Young girls from the age of ten onward were taken into organizations where they were taught only two things: to take care of their bodies so they could bear as many children as the state needed and to be loyal to National Socialism. Though the Nazis have been forced to recognize, through the lack of men, that not all women can get married. Huge marriage loans are floated every year whereby the contracting parties can borrow substantial sums from the government to be repaid slowly or to be cancelled entirely upon the birth of enough children. Birth control information is frowned on and practically forbidden.

Despite the fact that Hitler and the other Nazis are always ranting about "Volk ohne Raum" (a people without space) they command their men and women to have more children. Women have been deprived for all rights except that of childbirth and hard labour. They are not permitted to participate in political life - in fact Hitler's plans eventually include the deprivation of the vote; they are refused opportunities of education and self-expression; careers and professions are closed to them.

There was a street-car in the centre of the road from which a young girl was being brutally pushed and shoved. We moved closer and saw the tragic and tortured face. She looked ghastly. Her head had been shaved clean of hair and she was wearing a placard across her breast. We followed her for a moment, watching the crowd insult and jibe and drive her. Quentin and my brother asked several people around us, what was the matter. We understood from their German that she was a Gentile who had been consorting with a Jew. The placard said: "I have offered myself to a Jew."

Let Boris Vinogradov know that we want to use him for the realization of an affair we are interested in.... According to our data, the mood of his acquaintance (Martha Dodd) is quite ripe for finally drawing her into our work. Therefore we ask Vinogradov to write her a warm friendly letter and to invite her to a meeting in Paris where... they will carry out necessary measures to draw Martha into our work.

Martha argues that she is a convinced partisan of the Communist Party and the USSR. With the State Department's knowledge, Martha helps her father in his diplomatic work and is aware of all his [ambassadorial] affairs. The entire Dodd family hates National Socialists. Martha has interesting connections that she uses in getting information for her father. She has intimate relations with some of her acquaintances.... Martha claims that the main interest of her life is to assist secretly the revolutionary cause. She is prepared to use her position for work in this direction, provided that the possibility of failure and of discrediting her father can be eliminated. She claimed that a former official of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin - Boris Vinogradov - has had intimate relations with her.

Boris, this week it was a year since I saw you last. On the 8th I gave you a farewell kiss at the railway station, and since then we haven't seen one another. But I never, not for a minute, forgot you and everything you gave me in my life. This week, every night I thought about you - every night, and about that night we had such a stupid and mean quarrel - do you forgive me? I was scared and in a wild condition that night because I knew that I wouldn't see you for so long. I strongly wanted you to stay with me that night and forever, and I knew that I would never be able to have you. What have you been doing all this time? Have you been thinking about me and asking yourself how my personal life has gone?

From various sources I know that soon you will go home. Will you go via Berlin? Write me and let me know your plans. I would like to see you once more.

On December 8 I will be at home all night. Won't you call me, won't you talk to me from Bucharest - I want so much to hear your voice again - and on the 8th it will be the anniversary of our folly. We should blame our cowardice for this absence. Please, call me that night.

You may have heard about me indirectly. I have lived and thought many things since I saw you last time. You must know about it.

Armand is still here - but you must know that he means nothing to me now - as long as you are still alive - nobody can mean anything to me as long as you are alive.

For the last 2-3 weeks, I met with Dodd several times. At the first meeting, she told me about Bullitt's (U.S. Ambassador to France William Bullitt) swinish behavior during his sojourn in Berlin. According to her, Bullitt severely scolded the USSR in the American Embassy, arguing that in the next few months the Japanese would capture Vladivostok and the Russians would do nothing against it.... All of this exasperated the American Ambassador Dodd, who reported the talks in a letter to Washington....

During previous meetings Martha Dodd frankly expressed her willingness to help the Soviet Embassy with her information. Now she is studying hard the theory of communism and "Matters of Leninism" by Stalin. Her teacher is Arvid Harnack to whom she goes often. According to her, she now has to hide her Communist convictions due to her father's official status. This year her father will retire, and then she will be able to conduct Communist activities more openly.

However, this circumstance does not prevent her from maintaining rather intimate relations with Louis-Ferdinand, the Crown Prince's son. According to Dodd, this is a perfect disguise, because those who earlier treated her suspiciously because of her open relations with Vinogradov now consider her previous passion "hearty" rather than "political."

Honey, I'm so glad to get news from you and to know that you are finally in Warsaw.... You can't imagine, honey, how often you were with me, how I have been constantly thinking about you, worrying about you and craving to see you, how I adjusted to the inevitable when I heard the first news and how I was glad to know the truth. I want to see you so much, honey. Couldn't I come before the end of the month? I would like to come on February 6, I think ... and to stay for about a week. It is extremely important for me to see you and I promise to do it as soon as possible. I would like to stay in a small hotel not far from you, and I want nobody to know I'm there because I don't want to be entertained. I only want to see you as much as possible incognito. Probably, we'll be able to leave from Warsaw to the countryside for one or two days. I will come alone. After all, my parents quite agree that I do what I want. I am 28 and very independent!

Dissatisfied with Vinogradov's progress in preparing Dodd for agent work, the NKVD recalled the diplomat to Moscow shortly thereafter and assigned as Dodd's contact a Berlin correspondent for the newspaper Izvestia, Comrade Bukhartsev. At a diplomatic reception he introduced himself to Martha Dodd, who was given the code name "Liza." According to "Emir" (Bukhartsev's code name), she pledged to cooperate in passing along information. An internal NKVD memorandum in Moscow written during this period described Dodd's commitment to the cause:

It goes without saying that my services of any kind and at any time are proposed to the party for use at its discretion.
Currently, I have access mainly to the personal, confidential correspondence of my father with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. President.

My source of information on military and naval issues, as well as on aviation, is exclusively personal contact with our embassy's staff. I lost almost any connection with the Germans except perhaps for casual, high-society meetings which yield almost nothing.

I still have a connection to the diplomatic corps but, on the whole, it doesn't yield great results. I have established very close connections to journalists.

Germans, foreign diplomats, and our own personnel treat us suspiciously, unfriendly, and (as far as the Germans are concerned) insultingly. Is the information which I get from my father, who is hated in Germany and who occupies an isolated position among foreign diplomats and therefore has no access to any secret information, important enough for me to remain in Germany? Couldn't I conduct more valuable work in America or in some European organization such as the International Conference for Peace.

In America, I am suspected of nothing, except for the Germans, and I have countless valuable connections in all circles. In other words, is my potential work valuable enough to stay in Germany even for the [remaining] term of my father's sojourn there?

I have done everything possible to make my father remain in Germany. I'm still going to do everything I can in this direction. However, I'm afraid he will retire this summer or fall. He was of great benefit to the Roosevelt administration, contributing an anti-Nazi view. In any case, this was with regard to [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull and Roosevelt. Most State Department officials work with the Nazis, for example, Dunn, chief of the European department; Phillips, currently in Rome; Bullitt; and others. My father tried to prevent trade agreements [with Germany]; he refused to cooperate with bankers, businessmen, etc.

Recently he cabled to Hull and Roosevelt concerning a supposed loan to Germany which is supported by Bullitt and Blum, Davis, Phillips and England.... Except for Roosevelt and Hull, the State Department, representatives of American business circles, and the Germans all wish to remove my father. He personally wants to leave. Shouldn't he arrange his resignation with a provocation once he decides the question of timing? Shouldn't he provoke the Germans to make them demand his recall or create a scandal, after which he could speak openly in America both orally and in the press.... To resign and to publish a protest? He could be convinced to do it if it had significance for the USSR.

Roosevelt will be giving diplomatic posts to many capitalists who financed him. Having little experience with respect to European politics, Roosevelt will appoint... people or groups who will be dangerous now and in time of war. Nevertheless, my father has great influence on Hull and Roosevelt, who are inclined to be slightly anti-Fascist, and thus could influence a new appointment without Hull and Roosevelt, suspecting the underlying reasons for my father's behavior, who would be an advocate of mv instructions.

Have you got anybody in mind who would be at least liberal and democratic in this post (Dodd's replacement in Germany)? ... If there is information concerning our candidates, it would be important to know whose candidacy to the post of U.S. Ambassador in Germany the USSR would like to promote. If this man has at least a slight chance, I will persuade my father to promote his candidacy.

The meeting with Martha went off well. She was in a good mood. On December 15, she leaves for New York where a meeting with her is fixed (with NKVD operatives in that city).

She is still busy with our marriage plans and waits for the fulfillment of our promise despite her parents' warning that nothing would come of it.

Not unknown to you, journalist Louis Fischer proposed to her. She did not accept since she hopes to marry me. But if we tell her that I will by no means and never marry her, she will accept Fischer's proposal.

I think that she shouldn't be left in ignorance with regard to the real situation, for if we deceive her, she may become embittered and lose faith in us. Now she agrees to work for us even if it turns out that I won't marry her. I proposed giving money to her, but she turned me down.

We inform you that our source Liza (Miss Martha Dodd), daughter of the former American Ambassador in Germany Dodd - is currently in your city.

You should contact her after receiving a special cable. Her address: Irving Place, New York City. You should come to her early in the morning between 8 and 9 A.M. and say: "I want to give you regards from Bob Norman."

At present she has a fiance.... If Vinogradov reiterates his promise she will wait for him and reject the other man. Her fiance is Alfred Stern, 40 years old, Jew, a man with an independent material status who stayed in Germany a couple of years ago and helped the Communist Party financially.... She doesn't think her marriage would prevent her from working with us, though she doesn't understand completely what she should do.

Boris, dear! Finally I got your letter. You work in the press office, don't you? Are you happy? Did you find a girl you can love instead of me?

Did you hear that my mother died in late May totally unexpectedly? You can imagine how tragic it was for me. Surely, you know better than anybody else how we loved each other and how close we were in everything.

The three of us spent time together perfectly, and I remember how sweet she was to both of us when you were in Berlin.

Mother knew very well how deep our love was and understood all the meaning that you had and will have in my life. She knew that I loved nobody before and thought that I would never love again but hoped that I would be happy anyway.

You haven't had time yet to know that I really got married. On June 16, I married an American whom I love very much. I wanted to tell you a lot, but I will wait until our meeting. We are supposed to be in the USSR in late August or early September this year. I hope you'll be there or will let me know where I can meet you.

You know, honey, that for me, you meant more in my life than anybody else. You also know that, if I am needed, I will be ready to come when called.

Let me know your plan if you get another post. I look into the future and see you in Russia again. Your Martha.'-"

A gifted, clever and educated woman, she requires constant control over her behavior.... Let (Dodd) move in the circles interesting to us rather than in circles close to the Trust... It is necessary to continue activating her activities as a successful journalist. She should also be guided to approach and[deepen her relationship with the President's wife, Eleanor, through different social organizations, committees, and societies. Here, the special interest of the Roosevelts in China and everything connected with it must be used. Dodd can play on this factor. Let her approach Eleanor through the committee on help to China.

Bluntly but frankly, I asked Martha if her sexual relations with her husband were satisfactory. She, of course, asked "Why"... I explained that I was interested because she had twice remarked that she would divorce her husband if she stood in... the way of his political development. I suggested that one does not talk of divorce quite so casually unless one wanted a divorce. Martha explained: She loved her husband very much. Their relationship was quite satisfactory in every way. She loved him, not the wild love she felt for Boris Vinogradov, but still a satisfactory love.

Having once started, Martha, as in the past, talked quite freely... Martha's life in Berlin can be summed up in one word-"sleep." Seemingly, she spent most of her time in bed. In addition to the Russian or Russians, she had slept with a full-blown fascist-General Ernest Udet, second in command (after Goering) of the German air force; Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the Kaiser; and some guy at the French Embassy in Berlin. (A real internationalist!)"

Since Martha and Alfred had already received several subpoenas to testify in cases involving alleged espionage then underway in the United States, the couple was in no position to resume active work as agents. At a June 18, 1956, meeting, the Sterns told "Ostap," the Mexico City KGB station chief, that they wanted to live in the Soviet Union but, if that was not possible, in Czechoslovakia, China, or the German Democratic Republic. They claimed to have a million dollars in a Mexican bank that they were transferring to Switzerland. (Their lawyer, Paul O'Dwyer, had informed them that Jack Soble, a government witness and former Soviet agent, had told the FBI about the publishing firm Stern had developed with Boris Morros to assist Soviet "illegals." On July 20, 1956, naturalized with Paraguayan citizenship
and passports in exchange for a $10,000 bribe to an Paraguayan Embassy official in Mexico (the American government having canceled their U.S. passports), the couple left for Amsterdam. There, a Czech official met them and handed over airline tickets to Prague.

The Sterns learned in 1957 that they had been fined in the U.S. courts for refusing to testify before a congressional investigating committee, which had heard their old colleague and friend Boris Morros state flatly that Martha and Alfred were Soviet agents. They tried one final time to gain Soviet citizenship, offering their Mexican home and several paintings to the USSR. The Soviets, however, preferred that the Sterns remain in Czechoslovakia, though the KGB did dispatch a Colonel Korneev to Prague to discuss their application for Soviet citizenship, which was turned down.

There the matter remained until August 12, 1957, when Boris Morros, the Sterns' vocal nemesis, testified that he had served for the past twelve years as a double agent under FBI as well as Soviet instruction. Within days, on August 28, the KGB recommended to the Central Committee of the Communist Party that Martha and Alfred Stern be allowed to settle in the USSR. The Sterns arrived in Moscow the following month, at the same time an American court found them guilty in absentia of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

The post-Stalin "thaw" in Soviet life encouraged under Nikita Khrushchev's leadership was in full swing. The Sterns declined a KGB request to denounce Boris Morros's testimony as false." They concluded, also, that their inability to speak Russian (and possibly their unwillingness to live under direct KGB supervision) made it difficult for them to remain in the Soviet Union. Seeking counsel from others who had defected to the East, they requested but were denied a meeting with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the British agents who had fled for sanctuary to Moscow years earlier. In October 1957, the Sterns formally asked for asylum in Czechoslovakia, where they proposed starting new careers, Martha as an editor of English-language books and Alfred in the export-import field. The following January the couple returned to Prague.

Some weeks later SISS was vying with HUAC for names available from the show-business eccentric Boris Morros, who helped identify spies for a generously headlined melodrama. One of these, described as a Russian colonel, was named by a Finnish accomplice who testified, inter alia, that he (the accomplice) was a thief, a bigamist, a drunkard and a liar. The Russians had given him $5,000 to give to Sobell's wife, he said, but as he was unable to locate her he had buried it, then dug it up and spent it. The colonel was convicted and the Finn's testimony opportunely coincided with Sobell's latest plea for a new trial. The colonel, the Finn, and Morros all lived up to the established image of the kind of people Moscow employed as agents.

Morros introduced himself to spy aficionados as a piano and cello prodigy who had conducted the Tsar's imperial orchestra at 16 and, at 22, come to America as musical director of Balieff's Chauve-Souris for which he composed The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. On a return visit to the old country in 1945, the Russians had asked him to spy for them and he had reported this to Hoover; in 1950 Hoover had sent him back as a counterspy and a Russian secret-police general had "wined and dined me for ten hours straight." The Roman-candle headlines for Morros flickered out after Balieff's widow said he had neither been Chauve-Souris's musical director nor composed the Wooden Soldiers. He confessed to the media that he was broke but had "signed up all the Nobel Prize winners in Europe" for TV and had "fabulous offers." His best spy names were wealthy Alfred Stern, a notorious angel for heretical causes now living in Mexico, and his wife, novelist Martha Dodd. Fined $25,000 each for contempt in absentia, the Sterns passed out of reach in the first plane leaving for Prague. They saw no chance of living in peace anywhere in the free world, but were only able to leave it by hastily acquiring Paraguayan passports.

I arrived in Mexico City in a yellow Ford convertible on October 12, 1951, having driven from New York and made leisurely stops to visit friends in Washington, Nashville, and Louisiana. The anti-Communist crusade was gathering momentum in the United States, and I was anxious to avoid being summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee and risk going to prison, along with the Hollywood Ten. Of the Ten - who had already served prison sentences for "contempt of Congress," punishment for refusing to name the people with whom they had been associated in political activity-several had moved to Mexico, along with others escaping persecution for their political activities.

In those years and earlier, Mexico was a place of refuge for political exiles. Refugees from Franco, Hitler, and Stalin were welcomed, and many stayed on after it became possible for them to return to Europe. Trotsky had made his home in San Angel, a suburb of Mexico City, and had directed a worldwide anti-Stalin campaign from there until his death at the hands of an assassin in 1940.

In the early fifties the refugees in Mexico were Americans. Schoolteachers, doctors, writers, journalists, businessmen, college professors, and government employees dismissed for political reasons, and Communist Party members and functionaries, were members of the community that I was about to join. Some of them were well-known, such as Frederick Vanderbilt Field, who went to prison in 1951 for refusing to reveal to a federal judge the names of contributors to a bail fund for eleven Communist leaders convicted under the Smith Act, and Martha Dodd, daughter of Ambassador William E. Dodd, Roosevelt's man in Berlin from 1933 through 1937. The Hollywood contingent included Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo, Gordon Kahn, Hugo and Jean Butler, and John Bright, a group whose screen writing credits covered many of the best and most important films that came out of Hollywood both before and after the blacklist.

By the time Morros pointed the accusing finger at the woman who betrayed him, Miss Dodd and her tycoon husband were safely beyond the reach of the FBI. They had a timely warning! Last January, the Bureau arrested one of Morros’ associates, a bristle salesman named Jack Soble, and unmasked him as second-in-command in the Morros ring. With Soble’s arrest, the ring was compromised and Morros’ double-edged association with it had to be revealed.

That was the last-minute tip-off for Miss Dodd and her husband. They quickly picked up a few hundred thousand random dollars of the Stern millions and took a run-out powder, on the eve of their scheduled appearance before a grand jury. They first crossed the unguarded border to Mexico, then sneaked surreptitiously to safety behind the Iron Curtain....

The disclosure of Martha Dodd’s crime comes as a shock, but not as a surprise, to her intimates. She was long known as a diehard partisan of the Soviet Union. She was a member of a dozen Communist front organizations and a celebrity among American subversives, widely known as eloquent propagandist of the “cause.”

But it was not known that Martha was a producing spy, a busy bee in the Soviet espionage network. There was this fateful gap in our knowledge of Miss Dodd’s interesting biography. Top Secret Magazine can now fill this authentic and exclusive story of Martha Dodd’s insidious double-life.

It is possible, on the basis of the Martha Dodd file in the possession of Top Secret Magazine, even to pinpoint the origin of her treachery, which came about in the strangest of ways.

A native Virginian, Martha lived in Chicago where her father, Dr. Dodd, was a senior history professor at the University, specializing in George Washington and Woodrow Wilson. In her parents’ house, she was brought up in the liberal tradition of her father’s historic idols and on the Bible which Professor Dodd used to read each day at the dinner table.

Martha was a vivacious, flirtatious, fair-skinned sexy girl, far more interested in amorous escapades than in those serious matters. But she, too, had her serious side. She wrote short stories and poetry, and made up her mind to become a writer.

As a typical flapper of the Roaring Twenties, she was somewhat naive in her politics but that did not prevent her from taking sides. Unlike her democratic father, Martha flirted with the fashionable totalitarian ideas of those days, had at least an interest in Fascism and Nazism, and a touch of anti-Semitism. When after her graduation from the University of Chicago, it was time for her to go to work, she accepted a job with the right-wing bitterly anti-Roosevelt, Chicago Tribune as associate literary editor.

It was while working for that conservative newspaper, the most powerful mouthpiece of isolationism in the States, that she suddenly contracted the Bolshevik germ.

She was given a book to review and it turned out to be a violently pro-Soviet work by Ella Winter, a noted fellow-traveler and ex-wife of Lincoln Steffens. It was called, Red Virtue.

Nazism meant good-looking, tall, blond men to her and she liked what she saw. She was painting the Nazi capital red, but in a social way. She went out on the town every night, flirting, drinking and dancing, mostly with young men who happened to be Nazis She gained a dual reputation. Insiders described her as a nymphomaniac in her sex life and a Nazi sympathizer in her politics.

This reputation gained confirmation when she started an affair with a sinisterly handsome Nazi official, Rolf Diels by name. He was then chief of the Nazi secret service. His curriculum included spying on Martha’s own father and the American Embassy in Berlin.

It was from Diels that Miss Dodd first learned the intricate science and art of totalitarian espionage, the manner in which agents are planted on suspects, telephones tapped, correspondence rifled. Recalling her affair with Diels, Martha later said: “I was intrigued and fascinated by this human monster of sensitive” face and cruel, broken beauty. We went out quite a lot, dancing and driving. I went to his office once and saw dictaphones on the desk in an unpretentious, large and somewhat bare room. He gave me the first indication of how spying was done.”

She added: “There began to appear before my romantic eyes a vast and complicated network of espionage from which no one, official or private, could escape.”

In her yen for adventure, and in her naivety, Miss Dodd overlooked Diel’s true purpose in courting her. The American Embassy was a high priority target on the Nazi espionage list. Rolf Diels made love to the Ambassador’s pretty, petite, vivacious daughter in the hope that he could gain information; his purpose was to turn Martha Dodd into a Nazi spy - and he almost succeeded Then, unexpectedly, something happened that soured Martha on the whole Nazi shebang. Her friend Rolf Diels was unceremoniously sacked overnight and had to flee Nazi Germany. If she had ever flirted with the idea of doing Diels’ bidding, she no longer wanted to accommodate the Nazis, now that her mentor and lover was in disgrace.

In the meantime, others tried to cuddle up to Martha, in both a political and an amorous sense. The place of Diels in her heart was taken by a tall, blond, good-looking young Reichswehr officer who turned out to be the exact political opposite of Rolf - a violent anti-Nazi. It soon became known to Martha that her new friend was a secret Communist, actually doing yeoman duty for the Soviet secret service.

Again under the influence of a boy friend, the love-thirsty Miss Dodd revived her dormant interest in Russia and Communism. While previously she had frequented the gatherings of young pro-Nazi men and women, she now drifted into the clandestine circles of pro-Russian Germans. Before long, she had a contact inside the Soviet Embassy on Unter den Linden - the Russian Ambassador, Jacob Surich himself.

Comrade Surich urged her to visit the Soviet Union. Martha Dodd was started off on her fateful journey, with treason lurking at the end of her road.

In July 1934, Miss Dodd was ready for the trip which she undertook over her ambassador-father’s violent objections. By then, in Moscow, she was put down as a promising espionage candidate, so naturally she was given the appropriate reception. She traveled as an ordinary tourist, but that was not how the Russians regarded her. Instead of assigning to Miss Dodd a bona fide Intourist guide, they planted on her brilliant young agent of the secret service, a comely woman who was as flirtations and vivacious as Martha herself. Her job was to size up Miss Dodd.

The trip lasted a couple of months and Miss Dodd was given the run of Russia. She could go where she pleased. But was always accompanied by her pretty and smart chaperone. This was the beginning of another love affair in Martha’s life - her love affair with the Soviet Union.

When she emerged, she was a full-fledged propagandist for the Communists, frankly saying in Berlin: “Russia is a genuine democracy in spirit and in plans,” and praising the Red Army as an organization that had none of the “arrogance of militarism.” Although she wasn’t yet working as an actual espionage operative, Martha Dodd was already firmly in the claws of the Soviet secret service.

She returned to the United States and plunged headlong into pro-Soviet activities. She joined one crypto-Communist organization after another. Among the subversive groups in which she held membership were the American Committee on Democracy and Intellectual Freedom; the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born; the American Council for a Democratic Greece; the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy; the International Labor Defense; the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; the League of American Writers; the United American Spanish Aid Committee.

The word “democratic” recurred in the name of several organizations to which Martha Dodd belonged but, in fact, in the misleading language of the Bolsheviks, it stood for “Communist.” All of these groups were Moscow-sponsored, subversive organizations. Several were cover groups for Soviet espionage.

Martha also undertook miscellaneous activities on behalf of the Communist Party and the Young Communist League, and signed several manifestos defending Communist causes.

If she wasn’t yet a producing espionage agent, she was not too far from becoming one. She was already feeding invaluable information, that was gathered through her unsuspecting contacts, to various Communist middlemen and a certain amount of it even to Soviet spies working out of the Embassy.

All of the time, as she moved boldly on the lunatic fringe of Communism, she was slowly being sucked into the international Soviet conspiracy and its espionage branch inside the United States.

On her wanderings in the Red labyrinth, in 1937-38, Martha met a debonair North Dakotan who enthusiastically shared her ideas and aspirations. He was, aside from that, also struck by her pixyish pink beauty. He was a native of Fargo, a millionaire several times over, Alfred Kaufman Stern by name. It was love at first sight, a collision of sex and politics.

Born in 1897, a graduate of Exeter and Harvard, Alfred Stern inherited most of his money from his highly respected banker father in the Middlewest. He himself started out by following in his father’s footsteps and from Harvard went into the banking business in his home town. He added to the family fortune through investments in real estate, public housing becoming his philanthropic hobby.

Stern’s business interests had an enormous range, as had his philanthropies. The former extended from housing developments in Chicago via the General American Tank Corporation to Modern Age Books, Inc., a left-wing publishing firm; while the latter ranged from the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council to the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

In 1921, he married one of America’s fabulous heiresses - Miss Marion Rosenwald, daughter of the owner of Sears Roebuck & Company of Chicago. They had two children, but the marriage failed to work out. After their divorce, Mrs. Stern married Dr. Max Ascoli, publisher of The Reporter magazine.

Early in the Thirties, when still a young man, Alfred Stern thought he had enough money for the rest of his life, retired from business, and decided to go into public service. He became chairman of the Illinois Housing Commission - but already he was far too radical for his New Deal friends.

He was dabbling in practical politics, too and, although he was a registered Democrat, he gradually drifted to the outskirts of American Communism. It was a strange sideline for a businessman with a lavish country estate in Lewisboro, New York, a big town house in New York City, offices in Rockefeller Center - and literally millions in the bank.

When Alfred Stern bumped into Martha Dodd, she was also on the rebound from a brief and unhappy first marriage. The two hit it off extremely well. On September 4, 1938, they married, thus embarking on a joint trip that was to lead them eventually behind the Iron Curtain.

Under Martha’s energetic influence, Alfred Stern sank ever deeper into the morass of Communism. He, too, joined those front organizations of which his pretty second wife was a charter member. His house became a breeding ground for Communist propaganda. He became treasurer of the notorious American Labor Party which was itself a front organization of the Soviet Union, headed by Congressman Marcantonio.

But while Alfred Stern confined his activities to such political skullduggeries, Martha Dodd became a spy. By early 1940, Soviet agents in the United States saw no reason to doubt her sincerity and loyalty to the cause. They no longer merely hinted at the work she could do for her beloved Russia. They invited her in so many words to perform certain important espionage functions for the U.S.S.R.

In 1940, several spymasters stationed in the Washington Embassy of the Soviets established direct contact with Martha Dodd Stern and met with her, strangely enough, in two sets of contradictory places. Once in a while they invited her into the inner sanctum of the Embassy; on other occasions they made arrangements for circumspect meetings, in out of the way restaurants and al fresco.

Much of her contact work was done at her husband’s estate in Lewisboro where Martha plotted and conspired against her native country with secret emissaries of the Soviet spy network - Soble, Morros, Zubilin, and others - until she herself became a top-ranking member of the ring.

She had plenty of material at her fingertips to supply, thanks to her husband’s immense wealth, her father’s prestige, and her own standing in society, especially her intimate friendship with powerful and influential people in Washington whose indiscretion is proverbial. She picked up whatever she could from them and relayed it to her couriers and go-betweens, until she came to be regarded inside that secret world as one of the most valuable agents the Soviet’ had in this country.

She even returned to the Soviet Union, allegedly on a harmless visit, but in fact to formalize her association with the Russian spy organizations. She no longer dealt with peripheral persons like the pretty secret agent posing as an Intourist guide. She now conducted her business on the top echelon of the Soviet secret service. Her zeal and sincerity was never doubted, and her ability to acquire important strategic information was admired.

The daughter of an American history professor and New Deal ambassador renounced her country in all but name. Today, both Martha Dodd and Alfred Stern enjoy the protection of a Soviet satellite government. The chances are they are feted by her Communist bosses who regard them as “American” friends they can really trust, not like Boris Morros, “the slick double-agent,” who worked against the Soviet Union despite the fact that he was born in Russia.

Retribution for Martha Dodd’s hideous crime may be far off. It may never even come. But already today, she is a woman without a country. Some years ago, she wrote: “Before 1933 my life was rooted in America, in her earth and cities, people and attitudes.”

Written some twenty years ago, these words assume a strange meaning today when that “prodigal and black child” of a celebrated American is scorched before God and country - as a traitor to her native land.

Upon her return from the Soviet Union the following year, when she attached herself body and soul to the aims of Communism, she described herself in a melancholy sentence. She painted a vivid picture of her reception by her parents, at the ramshackle old Silesian railroad station in Berlin, as she stepped from the train. She was a thoroughly changed woman even in appearance. She was wearing a colorful Caucasian cap and tried to look as much as she could like one of those drab, healthy Soviet women she had come to admire so much.

Martha Dodd Stern, an American author who in the 1930's and 1940's wrote popular books about Nazi Germany and later fled behind the Iron Curtain when she and her wealthy husband, Alfred K. Stern, were accused of being Soviet spies, died on August 10 in Prague, friends reported. She was 82 years old and had lived in the Czechoslovak capital for more than three decades.

Victor Rabinowitz, a New York lawyer who received word of Mrs. Stern's death, said that although the cause of her death was not reported, she had recently suffered an intestinal blockage.

Martha Dodd came to public attention in 1939 when her first book, Through Embassy Eyes, was published. It told of her four years in Berlin beginning in 1933 when her father, William E. Dodd, was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Ambassador to Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

Then in her 20's, she was at first favorably impressed by the new leaders of Nazi Germany but her later disillusionment was reflected in her book.

In 1938, a year after her return to the United States, she married Mr. Stern, a former chairman of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council of New York who had inherited through an earlier marriage part of the fortune of Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago philanthropist.

In 1941, after her father's death and nine months before the United States entered World War II, Mrs. Stern and her brother, William E. Dodd Jr., published the Ambassador's diaries. Critics said that by failing to edit the comments of Germans who were opposed to Hitler they endangered the anti-Nazi underground.

In the last days of the war Mrs. Stern published Sowing the Wind, a novel that dealt with the moral degradation of Germans under the Nazi hierarchy.

In the early 1950's she and Mr. Stern became persistent targets of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in his anti-Communist investigations. The couple moved to Mexico City in 1953, and four years later Boris Morros, an American counterspy, testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities that the Sternses were part of a Soviet spy network.

When they were indicted on espionage charges in 1957, the couple fled to Prague, where they settled. They later traveled to the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries and to Cuba but never returned to the United States. Mrs. Stern did translations of books and articles. Mr. Stern died four years ago at the age of 88.

Mrs. Stern is survived by a son, Robert, who lives in Prague.