Noel Field was never a very consequential spy. Unlike Alger Hiss or Larry Duggan, fellow Soviet agents in the State Department, he did not hold a policy-making position or have access to high-level information. He did his most significant damage to American and Western interests long after leaving government service, during and after World War II, when he ran the Unitarians’ relief efforts in Europe and operated without direct supervision from Soviet controllers. And yet, his fanatical devotion to communism led him to throw away not only his own life, but those of much of his immediate family, who faced years of imprisonment, torture, and misery from those forces for whom he worked. Hundreds of devoted Communists were jailed, tortured, and many executed because of him. Even after Stalin’s death, when the absurd claims that Field and his wife, brother, and adopted daughter were all American spies were dropped by the Hungarian authorities, Noel Field refused to acknowledge that the cause that had inspired him had any fundamental flaws. He continued to lie about his own past and to protect his fellow Stalinists.
Kati Marton is uniquely situated to tell Field’s story. Her parents were Hungarian journalists, working for American wire services, who covered the 1949 purge trial that led to the execution of László Rajk, a high-ranking Hungarian Communist, on charges that he had been recruited as an American spy by Field. Later arrested, Marton’s father was interrogated by the same secret policeman who had questioned Field and occupied the same prison cell. After the Hungarian Revolution, Marton’s parents, before fleeing to the West, became the first journalists to speak to Noel and his wife Herta. She has used Hungarian archives, the records and interviews of an earlier Field biographer, Flora Lewis, and, most important, Field family papers that document with remarkable clarity—and no equivocation—his fanaticism and service to communism.
Her unambiguous conclusion: His is a story of “blind faith,” an idealist turned “into a willing participant in murder,” and a man who betrayed his own family and country on behalf of a monstrous ideology.
Noel Field (1904-1970) was both a precocious student and committed pacifist from his youth. Born in Zurich to an American Quaker pacifist who cooperated with American intelligence in World War I, he was appalled by the slaughter and resolved to work for world peace. Entering Harvard shortly after his father’s unexpected death in 1921, he graduated in only two years. Performing superbly on the written exam for the Foreign Service, he was judged socially immature but nevertheless hired and assigned to the Western European Division, where his work was admired. But he remained an outsider, living in an unfashionable neighborhood of Washington, socializing with blacks, reading Marx and Lenin, and searching for an alternate faith.
His wife, a former classmate from Switzerland, was utterly devoted to him, even though he had frequent affairs. The two of them pored over Marxist books sent by his mother; Noel feared that borrowing them from the library might compromise him at work. By 1928 he was emotionally a Communist, radicalized by the Sacco-Vanzetti case. When the Bonus Army descended on the capital in 1932, Field impulsively marched with them. In 1934, at the State Department, KGB agent Hede Massing recruited him for espionage; he decided it was his “honorable duty.” She found him an impulsive and naïve romantic: After one evening meeting, Field ran up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and belted out a rendition of the “Internationale” in Russian. At first, he only gave Massing oral reports; then he progressed to smuggling documents out of the State Department.
His close friend Alger Hiss tried to recruit him for his GRU circle, leading to an awkward encounter between Massing and Hiss, for which the former was rebuked by her KGB controller for poor tradecraft. The contacts had exposed Hiss, Larry Duggan, and Field to each other as Soviet agents. Marton wisely avoids rearguing the Hiss case, but notes the archival evidence from the former Soviet Union that has confirmed he was a spy and the unequivocal transcripts of Field’s interrogation by Hungarian secret police where he identified Alger Hiss as a fellow spy.
By 1936, Field, isolated in the State Department because of his left-wing views, felt uncomfortable spying on his own country and took a job with the League of Nations in Switzerland, where he remained in contact with Soviet agents, even helping the KGB track down and kill Ignaz Reiss, his first Soviet contact in Europe, who had defected and was in a position to expose him.
The seeds of Field’s later troubles lay in his initial KGB contacts: Massing, Reiss, and Walter Krivitsky all defected from Soviet intelligence in the 1930s and, despite his willingness to help KGB assassins, Field’s connections to such “traitors” marked him as not fully reliable. Moreover, one of his tasks at the League of Nations was to assist in the repatriation of Communists who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain. They, too, were regarded as unreliable by Stalin, and many who later returned to their East European homelands after World War II were conveniently linked to Field as American agents.
Hired by the Unitarians to direct relief work in Marseille following the fall of France to the Nazis, Field devoted himself to saving Communist cadres and shunning “noisy” anti-Communists. His biases were evident to other relief workers and agencies; the Unitarians turned a blind eye. He escaped to Switzerland in 1942 and made contact with his father’s old friend Allen Dulles, now directing the Office of Strategic Services in occupied Europe. Dulles used Noel’s contacts to funnel money and resistance fighters into Eastern Europe. When he finally reestablished contact with Moscow in 1943, Field was chastised for working with American intelligence; he was too naïve to realize that he was stoking Stalinist paranoia about potential traitors. Many of the men and women he aided were later purged as his fellow American spies.
With the end of the war, Field used the Unitarians’ resources to return Communist exiles to their homelands, where they could implement his utopian dreams. Criticism mounted from his employers, and he brazenly lied, denying that he was either a Communist or a Soviet operative. (He privately wrote one Communist leader, in 1948, that he and his wife had been party members for 12 years; confusingly, he said in the same letter that they had joined while in Moscow in 1938.) He was fired in October 1947 after an investigation demonstrated that all the relief money he supervised went to Communists and Communist organizations.
At loose ends, Field became embroiled in American investigations of Soviet espionage. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers publicly named him as a Soviet agent in the State Department. Afraid to return to America, where he feared he would be drawn into the Hiss case, and unemployed in Switzerland, he naïvely hoped that some of those he had helped during the war—and presently in power in Eastern Europe—would assist him. But Stalin, now battling the Titoist heresy, had already decided to purge unreliable Communists, particularly those who had survived the war in Western Europe or fought in Spain, and concluded that Field—recruited by traitors, an associate of Allen Dulles, and a savior of suspect Communists—was the perfect centerpiece for a vast conspiracy theory.
Lured to Czechoslovakia to discuss a teaching position, Field was arrested, turned over to the Hungarians, and brutally tortured until he confessed to recruiting 600 people to spy for the Americans. Dozens of those he fingered were murdered; many had never even heard of him until they were arrested and tortured. Although he never testified, defendants in the show trials that followed throughout Eastern Europe agreed that he had recruited them to spy for the United States.
Nor was Noel the only Field caught up in this drama. His wife Herta went to Prague to look for him and was arrested. His brother Hermann in Warsaw on a fruitless search for Noel was also picked up and held in solitary confinement. His foster daughter, Erica Glaser, traveled to East Germany to contact officials she knew in a desperate effort to find out what had happened—and was likewise arrested, tortured, and convicted of espionage. Sentenced to death, she was transferred to the Soviet Union and wound up in the Gulag, unable to communicate with her family for four years.
When a high-ranking Polish intelligence chief defected in 1954 and revealed that the Field brothers, both American citizens, were still alive, American diplomats demanded their release. With Stalin dead and the Soviet Union pulling back from his excesses, Noel and Herta Field were released from prison and reunited. Noel cried when informed of Stalin’s death; his first words to his wife were, “Have you remained true?”
Despite their release, the Fields remained under constant surveillance and restriction. Neither his own ordeal nor the cold-blooded murder of dozens of Communists because of his statements could shake Noel Field’s loyalties—or his loathing for his own country. When the American ambassador visited the Fields, Noel complained about Joseph McCarthy’s harassment of the State Department. After they requested political asylum in Hungary, the Fields became indignant when threatened with the loss of their American citizenship. Field tried to persuade his brother and foster daughter to remain in the Soviet bloc. He lectured them that he did not “blame an entire people, a system or a government for the misdeeds of a handful of the overzealous and the misguided” and expressed disappointment that they were angry with him and the demonic ideology to which he clung.
The Hungarian government gave Noel a job—at a salary 10 times that of the average Hungarian—as an editor and translator at a journal, where he informed on his coworkers to the secret police. He became a member of the Hungarian Communist party in 1956, just before the system began to implode following Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. László Rajk was reburied with honors, his widow denounced the regime, and Mátyás Rákosi, the man who had orchestrated the trial and Field’s role, was forced to flee to Moscow following riots. Noel Field obediently endorsed the Soviet invasion of Hungary and continued to believe that communism was the wave of the future.
Not content to have ruined his own life and his wife’s, Noel’s frequent anti-American diatribes in the mid-1950s made Erica Glaser’s life even harder. Freed from the Gulag in 1955, she was desperate to move to the United States to be with her husband, a former American soldier, and their two children. As an ex-Communist, she was barred from entering the country under the provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act. Even an affidavit from an ex-cellmate of the beatings and torture she had endured did not sway American bureaucrats, who insisted that there was no evidence she had actively opposed communism for the previous five years. Finally, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee took up her case, and she was allowed to emigrate in 1957. Erica Glaser made a new life as a teacher in Virginia; she refused ever to visit Noel Field. She sent him a copy of her anti-Communist memoir; he praised her writing but carefully avoided discussing politics.
Noel Field’s fanaticism alienated virtually everyone with whom he had contact. His coworkers regarded him as an eccentric. In 1960, he wrote an article for an American Communist magazine calling Stalin’s crimes “essential on the road to communism” and praising Soviet troops in Hungary as “freedom fighters.” As the Prague Spring developed in Czechoslovakia in 1968, he continued to blame the United States for the problems of the world—but, tellingly, stopped paying his Communist party dues.
True Believer is both thorough and engaging. The only major caveat is that the subtitle—Stalin’s Last American Spy—is misleading. Despite his work to assist the Soviet Union, Noel Field served as a spy for Stalin only during the last half of the 1930s. His other services to communism, from 1940 until the Unitarians fired him, were largely those of a devoted Communist trying his best to assist other Communists and betray his employer. He was hardly the last American government employee to spy for the Soviet Union; in fact, he was among the first. And he was certainly not a spy for the Americans, as alleged in the show trials in Eastern Europe. A recent book on the Dulles brothers, by Salon founder David Talbot, peddles the discredited theory that Field was cynically used by Allen Dulles to sow discord among the Communists. According to this fantasy, Dulles “fed” Noel to Stalin and was actually the orchestrator of the purges. Marton, however, makes it clear that Noel Field was Stalin’s willing dupe and that American intelligence had nothing to do with the Field family travails.
Many Communists were willing to sacrifice large numbers of people to create a utopian society. In a famous phrase, to make an omelet you have to break some eggs, and when they themselves were broken, many Communists were so in thrall to their ideology that they approved of their own destruction. Few American Communists ever faced that moment of truth.
Whittaker Chambers recalled in his autobiography that, for many ex-Communists, the moment of truth was when they heard the screams of the victims in their brains. Noel Field was too enthralled to his Communist faith to hear anything. Marton accurately describes him as “delusional and devious,” a man captured by a fantasy that no reality, or facts, could penetrate. Every generation has its share of such fanatics, secure in their belief that they are doing good even as they leave chaos and destruction in their wake. This portrait of a monster is an important lesson of what communism wrought.
Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory, is the author, most recently, of The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.
