travel writer eugene fodo

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Eugene Fodor: Travel Writer and Spy

By Eugene Nielsen

Monument “Thank you America” to remember freedom from Nazis by US Army in May 1945. This monument takes place at important Pilsner crossing “U Práce”. Photo: Ondrej.konicek. CC BY-SA 3.0.

All warfare is based on deception. ” — Sun Tzu

Eugene Fodor was a travel guide pioneer. Fodor’s was the first company to publish annually updated guidebooks for middle-class travelers who wanted to explore the world and interact with different cultures. His guidebooks were innovative and influential, covering not only the typical sights and attractions, but also the social and political aspects of the countries he visited. He wrote with a witty and engaging style, encouraging his readers to be curious and adventurous. He was also a naturalized American who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, and later had connections to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Fodor was born in 1905 He grew up in a city called Léva, which was part of Hungary at that time, but is now known as Levice and belongs to Slovakia. The city was under the control of Austria-Hungary when he was born. Fodor pursued his education in France, where he studied political economics at two prestigious universities: the Sorbonne and the University of Grenoble. H e also worked as an interpreter for a French shipping company. He traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia, learning six languages along the way. He settled in London in 1934 and started his own travel agency.

He had a passion for travel, and he noticed that the travel guides available in his time were not very interesting or engaging. He wanted to write a different kind of travel book, one that would entertain and inform the readers. He wrote On the Continent—The Entertaining Travel Annual, which was a guide to Europe that included anecdotes, humor and cultural insights. The book was published in 1936 by Francis Aldor, Aldor Publications, London, and it was well-received by the public. It was different from other travel guides at that time, which were mostly directories of hotels and attractions. It was also reprinted as an e-book by Random House in 2011.

When the war broke out, Fodor moved to New York. He joined the US Army1942 and became a naturalized US citizen soon after. His language skills drew the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces.

Fodor was recruited for a special assignment by Colonel William Paley (the founder of CBS) and General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS. The mission of Fodor’s team, called the First Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, was to spread false information and lower the enemy’s morale through radio, leaflets and loudspeakers on the front. In 1945, Fodor, led a team of OSS operatives to assist General Patton’s army in freeing the strategic city of Plzeň (Pilsen), Czechoslovakia from the Nazi occupation. The liberation of Plzeň by Patton’s Third Army was a fact that was suppressed by the communists during the country’s communist era. After the war ended, Fodor spent a year in Prague. While there, he fell in love and married Vlasta, a Czech woman.

His spy status was kept a secret for a long time, until E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer and a co-conspirator in the Watergate scandal, revealed it in the late 1970s. According to Hunt, Fodor had worked as a spy in Austria and continued in intelligence for 12 to 15 years during the Cold War era. Hunt did not disclose the details of Fodor’s missions or the agency he worked for. The New York Times reported that CIA money was used to underwrite Fodor’s travel guides. Fodor denied that he was an undercover agent and that the CIA helped to found and fund his organization.

He founded his own travel guide company, Fodor’s Modern Guides, in Paris, France, in 1949. He created Fodor Modern Guides, which were innovative and comprehensive guides that covered various destinations around the world. He moved his company headquarters to Connecticut in 1964, where he continued to produce and publish his guides. He lived there until his death in 1991.

Today, Fodor’s is one of the leading travel guide publishers in the world, with over 8,000 destinations covered across more than 300 guidebooks and a website that attracts millions of visitors every month. Fodor’s Travel also publishes an annual “Go List” of recommended places to visit and a “No List” of places that tourists may want to avoid due to environmental or ethical concerns.

Fodor’s Fodors.com

*The views and opinions expressed on this website are solely those of the original authors and contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Spotter Up Magazine, the administrative staff, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

The CIA Spy Who Reinvented the Travel Guide

For decades, Eugene Fodor wrote and edited the travel books that introduced middle-class travelers to the world—when he wasn’t moonlighting as a spook.

David Farley

Don Heiny/AP

The year 1936 was a momentous year for global travel . The RMS Queen Mary made her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. Aer Lingus took its first flight (from Dublin to Bristol). H.R. Ekins, a reporter for the New York World-Telegram , won a race around the world using only commercial airlines (it took him 18 days, 11 hours, 14 minutes, and 55 seconds). And Eugene Fodor published his first guidebook, 1936 … On the Continent , a 1,200-page doorstop on Europe, the world’s first annually updated travel guidebook.

The guidebook, which for the first time was aimed at middle-class travelers and not necessarily upper-class “grand tourists,” included all the typical sights, but also for the first time encouraged interacting with locals whose worldview might be different from those of readers. “Rome contains not only magnificent monuments and priceless art treasures,” Fodor wrote in the foreword to the 1936 guide, “but also Italians.”

Eugene Fodor, who died at 85 in 1991, profoundly influenced the way Americans traveled in the 20th and 21st centuries; the company he founded, today called Fodor’s Travel, currently publishes 150 titles per year and its website gets 2.75 million visitors a month. (Full disclosure: I have at times in the last decade updated and written the restaurant section for Fodor’s New York City guidebook.)

What most people don’t know was that Fodor was a CIA spy, on their payroll for years. After this secret became public in 1974, Fodor downplayed it and outright shut down questions about it in interviews, groaning, for example, when a reporter from Conde Nast Traveler brought it up to him in in the late ’80s and saying, “Everyone seems to have forgotten what the Cold War was like. The Soviets were a real threat. As an American, you did what you could.”

Fodor was born in 1905 in the small town of Losonc, then in the Kingdom of Hungary (now in Slovakia). He eventually became a naturalized American and he was in the United States when the Munich Pact was signed (ceding the Sudetenland, the western parts of Czechoslovakia, to Hitler). He insisted he would only return to Europe in a military uniform.

Thanks to his language skills (he spoke five languages fluently), he ended up in the Research & Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II precursor to the CIA led by the legendary General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. The unit, innocuously named First Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, was designed with psychological warfare in mind to spread disinformation and undermine enemy morale.

Fodor interrogated prisoners of war and wrote propaganda leaflets that were dropped in enemy territory. The unit was also responsible for working with resistance groups to carry out acts of sabotage in enemy territory. In spring 1945, he became part of an OSS operation that had him smuggled into Prague to help direct an uprising of the Czech Resistance against the occupying Germans. During that time, he also traveled to Plzen, a town in western Czechoslovakia, helping to liberate the region from the Nazis, as Russian troops advanced from the East, doing the same as they moved toward Prague and, eventually Berlin.

After the war, Fodor’s involvement with the CIA continued. Starting in the 1950s, the CIA began tapping artists, musicians, writers, and journalists abroad for propaganda purposes or for information collecting. “Travel writer” seemed like a good cover for an undercover agent in enemy territory. And a travel writer who formerly worked for the OSS was ideal. A declassified internal OSS assignment from 1946 stated that Eugene Fodor would now have the title “Intelligence Officer.” His location: Prague. His job: “gather[ing] intelligence through overt and covert means as he has in the past. He will not be expected to develop extensive agent chains, but he will be called upon to deal with local nationals on a secure basis.”

One of Fodor’s later assignments was to help foment an uprising in Hungary in 1956. The uprising happened, but the revolution that the CIA hoped would topple the Communist government did not. Fodor claimed that after 1956, he gave up the spy business.

According to documents I obtained in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, this is not true. It just depends how much you want to believe the source—E. Howard Hunt, a veteran CIA agent and, infamously, a convicted Watergate burglar.

On Dec. 31, 1974, The New York Times published an exposé by Seymour Hersh who had obtained classified transcripts from a Senate investigation hearing in December 1973. The article publicly revealed Fodor’s involvement with the agency for the first time.

“My staff ran a media operation known as Continental Press out of the National Press Building in Washington,” Hunt said during his 1973 testimony. “We funded much of the activities of the Frederick D. Praeger Publishing Corporation in New York City. We funded, to a large extent, the activities of Fodor's Travel Guides, distributed by the David McKay Corporation.”

In his 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate, and Beyond , Hunt claimed that the CIA, starting in the late ’50s or early ’60s, had bankrolled Fodor’s guidebook company: “We… even published a popular series of travel books—the Fodor Travel Guides. Our reasoning behind the guides was that typically most foreigners only got to know Americans through touristic ‘Ugly American’ stereotypes. So, we hoped to change that impression by people in other countries to come visit ours, enjoy life in the United States, and get to know America better.”

“We’d undergo his losses,” Hunt said of Fodor in the 1973 Senate hearing, “and he was on the CIA payroll and may still be for all I know.”

But that wasn’t the only reason that the CIA wanted to use Fodor and his company as a covert weapon in the Cold War. It was not unusual for the C.I.A. to use artists, writers, journalists, musicians and others for their own gain during the Cold War—both covertly and overtly. Three years after George Orwell’s death, a film version of Animal Farm was released in 1954. It was a fairly faithful rendition of the book, but instead of Orwell’s finale, in which both the humans and pigs are left in egregious light, the film removed the humans, leaving only the dirty pigs, i.e., the fascists. The silent producer of the film was, in fact, the CIA, and it was none other than E. Howard Hunt who visited Orwell’s widow to successfully wrest the rights from her so they could make the more overtly anti-Soviet version.

The agency saw in the abstract art of modern artists like Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko a kind of very American assertive individualism and so promoted their work abroad, often funding exhibitions. The CIA first funded the Paris Review , and one of its founding editors, the novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen , was a spy. Jazz greats Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, among others, were sent around various parts of the planet on CIA-funded tours. Sometimes the artists knew the U.S. government was paying for it. Other times, as in the case of Nina Simone, who was sent on a 1961 tour of Nigeria underwritten by the agency, the performer had no clue.

So it wasn’t surprising to learn from Seymour Hersh’s New York Times exposé that the CIA’s involvement with Fodor went even deeper. When Hersh interviewed Hunt for his Times story, the former agent revealed that the travel books had provided “cover” for CIA agents eager to travel in foreign countries disguised as travel writers. Fodor would later admit this was true, saying, “I told them to make sure to send me real writers, not civil engineers. I wanted to get some writing out of them, and I did too.” In fact, in 1956 Fodor sent some travel writers/CIA agents to Hungary to help rouse a potential revolution against the ruling Communist government.

In a declassified letter that Hunt sent to Fodor on Jan. 13, 1975, two weeks after the Times article appeared, Hunt tried to make amends. “I want you to know that I greatly regret the embarrassment caused you by the New York Times’ revelation of my executive session testimony given in confidence to the Ervin Committee more than a year ago… and I did so on the assumption it would not be publicly revealed.”

And then he added, “The UPI story of today’s date quotes you as stating that you and I never met, or had any dealings, and that of course is not accurate…. There should be a record of at least one meeting between you and me at a CIA office in Washington.”

In an internal CIA memo dated Jan. 24, 1975 that I obtained through a FOIA request, about four weeks after the revelations became public, Fodor called one of his contacts at the agency to express a worst-case-scenario situation that could come from being exposed as an agent. Fodor was from a Hungarian town that is now in Slovakia and his Czech-born wife, Vlasta, still had family in the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc. “I feel like I should let [Hunt] know how he endangered the safety of my family with his revelations, if only to prevent further disclosures and public controversy,” Fodor is quoted in the memo, implying there was possibly more information on his involvement that could come out.

In the memo, it states that the agency recommended to Fodor that he just “give a simple, sterile acknowledgement” of his past activities with the agency and leave it at that.

After that, Fodor downplayed his involvement with the CIA, chalking it up to a patriotic duty, even going so far to say that during the early Cold War nearly every American in Europe had been approached by the agency.

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Eugene Fodor; Author of Tourist Guidebooks

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Eugene Fodor, the Hungarian-born travel guru whose guidebooks gave tourists insight into both the sights and the sense of 170 lands around the world, has died.

Fodor was 85 when he died of a brain tumor Monday at a hospital in Torrington, Conn.

Robert Fisher, a business associate and publisher of Fisher’s Travel Guides, said his longtime friend had lived in nearby Litchfield for the past 26 years.

A pioneer in travel guides when few existed, Fodor visited more than 130 of the countries of which his firm wrote. The first guide, in 1936, was “On the Continent.”

The 1,212-page comprehensive guide revolutionized the industry with segments written by major playwrights and journalists familiar with both the highways and folkways of Europe.

Expanded to include Britain, it became “Europe 1938” when it was published in the United States.

That volume became the signature of Fodor’s future efforts, providing visitors with a love of travel that he said should not be exclusive to “the sights” of a land but of meeting “peoples whose customs, habits and general outlook are different from your own.”

The books, which now sell about 200 million copies a year, still are noted for detailed and entertaining descriptions of places and people.

Videotapes now augment the original pictorial guides to places such as Bangkok, Great Britain, Hawaii, Mexico, Singapore and Hungary, where Fodor was born Jenoe Fodor in Leva.

As a young man, he toured Europe and attended college in France.

“I wanted to see the world and I didn’t have the wherewithal,” he once said. “So I wrote all the shipping lines in those days and offered my services as an interpreter and got a job with the French line.”

That led to work as a travel writer, and eventually to the travel books.

After his 1938 guide to Europe became a success, he came to the United States at about the time Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. He remained here, becoming an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. By then he could speak and write in six languages and said he was “adequate” in four others.

Out of that came an accusation from E. Howard Hunt in the 1970s that Fodor had been an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hunt was the former CIA spy linked to the Watergate scandal.

Fodor denied personal involvement with the CIA but refused to comment on whether his travel guides provided cover for U.S. intelligence operatives abroad who were acting as writers.

At the end of World War II, Fodor returned to Europe, which he used as a base while often spending 10 months a year on the road.

As Eastern countries began to seek Western currency, his list of titles grew rapidly. At one point, Albania was the only country not the subject of at least one chapter.

“I had a chapter, but they protested against it,” he told the Reuters news agency in 1988.

In 1986, Fodor’s Travel Guides were sold to Random House, but Fodor had reduced his role in the firm years earlier.

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Eugene Fodor feted as the spy who loved travel

This 1986 file photo shows Eugene Fodor in his office in Litchfield, Conn. This year, Random House is marking the 75th anniversary of Eugene Fodor's first travel guide with an e-book version.

In 1936 Europe, before Hitler rolled into Poland but civil war on in Spain, a unique guidebook offered a different slant on the Continent for foreign travelers tired of traipsing to ancient monuments during whirlwind grand tours.

"We have proceeded on the assumption that your thirst for historical knowledge is nothing like so great as your thirst for the beer of Pilsen or the slivovitsa of Belgrade," the foreword reads, pointing out that Rome not only contains famous architecture and priceless art, "but also Italians."

The writer was Eugene Fodor, hardly a travel industry mainstay when his book, "On the Continent," launched his namesake brand 75 years ago. Back then, the Hungarian-born Fodor was a young anti-fascist who had worked as an interpreter for a French shipping line, studied at the Sorbonne and spoke six languages.

His trajectory as head of a fledgling guidebook company took a shadowy turn once war broke out. In 1942, he added spy to his resume — specializing in psychological warfare for the Americans and later providing cover for CIA operatives masquerading as travel writers for his guides.

$This book cover courtesy of Fodor's shows the cover of Eugene Fodor's \"1936 On The Continent: Reissued for Fodor's 50th Anniversary 1986.\" This year, Random House is marking the 75th anniversary of Eugene Fodor's first travel guide with an e-book version. (AP Photo/Fodor's) NO SALES$

Fodor's Travel is now an imprint of Random House, which is feting the founder this month as "The Spy Who Loved Travel," reissuing the original 1936 guide as an e-book on Fodors.com.

Fodor's spy past remained a secret for years after his 1,200-page tome on Europe helped transform guidebooks from stuffy lists of famous sites to often-cheeky narratives on cultures and people — while also dishing up places to stay, eat and wander in a variety of price ranges. Little more than rarely updated books for academics and the privileged existed before that.

Fodor employed top writers (the real kind) to spin each of the 26 countries covered in the book, first published in Britain. They provided on-the-ground advice on everything from tipping to train travel while encouraging tourists to mingle with the locals.

Fodor fact-checked every word and wrote chapters on Bulgaria and Monte Carlo himself. He updated the book for a U.S. audience in 1937. Another revision followed in '38 and hit The New York Times best-seller list.

It was the same year Hitler took control of the northern section of Czechoslovakia — Fodor's home area — under the Munich Agreement. Fodor was in the United States promoting his guidebook when he learned of the Munich pact. Outraged, he cabled the magazine office in London where he was employed and vowed never to return to Europe — "except in uniform." He made good on the promise when he joined the U.S. Army in 1942, becoming a U.S. citizen soon after.

Secret spy He was recruited by CIA precursors because of his language skills, doing prisoner interrogations and helping write leaflets dropped on the enemy during the Italian campaign. He also broadcast propaganda from Algiers and created the system of "Eisenhower Passes" that rewarded Nazi soldiers who surrendered with good treatment.

After the war, Fodor lived in Prague for a year. He met and married his wife, Vlasta, there and they later settled in Litchfield, Conn.

In 1974, The New York Times revealed his spy secret — Fodor's franchise long established with several dozen guides in what had become a competitive business after a '50s boom in overseas travel by Americans. Watergate operative E. Howard Hunt, at the height of Senate hearings on the scandal that brought down President Nixon, spilled Fodor's past and other CIA secrets during testimony.

According to Hunt, Fodor had worked as a spy in Austria when the Office of Strategic Services became the CIA and continued in intelligence for 12 to 15 years. Fodor tried to keep the lid on in late 1974 and early '75, fearing relatives of his Czech-born wife could be put in danger. But pressed by the paper's expose, he acknowledged his covert work — and his hiring of many guidebook writers who were CIA spies during the Cold War.

"But I told them to make sure and send me real writers, not civil engineers. I wanted to get some writing out of them. And I did, too," Fodor told the Times in June 1975.

Fodor died in 1991 of a brain tumor at age 85. He retired from the company in 1978 following a heart attack after a stressful reshuffling of publishers. Random House bought the company in 1986 and Fodor returned in a smaller role.

"This was a man who had deep curiosity and loved travel," said Tim Jarrell, publisher of Fodor's Travel. "He really felt that travel was a form of international diplomacy. He was a strong advocate of tourism and travel because he felt that when you meet people from different cultures, it's extremely hard to start a war."

Updated guidebooks Before there was a Frommer's or a Lonely Planet, Fodor dedicated himself to annual updates. "That was a huge factor," said Meg Rushton, a Fodor's Travel publicist who spent six months researching Fodor's life for the reissue. "You didn't have things like hotels or restaurants listed because the books wouldn't be updated for 15 or 20 years."

Fodor's regular updates allowed for more detailed logistical information to be included for the first time.

A constant traveler himself, Fodor was also dedicated to encouraging foreigners to interact with the people of the countries they visit. "He was very interested in talking about the modern culture, seeing their lives the way they lived them then, not just visiting artifacts of the past," Rushton said.

He also thought guidebooks should be entertaining, unlike the Baedekers and Blue Guides that dominated when he broke into the industry. "He thought travel guides should be inspirational," Rushton said.

The Fodor's brand now includes about 300 titles, a website with nearly 2 million unique visitors each month and a complement of iPhone apps and e-books.

Pat Carrier, who owns the Globe Corner travel bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., said the Fodor's brand has ceded ground to competitors over the last 15 years, allowing Lonely Planet, Moon and DK to chip away at its base.

But, he said, the brand has stayed true to its mission: "They provide a refined, filtered set of recommendations across the board. They've curated the destination a bit more than some of the other guide series, which kind of throw everything at you without a filter. That's also why some people don't like Fodor's, because it's a filtered view of the place."

One competitor, Arthur Frommer, came along a generation later and gives Fodor his due: "That was the beginning of the effort to begin describing the entire travel experience," said the founder of Frommer's Travel Guides.

Fodor, he said, "didn't lead the movement but he joined the movement to change travel guides from simply a dry recitation of sightseeing attractions into books that dealt with the entirety of the travel experience."

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Eugene Fodor, Creator of Guides For Worldwide Travel, Dies at 85

By Glenn Fowler

Feb. 19, 1991

Eugene Fodor, whose travel guides have been carried by tourists to the far corners of the world for more than half a century, died last night at the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, Conn. He was 85 years old and lived in Litchfield, Conn.

He died of a brain tumor, said a business associate, Robert Fisher.

Mr. Fodor's approach to travel writing was set forth in his first book, "1936 . . . On the Continent," a guide to Europe for British travelers that he published in London. The joy of travel, he wrote, should not be derived solely from seeing "the sights," but from mingling with "peoples whose customs, habits and general outlook are different from your own."

Between "On the Continent" and Mr. Fodor's retirement a decade ago, the number of Fodor guides grew to more than 140 titles, many in languages other than English. Roughly 200 million Fodor guides, now published in the United States by Random House, are sold each year. Spoke 5 Languages

Mr. Fodor was born in Leva, Hungary, now part of Czechoslovakia. He left as a youth to study political economics at the Sorbonne and at the University of Grenoble in France. A desire to travel and an ability to speak five languages led him to work as an interpreter for a French shipping line.

In his spare time he wrote articles for the line's in-house magazine about life aboard ship and visits to exotic ports. Soon he was selling articles to newspapers in Hungary and France.

In 1934, while working for the Aldor Publishing Company in London, he suggested a guidebook to the Continent that would contain the "human element" he found lacking in guides of the day.

The book was a success, and in 1938, when it was published for American travelers, it became a best seller. He was in the United States on a business trip that year, and when Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, he concluded that World War II was imminent.

He stayed in the United States, went into the Army in 1942 and served five years in the intelligence branch, emerging a captain. A C.I.A. Link Charged

Three decades later E. Howard Hunt Jr., the former Central Intelligence Agency operative who figured in the Watergate scandal, asserted that Mr. Fodor had been a C.I.A. agent, which Mr. Fodor denied. He declined to comment, however, on Mr. Hunt's contention that the Fodor guides had provided operating cover for American intelligence agents abroad.

In 1950 the David McKay Company in New York began publishing a series of Fodor guides to individual countries, and Mr. Fodor set up a Paris headquarters. The first four guides covered France, Switzerland and Italy and, in a move that angered the Irish, combined Britain and Ireland in a single book. Subsequent guides dealt separately with Ireland.

Mr. Fodor returned to the United States in 1964 to live in Litchfield, Conn., and began compiling travel books about this country.

"America is still a little-known and little-understood country, and we don't do much to promote ourselves abroad," he said at the time. "We may go to Europe to visit our past, but the rest of the world comes to America to see their future."

Mr. Fodor is survived by his wife, the former Vlasta Zobel, whom he married in 1948.

News | TRAVEL GUIDE AUTHOR EUGENE FODOR, 85

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Eugene Fodor, writer of travel guides

GLENN FOWLER

Eugene Fodor, whose travel guides have been carried by tourists to the far corners of the world for more than half a century, has died at 85. He died Monday (Feb. 18, 1991) at the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, Conn., of a brain tumor.

Mr. Fodor's approach to travel writing was set forth in his first book, 1936 .

. On the Continent, a guide to Europe for British travelers that he published in London. The joy of travel, he wrote, should not be derived solely from seeing "the sights," but from mingling with "peoples whose customs, habits and general outlook are different from your own."

Between On the Continent and Mr. Fodor's retirement a decade ago, the number of Fodor guides grew to more than 140 titles, many in languages other than English. Roughly 200-million Fodor guides, now published in the United States by Random House, are sold each year.

In his spare time he wrote articles for the line's in-house magazine about life aboard ship and visits to exotic ports. Soon he was selling articles to newspapers in Hungary and France.

In 1934, while working for the Aldor Publishing Co. in London, he suggested a guidebook to the Continent that would contain the "human element" he found lacking in guides of the day.

He stayed in the United States, went into the Army in 1942 and served five years in the intelligence branch, emerging as a captain.

Three decades later E. Howard Hunt Jr., the former Central Intelligence Agency operative who figured in the Watergate scandal, asserted that Mr. Fodor had been a CIA agent, which Mr. Fodor denied.

He declined to comment, however, on Hunt's contention that the Fodor guides had provided operating cover for American intelligence agents abroad.

In 1950 the David McKay Co. in New York began publishing a series of Fodor guides to individual countries, and Mr. Fodor set up a Paris headquarters.

The first four guides covered France, Switzerland and Italy and, in a move that angered the Irish, combined Britain and Ireland in a single book. Subsequent guides dealt separately with Ireland.

He returned to the United States in 1964 to live in Litchfield, Conn., and began compiling travel books about this country.

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Fodor founder was 'spy who loved travel'

NEW YORK — In 1936 Europe, a unique guidebook offered a different slant on the Continent for foreign travelers tired of traipsing to ancient monuments during whirlwind grand tours.

“We have proceeded on the assumption that your thirst for historical knowledge is nothing like so great as your thirst for the beer of Pilsen or the slivovitsa of Belgrade,” the foreword reads, pointing out that Rome has not only famous architecture and priceless art “but also Italians.”

The writer was Eugene Fodor, hardly a travel industry mainstay when his book, On the Continent , launched his namesake brand 75 years ago. The Hungarian-born Fodor was a young anti-fascist who spoke six languages.

His trajectory as head of a fledgling guidebook company took a shadowy turn once World War II broke out. In 1942, he added spy to his resume, specializing in psychological warfare as a U.S. soldier. As a civilian in the Cold War, he provided cover for CIA operatives masquerading as travel writers for his guides.

Fodor’s spy past remained a secret for decades after his 1,200-page tome on Europe helped transform guidebooks from stuffy lists of famous sites to often-

cheeky narratives on cultures and people — while also dishing up places to stay, eat and wander in a variety of price ranges. Before then, little more than rarely updated books for academics and the privileged existed.

Fodor employed top writers (the real kind) to spin each of the 26 countries covered in the book, first published in Britain. They provided on-the-ground advice on subjects such as tipping and train travel while encouraging tourists to mingle with the locals.

Fodor fact-checked every word and wrote chapters on Bulgaria and Monte Carlo. He updated the book for a U.S. audience in 1937. Another revision followed in ’38 and hit The New York Times best-seller list.

“This was a man who had deep curiosity and loved travel,” said Tim Jarrell, publisher of Fodor’s Travel. “He really felt that travel was a form of international diplomacy. He was a strong advocate of tourism and travel because he felt that when you meet people from different cultures, it’s extremely hard to start a war.”

Fodor’s Travel is now an imprint of Random House, which is feting the founder as “The Spy Who Loved Travel,” reissuing the original 1936 guide as an e-book on Fodors.com.

13 episodes

Inspired by true events, FODOR’S GUIDE TO ESPIONAGE tells the 60s era spy story of the world’s first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jetsets around the globe, secretly working for the CIA to prevent the greatest events of the the Cold War and avoid World War III.

Fodor's Guide to Espionage iHeartPodcasts

4.6 • 16 Ratings
MAY 21, 2024

Episode 12: Fodor's Guide to Havana, Chapter 2

Gene and Vlasta attempt to escape Havana and stop the Cuban Missile Crisis before it results in nuclear war. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

MAY 14, 2024

Episode 11: Fodor's Guide to Havana, Chapter 1

Gene and Vlasta travel to Cuba to help the CIA expose the Cuban Missile Crisis. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

MAY 7, 2024

Episode 10: Fodor's Guide to Prague

Gene and Vlasta seek to rescue Gene's father while exposing the KGB's largest Cold War operation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

APR 30, 2024

Episode 9: Fodor's Guide to Paris

Gene must help the CIA and French intelligence stop an assassination attempt on President Charles de Gaulle. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

APR 23, 2024

Episode 8: Fodor's Guide to Berlin, Chapter 2

Trapped behind the newly built "Berlin Wall," Gene and his team must find a way to escape to freedom before being captured by the KGB. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

APR 18, 2024

Episode 7: Fodor's Guide to Berlin, Chapter 1

Gene is sent by the CIA to communist East Berlin, helping the KGB's greatest forger defect to the United States. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2024 iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia

Customer Reviews

Fodor’s guide to espionage.

This is an amazing experience. You can close your eyes and enter a different world of travel with great hotels, history and spy craft with dangerous situations and characters. The actors, dialogue and sound effects just pull you into the story. Would highly recommend.

New favorite!

Great adventure listen for a travel and true crime lover! The production really paints the picture & great cast!

Great and engaging

Love the writing and story here, can’t wait for the next chapter. Must listen for history buffs or true crime fans.

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Fodor's Guide to Espionage

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} Episode 12: Fodor's Guide to Havana, Chapter 2

Gene and Vlasta attempt to escape Havana and stop the Cuban Missile Crisis before it results in nuclear war.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;} Episode 11: Fodor's Guide to Havana, Chapter 1

Gene and Vlasta travel to Cuba to help the CIA expose the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Episode 10: Fodor's Guide to Prague

Gene and Vlasta seek to rescue Gene's father while exposing the KGB's largest Cold War operation.

Episode 9: Fodor's Guide to Paris

Gene must help the CIA and French intelligence stop an assassination attempt on President Charles de Gaulle.

Episode 8: Fodor's Guide to Berlin, Chapter 2

Trapped behind the newly built "Berlin Wall," Gene and his team must find a way to escape to freedom before being captured by the KGB.

Episode 7: Fodor's Guide to Berlin, Chapter 1

Gene is sent by the CIA to communist East Berlin, helping the KGB's greatest forger defect to the United States.

Episode 6: Fodor's Guide to Rome, Chapter 2

Gene helps the CIA stop an attack on the Vatican involving "Operation Gladio."

Episode 5: Fodor's Guide to Rome, Chapter 1

Gene helps the CIA investigate a KGB mission concerning "Operation Gladio," a Cold War clandestine operation involving secret armies and hidden weapons caches.

Episode 4: Fodor's Guide to London, Chapter 2

Gene helps the CIA and MI5 stop the Portland Spy Ring, discovering a larger KGB conspiracy in their midst.

Episode 3: Fodor's Guide to London, Chapter 1

Gene helps the CIA and England's MI5 expose the largest security breach in British history, the Portland Spy Ring.

Episode 2: Fodor's Guide to Monte Carlo, Chapter 2

Gene helps the CIA stop an assassin while discovering a long hidden family secret.

Episode 1: Fodor's Guide to Monte Carlo, Chapter 1

Gene and Vlasta enjoy their anniversary vacation until a friend's murder draws Gene into assisting the CIA.

Introducing: Fodor's Guide to Espionage

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Eugene Fodor feted as the spy who loved travel

By Associated Press

NEW YORK — In 1936 Europe, before Hitler rolled into Poland but civil war was on in Spain, a unique guidebook offered a different slant on the Continent for foreign travelers tired of traipsing to ancient monuments during whirlwind grand tours.

Fodor's Travel is now an imprint of Random House, which is feting the founder this month as "The Spy Who Loved Travel," reissuing the original 1936 guide as an e-book on Fodors.com .

He was recruited by CIA precursors because of his language skills, doing prisoner interrogations and helping write leaflets dropped on the enemy during the Italian campaign. He also broadcast propaganda from Algiers and created the system of "Eisenhower Passes" that rewarded Nazi soldiers who surrendered with good treatment.

After the war, Fodor lived in Prague for a year. He met and married his wife, Vlasta, there and they later settled in Litchfield, Conn.

"But I told them to make sure and send me real writers, not civil engineers. I wanted to get some writing out of them. And I did, too," Fodor told the Times in June 1975.

Before there was a Frommer's or a Lonely Planet, Fodor dedicated himself to annual updates. "That was a huge factor," said Meg Rushton, a Fodor's Travel publicist who spent six months researching Fodor's life for the reissue. "You didn't have things like hotels or restaurants listed because the books wouldn't be updated for 15 or 20 years."

Fodor's regular updates allowed for more detailed logistical information to be included for the first time.

The Fodor's brand now includes about 300 titles, a website with nearly 2 million unique visitors each month and a complement of iPhone apps and e-books.

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Fodor’s Guide to Espionage

Copyright: 2024 iHeartMedia, Inc. © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from iHeartMedia