WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO

Hello, friends in Radio-land.  I know I've been missing in action, lo, these many months.  But I've been doing stuff.  Thought I'd pop in and apologize and bring everyone up to date.

I've spent the last bunch of years researching and writing a book about an American woman who became a Soviet spy during the 1930s and then led a fairly bizarre life because of it.   Her name was Martha Dodd and I first learned about her when I came to Prague to be a 'foreign correspondent' back in 1992.  

I worked at the Prague Post, a now-defunct, briefly legendary weekly newspaper, which endeavored to cover the news coming out of newly-democratic Czechoslovakia.  It was manned by an ever-evolving band of American, Canadian, British, and Czech journalists, all young, and most without even half a clue.

I already had several years experience covering the Pentagon and Capitol Hill for a succession of sleazy defense-industry newsletters. I was also quite a bit older than most of my colleagues who were mostly fresh out of university. Anyway, one day in July or August, when absolutely nothing, besides the country breaking up, I went for an interview with someone from the Agricultural Chamber, a professional organization of farmers.  Since he didn't speak English, I brought along a translator.  Her name was Dora Slaba and she was a sixty-ish woman, a Sudeten Jew, who spoke with a British accent, something she'd picked up living in London during WWII.  After the interview, I took her out to a McDonalds which had just opened up on Wenceslas Square and got Dora her very first Happy Meal. 

We chatted for a few minutes as we ate and then she seemed to get serious and she asked me if I'd ever heard of an American writer named Martha Dodd.  I told her didn't and asked who she was.

"She was a rich American widow who'd been living here for years and years," Dora answered.  "I was her secretary for a year or two just before the Revolution. She said she was a writer and a journalist, but nobody I've talked to has ever heard of her."

I told Dora she sounded like she might be interesting. Was she still around? Dora shook her head and told me she'd died two years earlier.  I told her again how I thought it sounded interesting and we moved on to other subjects. I promptly forgot all about it.  For the next five years I was extremely busy covering all kinds of crazy stories that were continually breaking.

It wasn't until about ten years later I ran into that woman.  

I'd been back in the US for several years and was at work on a novel set during the final days of the Third Reich.  I was doing research on the internet in a history site probably called something like "Hot Babes of Nazi Germany!"  And there she was:  Martha Dodd,  the woman Dora had worked for!

It turned out that Martha Dodd was the daughter of William E Dodd, who had been the American Ambassador to Nazi Germany. She had accompanied her parents to Berlin in 1933 and promptly started having sex with amost every Nazi bigwig she came into contact with. And there were a lot of them. At one point she was screwing the head of the Gestapo, a celebrated dive-bomber ace and movie stunt pilot, several generals and Hitler's piano player.  Then she met a dashing Russian diplomat and promptly fell head over heels for him, though she was still boffing all those other guys. He recruited her into Soviet intelligence.  For a while she was one of Stalin's top agents. She had a fairly amazing run which lasted a couple years until her father's tour of duty ended and the Dodd family went back to America.

Martha had hoped to continue her spy work in America, and Moscow Center had big plans for her. But almost as soon as she came home,  Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of purges that put all the best Soviet intelligence officers in front of firing squads. Martha got forgotten.

Eventually she got put into a low-level spy ring and her exploits were anything but spectacular.  The FBI found out about them and she spent years under surveillance. When they tried to arrest her, she slipped their trap twice and ended up fleeing with all her money to Prague where she lived like something out of Sunset Boulevard for the next thirty years, which was how Dora met her.

I went back to Prague and found Dora and made her tell me what else she knew.  She told me a lot of weird stories.  But I have also learned a lot weirder stuff from other people I found that knew her.

Anyway, I'm currently writing about Martha Dodd's life.  I'm at least a year from completing it, but my agent is shopping a package of chapters to various interested editors, so my fingers are crossed.

Wish me luck, you all.