Sleeping With the Enemy

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 w…