Noel Field

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Noel Field, an American citizen, worked in the Western European Division of the United States Department of State in the 1930s. His early history---a Quaker with Communist sympathies who rose steadily in the world of American diplomacy---offers an informative window on its era. But it does not hint at the explosion to come, in postwar Eastern Europe, for which Field unwittingly would serve as the detonator. Before it was over, investigations, trials, and executions removed key members of the ruling Communist Parties in all Eastern European states. The crime in each case was having worked with Noel Field, the notorious American spymaster. Though the pattern of victims of these purges was not uniform, they tended to remove Communists who had remained underground in Europe in favor of Moscow-based agents who returned to their native lands behind the Red Army. How the Cold War would have developed if these individuals had remained in office will never be known.

During his years at State, Field certainly harbored sympathies for the USSR. Hede Massing, a former Soviet agent turned informer, told US authorities that when she attempted to recruit him for one Soviet spy network (the OGPU), that he already worked another (the GRU). But two of Field's handlers defected, raising doubts within Soviet intelligence about Field's own role that Field, seeking to re-establish his bonafides, spent many years seeking to assuage. Field left his position at the Department of State and joined the a League of Nations program in Geneva, Switzerland. In October 1940 Field resigned his position in Geneva and went to work for the Unitarian Service Committee in Marseilles. Field used this position to serve as a courier for the underground German Communist party and convey messages to and from Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian and Yugoslav communist party organizations as he traveled Europe ostensibly on refugee business. During the war years, Field, based in Switzerland, continued to work on behalf of refugees, including a substantial number of Communist resistance fighters who would, after the war, assume positions of power in Eastern Europe. Field served Allen Dulles, then of the OSS and later CIA chief, as liaison to Communist resistance fighters when they were needed for OSS operations.

After the war, Field was purged from the Unitarian Church relief organization and decided to settle in Prague; by some accounts, he was simply broke, but others attribute his decision to live within the Soviet bloc to fear that he would be subpoenaed to appear as a material witness in the Alger Hiss trial. Expecting to be greeted by old comrades with a warm welcome, he was instead arrested, moved to a prison in Budapest, and interrogated under extreme duress. No word of his fate reached the West, and concerned family members -- his wife, Herta; his brother, Hermann; and his foster daughter, Erica -- traveled to Eastern Europe to look for him. Each likewise vanished, finding a similar fate of brutal imprisonment and endless interrogation. When Field surfaced again, it was as a source of evidence used in the show trials of Communist Party leaders that were held throughout the Eastern bloc. Prosecutors used Field's confessions, obtained under torture, to implicate the accused as participants in a vast network of agents, recruited by Field on behalf of Dulles for the OSS and later controlled by the CIA. The purges and trials convulsed the governments of Eastern Europe. High officials in several countries were executed, and many others sentenced to long prison terms. Communist parties in each state turned on veterans of the Spanish Civil War and the underground resistance to Nazi occupation, once hailed as heroes. Even decades after the downfall of each of these Communist regimes, the scars have not yet fully healed.

None of the members of the Field family were shot, but each suffered terribly. Herta Field was imprisoned near her husband, in Budapest. Hermann Field, who had taken time off from his search for his brother by flying to Warsaw to see friends, was apprehended as he attempted to board his return flight and endured inhuman conditions for five years. Erica's search for her foster father was rewarded by interrogation in East German prisons and, after a death sentence that was commuted, spent years in Vorkuta, the notorious Gulag outpost in the Arctic. All were released by the mid-1950s, with apologies and offers of compensation. Hermann and Erica wrote riveting accounts of their experiences. But upon their release in Budapest, Noel and Herta Field asked for asylum and spent their remaining years as ordinary citizens of the state that had victimized them.

The Field case was and remains one of the great mysteries of the Cold War. No evidence has come forward to support the charge that Field ever tried to recruit a spy network to serve the United States after the war. What was the source of these accusations? One hypothesis is that Stalin, bent on purging the governments of the Eastern European Communist states of any independent-minded officials, found Field to be the perfect instrument. The USSR had harbored doubts about Field's true loyalties since the 1930s, and Soviet intelligence, acting behind the scenes, directed his arrest and interrogation so as to implicate Stalin's perceived enemies in the Eastern Bloc states. In this view, Stalin might have carried out the purges in any case, using some other pretext, had Field not defected, just as he had not hesitated to purge imagined enemies at home. The alternative hypothesis is that Dulles, tipped off that Field was headed East, saw an irresistible opportunity to create havoc among the Cold War enemy and lit the fuse by instructing an agent within East European counterintelligence (Josef Swiatlo, a Pole, who soon after defected to the United States and broadcast damning exposés on Radio Free Europe before disappearing with a government-supplied alias) to alert his colleagues to the impending arrival of Dulles's master spy, coming now to activate the network of traitors he had put in place during the war years. The chaos that ensued was Dulles's reward.

Hermann Field, who lived into his 90s, was convinced of the first hypothesis, but his plea for the release of CIA files was unanswered. His arrest and interrogation were carried out, incidentally, by Swiatlo. Field's foster daughter, Erica, remained convinced of the second.

As for Noel Field himself: he remained a true believer in Communism. His final testament, written in Budapest and published in an American political journal, was entitled "Hitching Our Wagon to a Star." He died in 1970.

[edit] Sources

Noel Field, "Hitching Our Wagon to a Star". Mainstream, January 1961
Hermann Field and Kate Field, Trapped in the Cold War The Ordeal of an American Family. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Erica Glaser Wallach, Light at Midnight. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967
Karel Kaplan, Report on the Murder of the General Secretary. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990.
Flora Lewis: Red Pawn. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965
Werner Schweizer: Noel Field, Invented Spy (documentary film). Zurich: Tchoint Venture Film Productions, 1996
Stewart Steven: Operation Splinter Factor. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1974
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, (1999).
Cold War Counterintelligence