As a journalist, most of her efforts concerned the Middle East, about which she wrote regularly in the "Christian Science Monitor" from the late 1920s until the 1950s. She was the first woman ever on the staff of "The Egyptian Gazette".
From 1930 until her death in 1994, she was married to Major (later Colonel) Charles Francis Kederick (July 11, 1901 – February 10, 1988), an Army officer who was an American-educated Syrian and had been chief aide-de-camp to King Faisal I of Iraq. They divorced in 1953, at which point she also changed the spelling of her name from "Fieber" to "Fielder".
Sometime after her divorce, she married (for a second time) Richard Field (1920–2011), an actor, author and educator, and an Assistant Dean at the University of California at Berkeley. Field published a book in 1973, "Inventive Playthings: Things to Make and Do in the Home", about creative child development.
During the years she was married to Charles Kederick, Dora Fielder served with him in the Special Operations Executive in both World War II and the Korean War, in several Middle Eastern theatres, as a civilian. During World War II, the pair were captured in Libya by the Italian army, and were detained in a prisoner of war camp in Tripolitania until they were released in 1943.
She spent three years during the second World War as an SOE agent behind enemy lines in Italian-occupied Ethiopia, during which she was parachuted into the country three times.
At the time of her death in Berkeley, California, at the age of 87, she was working on her fifth book, provisionally titled "It Has Been Quite A Life!", an account of her adventures.
She was the great-niece of the pianist Arthur Friedheim.
Works:
- "The New Woman of China", 1930s.
- "Children of the Desert", 1947.
- "We Became Spies; stories of the United States Secret Service", 1954.
- "Secret Assignment; the story of America's secret intelligence service in peace and war", 1955.
- "An American in Cairo: The Education of a Coptic Journalist". 1991.