THE BEST AND MOST TIMELY LESSON WE CAN TAKE from Traitor’s Odyssey, the latest biography of wartime Soviet mole Martha Dodd, is that, with luck, sometimes a well-placed U.S. turncoat can end up being an abject failure. Otherwise, Dodd, the daughter of William Edward Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany at the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, might have done serious damage.

As thoroughly revisited by Brendan McNally, Martha was a 25-year-old assistant literary editor at the Chicago Tribune when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose her little-known father to serve in Berlin, mostly because other more prominent choices had turned down the job. Martha quit work, abandoned a secret marriage to one of many suitors, and set sail for Germany in the summer of 1933 to accompany her father on the new diplomatic assignment along with her mother, Mattie, and ne'er-do-well brother, Bill Jr, 27. They hadn’t even left port in New York before she and her family caused a minor furor aboard the SS Washington when they appeared to pose in a “Heil Hitler” salute. Or perhaps, said Erik Larson, author of a best-selling account of the Dodds, In the Garden of Beasts, it was only an unintended “mid-Heil.”

The young woman’s arrival in Germany was the start of her life-long romance with Europe—and European men of all stripes. Not that she was partial only to Europeans. She had bedded many others besides her lovesick husband.

There was poet Carl Sandberg, her father’s longtime friend; possibly FDR Jr., who happened to be traveling to Europe that summer on the SS Washington with the Dodd’s; and eventually the author Thomas Wolfe, who wrote to his editor, Max Perkins, that the ambassador’s daughter was “like a butterfly, hovering around my penis.”

McNally, also the author of Germania, a madcap 2011 novel set in the last days of the Third Reich, takes delight in describing as many of Martha Dodd’s serial trysts as he can track down. His choice is logical: Martha Dodd’s love life is central to the spy story. At first, she just adored the jib and contours of those fancy Nazi uniforms. There was the Luftwaffe fighter pilot, Ernst Udet, and Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Hermann Goering and an early head of the Gestapo.

Martha also prominently consorted with Hitler’s long-time friend, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a flamboyant Harvard graduate and member of the university’s Hasty Pudding Club, at the time serving as the Nazi regime’s foreign press spokesman and liaison. Hanfstaengl, who had no problem sharing Martha with others, came up with a great idea—his friend Adolf needed to get hitched.

Putzi called Martha one day and “spluttered and ranted grandiosely,” wrote Martha later in a memoir. “Hitler needs a woman. Hitler should have an American woman—a lovely woman could change the whole destiny of Europe. Martha, you are that woman.”

A meeting with Der Führer was arranged at a luxurious Berlin hotel restaurant. Hitler and Martha “had tea and he talked with her a little,” writes McNally. “In her very bad German, she more or less understood what he was saying.” Sadly or not, there was no chemistry and they did not meet again. Other than his “mad burning eyes,” Martha wrote later, “he seemed modest, middle class, rather dull and self-conscious.”

Ambassador Dodd, meanwhile, doted on his daughter and appeared to be oblivious to her many romances. Not so for others at the U.S. embassy, who came up with the perfectly droll gibe for her exploits: “The Nazi Penetration of America.”

While Martha maintained and alternated cavorting with her various Nazi lovers, she became disenchanted with the violence and barbarism of Hitler’s regime. Soon she met a man who would help reorient her life, Boris Vinogradov, a Soviet diplomat who with all certainty was an agent of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.

Moscow Center soon saw the advantage of having an agent so well-situated as the daughter of a U.S. ambassador. Martha, code-named “Liza,” was soon purloining letters and messages from her father’s embassy desk and passing them on to Boris. But poor Boris soon committed a cardinal, if common sin in the espionage business: He fell in love with his agent. For her part, Martha considered him one of the great loves of her life, not that she gave up all the rest of them.

Martha returned to the United States in December, 1937 when her father was recalled after four years in Berlin. (Martha’s mother died of natural causes half a year later and Ambassador Dodd succumbed to illness in February 1940.) Martha went to Connecticut, where she married Alfred Stern, a wealthy businessman and fellow left-wing traveler, which allowed her to live a carefree bourgeois life throughout the war period while protesting in favor of Communist egalitarianism.

As World War II ended, Martha had done nothing much for the war effort on any side, a lazy courtesan without portfolio. Here, McNally’s narrative extends beyond the tale already told famously by Larson In the Garden of Beasts, as well as other fiction and non-fiction works that also have dealt with Martha. (William Shirer gave her passing mention in his monumental Berlin Diary.) Dodd herself wrote three books and edited Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933–1938, the wartime memoir of the father whom she sp...

The Spy Was a Femme Fatale, But Came Away Empty-Handed

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