft were Russian, filled with assault troops, along with jeeps and light tanks. At the same time, thousands of Russian, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian tanks along with hundreds of thousands of soldiers were pouring into Czechoslovakia, all believing they were there to liberate their Czech and Slovak brothers and sisters from the clutches of the capitalist revisionists.

Dora told me how she turned on the radio and what she heard on the air was her colleagues, broadcasting news of the Soviet invasion as it was happening to them. Her colleagues. Dora was shocked. Everybody she worked with at Radio Prague had spent their professional careers doing what she did: toeing the party line on everything, keeping their heads down and not doing anything that might get them into trouble, written up and sent down to the labour office for reassignment more suitable for malcontents. Now they were reporting from the barricades and manning microphones in all the different studios in different languages, telling the world what was happening in Czechoslovakia; how the people were protesting and how crowds of civilians were standing up to the tanks.

Dora knew what she had to do. She got dressed, kissed her husband and daughter goodbye and walked down the Zizkov, past all the people, the tanks and the Russian and Bulgarian soldiers, and up Wenceslas Square, over to Radio Prague’s offices and studios. For three days Dora read the news in German, English and Russian. For some reason the Russians hadn’t located their offices, even though they had tanks and troops on the street outside their door. Eventually they wised up, but by then Dora and some others drove out in a borrowed Skoda to a remote emergency broadcasting site, which the Russians also didn’t know about, where they continued broadcasting for another day. When they knew the Russians were coming for them, they all fled. Dora and two others drove the Skoda to the German border, where they walked across. A couple of days later, refugee passport in hand, Dora Slaba found herself back in London.

But it was not the London she remembered. The Cold War had changed it in unimaginable ways. The best job she could get was teaching French in a girls’ school. After two years, she’d had enough and went back to Prague. They’d promised her she could have her job back at Radio Prague if she returned. It lasted a week. The following Monday, Dora was told her position had been cancelled and she was sent down to the Labour Ministry for reassignment.

Dora was sent to a basement office at the Czech Academy of Sciences where she spent the next fifteen years as an English language tutor for members of the academy needing to publish, or deliver speeches, in English. It was, in Dora’s opinion, the lowest of the low. There was a crying need for fluent English and German speakers and writers in state trading companies and other groups. But Dora was not considered ‘politically reliable’, so she remained a tutor of moss-backed academicians.

‘And that’s what you did until now?’ I asked.

For a moment I thought she would just say ‘yes’, that that was her life since 1968. Then there was a pause. Dora looked at me like she had a question she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask. Then she asked me if I’d ever heard of an American writer named Martha Dodd.

I told her I hadn’t and asked who she was. Dora replied that she wasn’t sure, only that she had been a writer and journalist who’d written some bestsellers, and that she had lived in Prague for a long time before her death just two years earlier. I frowned and told Dora that she didn’t sound like anyone I’d heard of. Why? Dora answered that she’d been her secretary for a while just before the Revolution. That struck me as odd. I hadn’t thought that outside of embassy staff and the like there were any Americans at all living there during the Cold War. Dora informed me that there had been a handful living in Prague. So you worked for her? Yes, for about a year and a half. What was that like? She lived in a villa in Prague 5. She was very old, rich, widowed, and had servants. Servants? Really? I didn’t think that sort of thing was allowed under communism. Dora made a gesture somewhere between a grimace and a smile, and the subject changed to something else. As we walked back to the paper, I remember thinking to myself that I ought to look into this whole thing sometime, but by the time we got back to the office it was already forgotten about. I’m sure it never crossed my mind once during the next six years. It was a very busy time.

Eventually, I went back to Dallas and for the next few years I wrote for different magazines and started writing books. I was researching a slapstick comedy set in Nazi Germany during the final days of the Third Reich. Most of it took place during the three-week period immediately after Hitler blew his brains out. It was something I’d done much research on years earlier. The internet had since come into existence and by now there was enough up there that I could do a good amount of research online … and that’s where I stumbled across Martha.

If memory serves me, the name of the website had been something like ‘Hot Babes of the Third Reich’. Mostly it was girlfriends and wives of various Nazi bigwigs: Eva Braun, Magda Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, Hanna Reitsch, Hermann Goering’s first and second wives and Heinrich Himmler’s mistress, along with numerous actresses. And there she was, among them all: Martha Dodd, the American woman Dora had worked for right before the 1989 Revolution. It had her listed as mistress of Ernst Udet, the famous dive-bomber ace, playboy and one-time Hollywood stunt pilot. But then it also turned out she had been girlfriend of the head of the Gestapo. It didn’t stop there. She was also known to have slept with more Nazi generals and more high Nazi functionaries than could be listed. It mentioned that Martha Dodd had even briefly dated Hitler. Her father had been the American Ambassador, appointed by FDR early in his presidency, before the threat Hitler posed was fully understood. It noted that after cutting a wide swath among the young Nazi blades in Berlin, Martha Dodd surprised everybody by falling madly in love with a Soviet diplomat she’d met, and in the course of it got recruited as a spy for Moscow. When she returned to America, she wrote two bestsellers about her time in Germany. She married a millionaire whom she subsequently recruited. Together, they were part of a Soviet spy ring operating in America during the Second World War. It went on to say that somehow the FBI got wind of their activities and put them under surveillance, which went on for years. Even so, she and her husband managed to slip away from the FBI, not once, but twice, and both times with all their money, which was how they ended up in Prague, where they lived for 30 more years until their deaths. So Martha Dodd, the American woman Dora had worked for, was a Soviet spy who had gone to ground!

It’s funny, but during the six years I was reporting from Prague, I spent surprisingly little time dealing with the Cold War, even though my reporting often put me in front of spooks, StB, and old communists of every sort. Its legacies were always there, but that was different. We were focused on the here and now, and not on sorting out the past. Getting to the bottom of Cold War mysteries was a sure-fire means of going broke and starving to death.

I sold my book about post-Hitler Nazi Germany and made enough money from it to allow my wife and I to move back to Prague for a couple years. I managed to hunt down Dora Slaba and ask her what she remembered about her old boss. Dora told me she remembered everything. Oh? Did she know about Martha’s time in Berlin? No. Did she know about Martha dating Hitler? No. Did she know about her dating the head of the Gestapo? No. Did she know about her being a Soviet spy? No. Each time she said it like none of it particularly surprised her.

Then I asked Dora if she had ever thought of asking her why she was living in Prague. At this, Dora’s voice took on a sad, pitying tone. ‘Brendan,’ she said, ‘that was a question you just didn’t ask. You didn’t even wonder. That was how Communism worked.’

‘Tell me what you remember about her.’

There was a long pause and then Dora started telling me of her time with her. I’ll never forget the way she began:

‘She was a bitch.’

1. THE FLYING HAMBURGER

Back in Chicago, the Tribune’s foreign editor had told Martha that, with the Nazis now in power, she could forget about Berlin’s legendary social scene. It was dead. As a result, when they packed for the move, Martha and her mother brought only a few of their gowns and dresses. They also didn’t bring any furniture or household items with them, which diplomats normally did, so the small amount of baggage the Dodds brought aboard the SS Washington made them seem more like tourists than the family of a US ambassador travelling to a new duty station.

They did, however, bring along the family car, a not-new Chevrolet. Martha’s father, William E. Dodd, simple, resolutely unadorned man that he was, cringed at the thought of being seen riding inside any of the grand limousines which the embassy kept for the ambassador’s use. His idea was that, whenever there might be an official function to attend, he’d use the Chevvy with his son, Bill Jr, acting as chauffer. One of the points Dodd had stipulated to President Roosevelt when he’d offered him the ambassadorship was that he be allowed to live within his salary. FDR agreed right off, like it went without saying. But then, hadn’t he been the one who had said his reason for sending a Jeffersonian Democrat like Dodd to Berlin was so that Hitler and the Nazis would see what America was about?

The Chevvy was at that moment in the ship’s hold, and once they were docked and passenger disembarkation was underway, a dockside crane would lift it out and set it gently down on the pier. They’d load it up and Bill Jr would drive it down to Berlin to their hotel. Then Dodd and some embassy bigwig named Gordon would go off together on some special train called ‘The Flying Hamburger’ for a briefing on ‘the political situation’, which needed to be discussed right away and in private. As for Martha and her mother, there’d be people from the embassy who’d come up with Gordon and would get them on the regular train, and they’d all travel down to Berlin together.

Her father’s appointment had caught everyone in Chicago by surprise, since no one in the Cook County political machine had ever heard of him. All anyone knew was William E. Dodd, a Chicago Democrat, university professor, eminent historian and apparently one of President Roosevelt’s personal friends, had been appointed ambassador to Berlin and FDR’s personal envoy to Adolf Hitler! Since no one knew who the Dodds were, it didn’t take much for the Chicago papers to grab the few available facts and concoct an engaging and acceptable narrative. The Dodds were an All-American family: Mom, Dad, Buddy and Sis off to Berlin to show Mr Hitler just what America is all about. It worked. Readers ate it up. But then, strangely, the story got picked up by the papers in other cities,1 so by the time the Dodds reached New York, they discovered they were celebrities. When they boarded their ship, the SS Washington, the next morning, there was a crowd of people, mostly strangers, gathered at the dock to see them off, along with numerous press photographers. As the lines were cast off and the ship’s screws began churning the water, some of the photographers, seeing the Dodds looking down from the rail, shouted at them to wave goodbye for the cameras. The Dodds obliged and the photographers snapped their picture. The shot that made the papers appeared to show the new ambassador and his family giving ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes. But as the ship headed out of New York Harbor and into the Atlantic, a calm finally came over everything and the Dodds’ brush with celebrity was ended.

The voyage from New York lasted nine days. The whole time the sea was calm and for Dodd, it was a time of quiet reflection about what lay ahead. He hadn’t used his German in years and now, in an effort to quickly regain his former fluency, he had his wife and children sit with him in his stateroom for an hour or two each morning while he read aloud to them in German. The rest of the time he spent going through the thick sheaf of reports and briefing documents which the State Department had prepared for him.

As for Martha, for the first two days at sea she ‘wept copiously and sentimentally’ for things and people she’d never come back to. There was the comfortable, if anonymous, middle-class existence which the Dodds had led up until then, and for Martha, there were the many friends and more than a few lovers, and even, it turned out, a husband she hadn’t quite gotten around to telling her parents about. There was also her job as Assistant Books Editor at the Chicago Tribune, a plum position she’d only recently started but had already grown bored with.

As for what lay ahead, Martha had no idea, either. Her life’s dream had always been to be a famous writer, and even though she was now, officially speaking, a newspaperwoman, she’d never had any interest in journalism. As for all that was going on in Germany, Martha had given it very little thought. Her interests lay in literature and poetry, not politics. It didn’t matter that she’d grown up in an intellectually vibrant household, alive with endless spirited discussions about history, politics and economics, none of it particularly interesting to her. Hitler was, to Martha, little more than ‘a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin… who burned books and had set up a dictatorship’.2

Martha’s basic indifference to world affairs and the situation in Nazi Germany was largely lost on the poet Carl Sandburg, one of her father’s closest friends and, apparently, one of Martha’s occasional lovers, who extolled her to ‘find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and brains are made of!’3 What Martha made of Sandburg’s sage advice at the time is not known. For her, it was enough that she was going on an adventure abroad in a faraway, exotic place, and at the same time extracting herself from her secret marriage and other personal complications, which she hoped might then sort themselves out without any great participation on her own part.

It wasn’t that she no longer loved the man she’d married. She did love him, but it had been done on a whim a year earlier. She loved him just as she loved other men too, and with all of them, she blew hot and then cold. Mostly Martha loved the art of pursuit and of being pursued. But much as Martha loved men, there were never any whose company she preferred over her father’s and no place she’d rather be than with her family.

After two days, Martha’s weeping ended and once again she was ready for fun. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr, the President’s son, was also aboard, on his way to spend a summer in France. He fit the bill perfectly for a shipboard playmate. They danced, they drank. If it went beyond that, neither mentioned it afterwards. When the SS Washington docked at Le Havre, she got off with him and walked with him to the train station before returning to the ship.

While Martha claimed to have had ‘not the faintest idea of anti-Semitism in either its mild or vicious forms’,4 prior to entering university, the same could not be said of her father. William E. Dodd considered himself a liberal democrat, but only in the ‘Jeffersonian’ sense. His interest and sympathies were with the ‘yeomanry’: farmers who worked their own smallholdings with, at most, the help of a hired hand or two. These and the mechanics and tradesmen who supported them and made an agrarian economy possible was what he cared about. Dodd opposed slavery, not so much because of its inhumanity as its inherent inefficiency. Unlike many Southerners, Dodd professed no warm feelings for Black people, or for the teeming ethnic masses who lived in cities and toiled in factories. A perfect America was, in Dodd’s mind, one peopled by men and women from the British Isles and northern Europe. This was particularly so for the Jews. Dodd’s anti-Semitism was of the mild, socially acceptable form. He probably didn’t have it in him to be mean to Jews, or vicious. While he read the reports in the newspapers of what the Nazis were doing to Jews in Germany, he mostly took a dim view of those reports, just as he had of the entreaties of different Jewish leaders he’d had meetings with in the days before his departure. If there was any truth to it, Dodd couldn’t help but believe it was something they’d probably brought on themselves.

When the SS Washington reached Hamburg on the morning of 13 July 1933, a crowd of Germans and Americans were there on the United States Lines terminal pier after traveling up from Berlin to greet, or at least get a glimpse of, the new American Ambassador and his family. Many brought flowers, though probably no one there had ever met or seen the Dodds before this. They’d come because the arrival of a new American Ambassador was a very big deal. Sackett, the last ambassador, had been extremely popular, and in a city that viewed itself as ‘almost-American’, he was seen as a sort of spiritual godfather. With all that was going on with Hitler and the Brownshirts, people couldn’t help but wonder whether this new ambassador might have the same kind of magic as his predecessor. Everyone hoped so, but some had their doubts.

Among the crowd was a small delegation of embassy staff, headed by George Anderson Gordon, the notoriously tightly wound Counselor, and Ambassador Dodd’s soon to be chief subordinate. In Gordon’s mind, the success or failure of the new ambassador’s mission rested in no small way on how well he listened to and did what Gordon told him. As political appointees went, Frederick Sackett had been close to perfect, even though he couldn’t speak German and knew next to nothing about the country. Ultimately, none of that mattered, because Sackett knew how to listen, especially to his experts and advisors. Not that he always did as they suggested, but at least he operated on the information with which he’d been furnished. It wasn’t surprising, since he’d previously been a Republican Senator from Kentucky and a business tycoon before that, so Sackett knew all about dealing with people of all kinds and giving them a good face. And that was something the Germans had needed, after the years of war and economic and political disruption.

But Sackett had been far more than just a good listener and a friendly face. President Hoover had sent him to do everything he could to bolster the democratic Weimar government and Heinrich Brüning, its Chancellor, and to make sure the German government didn’t stop making interest payments on the massive loans it had taken out from all those American banks, which were themselves on the verge of going under. In this, he had been quite successful, right up until the end of January when the democratic government finally collapsed and that gutter politician Hitler became Chancellor. By then, of course, Sackett was already on his way out, following Hoover’s defeat to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential elections that November. While Hoover was in the White House and Germany remained a democracy, Sackett did everything he could to keep it that way. He shelled out plenty from his own pocket, which was of course one of the requirements for the post. But Sackett had no intention of shelling out in support of Franklin Roosevelt, especially not if the recipients were going to be a bunch of Nazis. Sackett remained at his post another month following Roosevelt’s inauguration, but once it became clear no one in Washington had any idea when a replacement might be coming, Sacket folded up his tent and went home.

Oh, but the man had style! Once, Sackett and his wife put on an afternoon tea in which they’d served lobster. Lobster! It made the evening papers, something Gordon personally took a dim view of. But it paid off because people were still talking about it.

After Sackett left, for the next four months, George Messersmith, the Consul General for Germany, sat in the ambassador’s chair, and during that time seemed to do all he could to drive Hitler crazy. Messersmith had never made a secret of despising Hitler and this was something he was free to do, because unlike Sackett or Gordon or anyone else associated with the chancellery, he was consular and not so bound by protocol. Hitler knew he couldn’t complain to the ambassador about Messersmith, because Messersmith was the ambassador. Hitler, being a bully, avoided confrontation unless he already knew he’d come out on top. He knew Messersmith was a vicious little terrier who’d relish the opportunity to show him what for.

George Gordon and George Messersmith. Depending on how you chose to look at it, they were either complete opposites or simply cut from different ends of the same cloth. George Gordon was a Harvard-educated Alabama aristocrat, tall, with a formidable mustache that matched his bearing, and a temperament that varied between ‘difficult’ and ‘explosive’. Still, he was a keen observer and analyst, highly respected by those who read his reports. Messersmith was also considered difficult. In later years, there would be a saying that there were only two types of Foreign Service Officers: those who’d heard George Messersmith was an ogre to work for and those who knew it for a fact! Messersmith was a harsh, vindictive and petty taskmaster, something he’d apparently picked up teaching in rural, one-room Delaware schoolhouses.

Unlike Gordon, who had been born of wealth and attended the finest schools, Messersmith, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, grew up in poverty. Unable to afford university, he went instead for a teaching certificate and within a few years had gone from teaching in a one-room schoolhouse to being assistant superintendent for Delaware’s public schools. Then, one day, he surprised everyone by joining the State Department’s consular service. His first post was a mostly disused border crossing in Fort Erie, Ontario. Then the First World War erupted in Europe and Messersmith was reassigned to Curacao in the Caribbean. Being Dutch and therefore neutral, Curacao was a hotbed of spy activity and Messersmith soon found himself drawn into it. At one point he was approached by what he called ‘a disreputable young German-American man’, who was actually an American double agent requiring his help in busting a spy ring, since, as it turned out, Messersmith had a natural skill in breaking codes. After the war, Messersmith bounced between posts in northern Europe and South America before being appointed Consul General for Germany, the Consular Service’s highest post.

While Gordon confined his interactions to Germany’s uppermost political circles, Messersmith spoke with absolutely everyone else. Ogre as he might have been to work for, outside the office George Messersmith was an affable fellow whom people were naturally drawn to. Kings, generals, businessmen and clerks found him easy to confide in, which was fortunate, since Messersmith had also been born with his ear to the ground. For all their apparent differences, in the end, when it was time to write reports and draw conclusions, the ones Gordon and Messersmith reached were about the same: that Hitler and the Nazis were the real, immediate threat, not the communists and socialists as Washington insisted. Hitler was not simply a flash in the pan. Hitler meant everything he said about the Jews and what he would do to them. Hitler would kill them and anyone else who got in his way. And he would start another world war. Anyone who thought it was just political posturing was wrong.

Now, standing with all the others on the dock, watching the large ship approach, Gordon must have wondered, like everyone else, why Roosevelt had picked him for the job. Dodd was just a history professor with neither the stature nor the means to do it properly. Berlin was, after all, a ‘millionaire’s post’. When Hoover asked Sackett to take the post, Sackett knew in advance he’d be continually shelling out on banquets and receptions. So why Dodd? He obviously didn’t have money. What had the new President been thinking?

And what was he doing coming with two adult children in tow? In Gordon’s world, adult children didn’t accompany their parents on foreign postings. They had lives of their own. Dodd’s son and daughter were both in their late twenties and unmarried. Apparently the son was also an academic, with what looked like two one-year teaching appointments, neither of which had been renewed. Why? Then there was the daughter. Martha Eccles Dodd was twenty-five and had studied poetry and literature at the University of Chicago without graduating. She had been working at the Chicago Tribune, but quit to be with her parents. This couldn’t have looked good in Gordon’s eyes, being someone who undoubtedly took a dim view of unmarried women in their mid-twenties, or ‘career women’ of any age and, most of all, anyone in the press.

Gordon had already exchanged many cables with Dodd, but still wasn’t sure how well he grasped the current situation. If Dodd did, he would listen to what Gordon told him. He needed to understand that in the world of diplomats, protocol was paramount; that you didn’t just do things because they felt right at the moment. Everything had to be measured, and there had to be a strict delineation of whom one talked and did not talk with. An ambassador had to limit his contacts to the uppermost circles of power: to the Head of State and the Head of Government. That meant the President, the Chancellor, and, if applicable, the Vice-Chancellor, but that was it.

Gordon had made it clear to Sackett that talking to the opposition parties was not part of his job – ‘opposition’, of course, meaning Hitler. Of course Sackett went anyway, but at least he waited until Gordon was away. A secret meeting with Hitler5 was set up. The idea apparently was for it to be a ‘meeting of the minds’, where Sackett and Hitler would spend a couple of hours together, getting to know each other and examining ideas. In the end, all Sackett got was Hitler ranting, like he was addressing a crowd of several thousand, not pausing, even once, for the translator to catch up or even asking a question. Sackett left, two hours later, certain of one thing: Adolf Hitler was a dangerous nut, who must never be allowed to ever take power.6

Of course, now that Hitler was Chancellor, Dodd would be required to meet him. Hopefully there’d be no need for a second meeting. Hopefully it wouldn’t be long before Hitler got booted and replaced by someone else. Brüning would be ideal. Sackett had worked with him quite closely for years. No reason to think a Brüning–Dodd partnership wouldn’t work. Again, it was mainly just a question of this Professor Dodd listening to what Gordon said. And of course, they would also have to find a way of getting Brüning or even one of the others back in power.

‘The others’ meant the other previous chancellors: General Kurt von Schleicher, and Franz von Papen, currently Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor and Prussian Premier. To consider either of them as being on the side of the angels required far more naïveté than Gordon possessed. Both were arch intriguers and opportunists, whose endless cynical machinations had inadvertently gotten Hitler into power in the first place. After Brüning, they were the best Germany could hope for, and if working with either of them was how you got rid of Hitler, then it might well be necessary. Von Schleicher and von Papen were among the top items Gordon planned to discuss with Dodd during their first briefing. They would need at least an hour alone without any interruption and Gordon had a plan for achieving this: the Flying Hamburger

The ‘Flying Hamburger’, or ‘Fliegender Hamburger’, was a high-speed diesel-electric train which had just started running between Berlin and Hamburg that spring. It consisted of just two streamlined coaches, each with its own engine, and was capable of reaching speeds of up to 100 mph, making it the fastest train in the world. He’d suggested it to Dodd during their continual exchange of cables, even informing him, in case he didn’t know, that the ship’s purser could make the necessary arrangements. He presented the idea to Dodd in a telegram and Dodd readily agreed to it.7 So that was all set. All he had to do was go to the ship’s purser and buy himself a ticket. Yes, he and Dodd would ride the Flying Hamburger and Mrs Dodd and her children and the rest of the embassy delegation would ride together on the regular train.

Then there was the matter of a residence for the Dodds. As there was no official ambassador’s residence at the time, the assumption was that Dodd would continue doing as Sackett had done and live at one of the city’s top hotels – either the Adlon, the Bristol, or the Esplanade. But Dodd, it turned out, wanted no part of luxury hotels, insisting, as Messersmith put it, that ‘he wished to have modest quarters in a modest hotel’.8 Messersmith and Gordon knew this was not realistic. ‘Mr. Dodd was a man of very exaggerated ideas about the way an Ambassador should live,’ wrote Messersmith years later. ‘He felt that he should live most inconspicuously and modestly. While I understood this and how he felt about it, I knew that the German officials and German people would not understand it.’9

Being friends with managers from several of the city’s leading hotels, Messersmith suggested Gordon leave this matter to him. Messersmith then contacted the manager of the Esplanade who, eager for the added prestige, offered a deal so friendly that it was practically free.10 Messersmith figured Dodd would be pleased.

Gordon hoped that riding together aboard the world’s fastest train, Dodd would grasp what Gordon needed to tell him about how Hitler had turned a democratic republic into a full-fledged dictatorship; how less than a month after being named Chancellor, someone, probably one of Hitler’s thugs, set fire to the Reichstag and burned it down, giving Hitler all the pretext he needed to declare an emergency, suspend key sections of the constitution, give police powers to his Brownshirts, and then arrest communist and other opposition members of parliament. In just a couple of deft moves, Hitler dismantled rule by law. Weimar democracy was dead. The Brownshirts, who were now auxiliary police, went about beating up Jews and anyone they considered insufficiently enthusiastic about the new Nazi regime. They’d set up secret impromptu jails, often in empty apartments or in abandoned factories. People would disappear from the streets and be taken to them. If they were lucky, they might reappear days or weeks later, dazed, beaten, naked or in rags. Other times they’d be found floating in the canals. But just as often, they’d never be seen again. And now with the summer holiday season in full swing, American tourists were occasionally catching the Brownshirts’ wrath. When it happened, often as not the German police stood around, doing nothing.

Telling him this might jolt Dodd into understanding that he was no longer just a university professor but a diplomat, the President of the United States’ personal envoy to a madman bent on dragging the world back into war.

Again, it was mainly a question of what Dodd wanted, and in a few minutes, Gordon supposed, he would start finding out what that was.

The big ship sidled up to the dock, aided by the harbor tugs. Lines were thrown down, fore and aft, from the main deck, looped around the mooring posts on the dock and then drawn taut. The gangway was attached and the large hull door opened; the passengers began disembarking. As the Dodds descended the gangway, the press photographers’ flashbulbs began popping. The crowd cheered and waved their flower bouquets at them. While Dodd and his wife seemed to take it all with a good-natured, if slightly bewildered, grain of salt, Martha reveled in it. Celebrity fit Martha Dodd perfectly. She felt the spotlight on her and knew it was where she belonged.

But then, just as they stepped off the gangway onto the pier, a man came forward to greet them, a tall, stiff, almost comical figure, with, as Martha would later describe him, ‘gray-white hair and mustache which looked curled, elegant dress, gloves, stick and proper hat, complexion of flaming hue, clipped, polite and a definitely condescending accent … a gentleman of the most extreme protocol’.11It was Gordon, stiff and formal as an 18th-century courtier, with the rest of the embassy delegation behind him.

Dodd responded the way he did to anything reeking of pomp and classism: with his farmer’s puncturing informality. Martha and Bill Jr may have giggled or burst into outright laughter, or just stood there fighting back silly grins as Gordon addressed them with his ridiculous formality.

History is not supposed to deal in ‘what ifs’. It’s still hard not to wonder how different things might have turned out had the Dodds managed to muster up some gravitas for the occasion. Perhaps then their relations with Gordon and the rest of the embassy staff might not have been permanently poisoned for the four-and-a-half years that Dodd spent as ambassador. But the Dodds could not, and left Gordon so offended that ‘his rage almost – not quite – transcended the bounds allowed by his rigid code of behavior’.12

Everything about the Dodds seemed to exasperate Gordon: from their flippant informality to the miniscule amount of luggage they brought, the decidedly modest Chevrolet they’d insisted on bringing, and Dodd’s painfully earnest intention of using it instead of the embassy limousines – and then having his son be his chauffer. Only after the car had been lowered down onto the dock and the customs official started examining it, did it emerge that Dodd hadn’t bothered acquiring any of the licences or permits necessary for operating automobiles in Germany. He had simply assumed its Illinois registration and plates were enough. Keeping his explosive anger in check, Gordon managed to prevail upon some customs officials and got them to issue a temporary waiver allowing Bill Jr to drive the automobile down to Berlin.

But then, once Gordon had that problem solved, he learned Dodd hadn’t bought tickets for the Flying Hamburger. Through an apparent miscommunication, both had assumed the other would take care of it. Dodd shrugged it off with amiable sheepishness, but Gordon was fuming. They tried buying a ticket at the station, but they were already sold out.

Gordon and Dodd ended up riding the ordinary stopping train to Berlin along with everyone else. They rode together in one compartment while Martha and her mother went in another, which had been filled with bouquets of flowers from their many well-wishers. Gordon gave Dodd a thorough briefing on the current political situation along with a serious talking to about his role as an ambassador and the importance of altering his behavior accordingly. But by all indications Gordon’s admonitions had little effect.

When the train finally pulled into Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof, George Messersmith was waiting on the platform. Accompanying him was Bella Fromm, one of Berlin’s leading journalists and a close friend of Messersmith. He saw to it that she and Dodd had a friendly chat while the baggage was loaded aboard the embassy limousines which Messersmith had brought. She immediately liked Dodd’s dry wit and precise observations. But then when the subject of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews inevitably came up, he surprised her by insisting that he ‘hadn’t been charged to speak up for the Jews’. He added that his understanding was that the ‘horror tales’ he’d been reading about their mistreatment in the American press were exaggerations. Fromm, herself a Jew, calmly informed Dodd that if anything, the situation regarding the Jews was far worse than anything the newspapers dared print. ‘He seemed upset when he heard that the “horror tales” are innocent fairy tales compared to the actual goings on,’ she later wrote.13

While Dodd and his wife rode with Messersmith in one limousine, Martha shared the backseat of another with a ‘nervous young man, one of the embassy secretaries, who, fearing the driver would report their conversation to the secret police’, attempted to hush her anytime she asked a question or ventured an opinion. When she didn’t stop, he sharply told her she needed to start learning ‘to be seen and not heard’.14 It was advice she would never follow.

2. SKIN IN THE GAME

Whatever topics may have been discussed during Gordon and Dodd’s train ride, what almost certainly wasn’t raised were the Soviet spy rings which, until only a few months earlier, had been operating with impunity. They were now, apparently, all shut down following Hitler’s mass arrests of communists and other leftists. Even though Gordon probably knew quite a bit on the subject, the reason it was likely not brought up was that at the time the US had very little skin in that particular game. Officially, there were no American spies operating in Germany at the time. Unofficially, George Messersmith could have counted as one, though he certainly would have blanched at the suggestion. Something similar could have been said of the British at the time. The French, however, were a very different story.

For more than a dozen years, Soviet spies and spy networks had operated almost without interference throughout Germany. That they could do so was an unintended result of the secret alliance which had been going on between the two countries since shortly after the end of the First World War. While it would have been difficult for Hitler not to know about the secret alliance, what he knew about the networks themselves is less of an easy guess. He had to have known that Soviet spies were around and in large numbers, but as for the quotidian details about their structure and organisation, it is entirely possible he might not have been that interested.

When Hitler began ordering the arrests of large numbers of communists and other leftists, shortly after becoming Chancellor, he also, in one fell swoop, put the Soviet spy networks out of business, which in turn forced Moscow Center to devise a radical new ‘American strategy’ for staying in the German game. Though it had not been its intention, the effect of this new strategy would soon spread over to the United States, where its repercussions would continue to be felt long after the Third Reich was gone.

The Russian–German entente had its beginnings inside, of all places, Berlin’s Moabit prison following the German government’s brutal suppression of the communist-led Spartacist Uprising of January 1919.1 It was there, in the detention cells, among the hundreds of arrested communists and leftists, that a police official recognised Karl Radek, a top Comintern2 official and close colleague of Vladimir Lenin. Radek had illegally entered Germany to help organise the insurrection, which the Bolsheviks had hoped would turn Germany into a fellow Soviet state. Germany did not have diplomatic relations with Russia at that point, which made Radek the closest thing there was to an emissary. They decided to find out if Radek had anything to say. It turned out he did. Radek started getting visits from German government officials, among them Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, head of the army General Hans von Seeckt, Turkish envoy Enver Pasha,3 and others, all interested in exploring areas of common interest with their fellow pariah state. It didn’t take long to realise that they each had what the other needed.

After the war, Germany’s industrial base was at a standstill for want of raw materials and hard currency to pay for them, and markets to sell to. Russia, on the other hand, was a massive, hungry market. It wanted to construct, from scratch, an entire industrial base and on a gigantic scale: factories, steel mills and power plants; everything. Its military needed modern weapons: aircraft, tanks, artillery and the know-how to use them effectively. Russia lacked foreign exchange, but was rich in raw materials. The Germans also needed weapons, but because of the peace terms dictated to them from the West, they also now needed hidden places to develop them, build them, and develop tactics using them, far from the Allied Control Commission’s eyes. Again, Russia had what they needed. The problem was Germany and Russia had always been mortal enemies. Was it possible they could find a modus vivendi? Radek and his visitors talked about it at length and decided they might.

Over the next several months, accommodations were reached. In the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, Germany and the Soviet Union formally recognised each another, renounced previous territorial claims and cancelled their pre-war debts. Elaborate barter systems were devised to work around their lack of foreign exchange. As a result, Germany received raw materials and Russia acquired industrial machinery, know-how, and sometimes entire factories.

In the military sphere this new relationship proved particularly fruitful. Zentrale Moskau,a joint secret organisation, was established with offices in both capitals to facilitate military cooperation. After that, the Red Air Force established a flying school at Lipetsk, 250 miles outside Moscow, staffed by German civilian instructors. In remote Kazan, a tank school was set up for the Germans in which the future Wehrmacht’s panzer force gestated.4 A Trade Enterprise Development Company, deceptively named Gesellschaft zur Forderung Gewerblicher,5 or GEFU, contracted with the Soviets to manufacture aircraft engines, artillery shells, small-caliber ammunition and other war materiel, the output of which the two countries shared. GEFU also sent hundreds of military and civilian specialists into Russia to help production.

Understandably, this arrangement did not ride well with OGPU’s (OGPU was the Joint State Political Directorate, an early security and political police force in the USSR and forerunner of the KGB) counter-intelligence branch, being that GEFU was in their eyes an arm of the German military, and from communications they’d intercept, it was apparent some of its specialists were engaging in espionage. But for the moment, their concerns had to take a backseat to economic and foreign policy considerations.6 Of course, the Germans weren’t the only ones engaging in espionage. As cooperation grew throughout the 1920s, Soviet intelligence found new opportunities to insert agents into Germany. Soviet trade delegations often included spies who, once inside the country,7 would promptly split off and disappear. Their papers would get taken over by other agents without the German police ever noticing their absence. They would then acquire local papers and new identities and begin recruiting German communists and left-wingers as agents.

Soviet intelligence relied heavily on assistance from German communists and other sympathisers. From the moment the German Communist Party was created in November 1918, there was a symbiotic relationship between them and the Soviet intelligence services. Members were appointed to work as liaisons with spies who’d been sent in. At their direction, they would help recruit other agents and participate in clandestine operations.8 Communist student organisations became a source of young, eager recruits. So were German engineers responding to newspaper adverts for employment in Russia?

Probably the most productive method for acquiring large amounts of usable intelligence was through Betriebs-Berichterstatter (Worker-Correspondents), or ‘RABKOR’, in which local communist newspapers invited workers to share their knowledge of inventions and new technologies they were involved with. In early 1928, Rote Fahne, the German communist paper, boasted having 127 Rabkors.9 By the end of that year it claimed several thousand. At one point the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that the Soviets were stealing $250 million worth of industrial secrets per year. Nevertheless, they chose to keep quiet about it rather than disturb their productive relationship with the USSR.10 During this period the Soviet spy presence was so commonplace that German communists had nicknames for the two organisations operating there. Red Army Intelligence, the GRU, was ‘Klara’, while the Cheka’s foreign branch, the INO, was ‘Grete’.11

Hitler became Chancellor on 31 January 1933, and suddenly Grete and Klara’s day was over. Once the arrests of KDP members started,12 the people making up the Grete and Klara networks were either on the run or in prison. Hitler continued to be largely ignorant of the arrests’ full effect on the networks. At one point the German police raided one of the German–Soviet joint ventures, not realising what it actually was.13