Unsung History28 Mar 2022

Cordelia Dodson Hood

When German troops invaded Austria in 1938, Cordelia Dodson was visiting Vienna, living with her siblings as they studied German, attended the opera, and marched with Austrian students protesting against Hitler. Even with this experience, Cordelia may have settled into academic life in the United States, but when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the US entered the war, she felt called to serve her country.

In a decades-long career in Europe, Cordelia Dodson Hood combined her linguistic skill, her phenomenal memory, and her ability to connect with people, to gather and analyze intelligence, first about the Germans, and then about the Soviets. Despite the importance of her intelligence work, her story has been largely hidden, overshadowed by the splashier spies of the time.

I’m joined in this episode by Kathleen C. Stone, author of They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Photo Credit: “Cordelia Hood, undated.” Photograph by Nam de Beaufort, courtesy of Sarah Fisher. Audio credit: “Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood),” written by Johann Srauss, and performed by Erna Sack in July 1949, Public Domain.

Additional Sources:

“Intelligence officer did fieldwork for OSS and CIA: Cordelia Dodson Hood ’36, MA ’41.” Reed Magazine, December 2011.
“Cordelia Dodson Hood,” The Lincoln County News, July 31, 2011.

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