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In August, we learned that former Ridgefield-area resident Martha Dodd was a Nazi-loving nymph in Berlin, when her father was the American Ambassador to Germany (1933-37). She even went on a date with Hitler, perhaps slated to become Mrs. Hitler, but that didn't work out.

Afterwards she lived in New York and later the Ridgefield area. Starting in Berlin, Martha had also moved on from Nazis to Russians, which created all sorts of drama, intrigue and problems.

She married New York millionaire Alfred Stern in 1938 in New York. After WWII, Alfred and Martha became of intense interest by the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.

Below are excerpts from Brendan McNally’s Traitor's Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage (2024).  

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Meanwhile, at FBI Headquarters in Washington, Hoover ordered the field offices to prepare reports on Jack and Myra Soble, Alfred and Martha Stern, plus another person associated with MOCASE whose name remains hidden to this day. Hoover then met with the Special Agent in charge of the New York Field Office, who’d flown down to brief the Director. (p. 252)

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[Alfred and Martha Stern] were high-profile people with lots of money, a good deal of which they contributed to many different causes. They also had plenty of upper-crust friends and acquaintances,
nearly all of whom were either communists, communist sympathisers, socialists, fellow travellers and the like. Hoover was ready for them.

Attorney General Clark had handed Hoover and Ladd a renewable one-year court order authorising visual and technical surveillance on the Sterns. Hoover immediately placed mail covers on their apartment, country home and at Alfred’s office. Any letters coming to them were pulled out during the sorting and handed to a special agent, who’d open them using special techniques, log them, copy them, and re-insert them into their original envelopes before handing them back to the postman to deliver. This created a jurisdictional bottleneck, since the local post office handling the Sterns’ mail was over the line in Connecticut, making it a task which could be carried out only by a special agent from the New Haven office. It probably took a while before a work-around could be thought up.

Tapping the Sterns’ telephones proved an easier task, which was fortunate since both Martha and Alfred spent time on the phone. Rather than having to sneak in and place physical taps on their telephones, as they did in the past, the agents now listened in from the local telephone exchanges. Later, their authorisation was widened to allow microphones to be placed inside their walls. They had also started using a vacant, boarded-up house adjacent to one end of the Sterns’ property, giving them a view of the Sterns outside at their patio, pool and tennis courts. In the city, sometimes they followed them around on the streets or in cars. Informants were also found: a doorman, already of the opinion the Sterns and their friends were a bunch of communists, readily agreed to keep an eye on their comings and goings. At their country house, they enlisted two local black teenage girls who had recently been hired. They wanted to get Ralph Scott, the Sterns’ butler and handyman, to talk to them, but apparently he wouldn’t. The FBI’s note said that they should see if they could learn anything through Scott’s brother who lived in Philadelphia at Lakewood-3-2801. Whether the lead was ever followed up is not known. What they had in place was good enough for the moment. The FBI’s surveillance of Alfred and Martha Stern had begun. (pp. 254-55).

And maybe you thought pearl-clutching Ridgefield was always a sleepy, outer suburb like I did!

This book is a real page-turner and essential reading regarding Connecticut history and more.

> Brendan McNally. (2024). Traitor's Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage. Icon Books.

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Learn more about Martha Dodd:

> Scroll to the bottom of this linked article, search “Dodd” in the declassified FBI files directory and see Martha’s FBI file.

> Read more about Martha, Putzi, and Nazi agent and architect Philip Johnson of New Canaan in: Johnson & Tremaine associates, Ridgefield’s Martha Dodd featured In Hitler’s Aristocrats (2023) - Part 5 of 6.

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