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American communist activist, diplomat, and NKVD spy

Noel Haviland Field (23 January 1904 – 12 September 1970) was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD. His name was used as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia. Much controversy surrounds the Field story. In 2015, the historian David Talbot reignited claims that Field was set up by Allen Dulles in order to create paranoia designed to undermine the Soviet Union. During World War II, Field worked in France and Switzerland to support Jewish and anti fascist refugees. During this time, he also had contact with the U. S. intelligence service OSS. Arrested in Prague in 1949 by the Czechoslovak secret police, handed over to the Hungarian secret police and subsequently imprisoned in Hungary, he served as the pretext for show trials of Communist functionaries in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary, where it was claimed that he had served as their American spymaster. The purpose of the show trials was to replace indigenous communist party members with others more aligned with Moscow. After his release in 1954, he stayed in Budapest.

Field was born in south London in 1904, the first son of Brooklyn born zoologist Herbert Haviland Field, who directed an international scientific bibliographical institute in Zürich, and his English wife. After Herbert Field's death in 1921, his wife took Noel Field, his brother Hermann, and two sisters to the U. S., where the boys attended Harvard University. Upon completion of his studies, Noel married his childhood sweetheart from Switzerland, Herta Katharina Vieser.

Noel Field began his career at the State Department in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, he was an antifascist and sympathised with Soviet peace initiatives, as did many Western progressives at the time. Marguerite Young recommended Field to Massing. Peter Gutzeit, the Soviet Consul in New York City, was also an officer in the Soviet NKVD which was tasked with espionage. In 1934 he identified Noel Field and his friend, Laurence Duggan, as future Soviet spies. Gutzeit wrote on 3 October 1934, that Duggan "is interesting to us because through him one will be able to find a way toward Noel Field of the State Department's European Department with whom Duggan is friendly." Iskhak Akhmerov decided that Boris Bazarov should be the one to work with Hede Massing on this project. In 1935, Hede Massing, who was an NKVD operative, tried to sign Field up for the NKVD. Field agreed to work for the NKVD. However, in 1936, Field accepted a post in Geneva with the League of Nations. Massing arranged for Field to make contact with Ignatz Reiss and Walter Krivitsky, who was in charge of Soviet intelligence in Switzerland. Field was deeply moved by the Spanish Civil War and became involved in efforts to aid victims and opponents of fascism. As a League of Nations representative in Spain from 1938 to 1939, Field helped to repatriate foreign participants from the Republican side. During this period, Field worked with the Nîmes Committee, a network of about 30 relief organizations in Vichy France, and maintained congenial ties with Varian Fry and other relief workers who viewed him as a dedicated humanitarian who seemed to be working himself into exhaustion and nervous collapse. Field developed a roster of several hundred refugees whom he attempted to help emigrate. Unlike some members of the Unitarian Service Committee and Fry, Field did not face hostility from the staff at the U. S. Embassy in Marseilles for his activities, possibly because he sent many of his refugee clients to Switzerland, rather than to the U. S. In 1942, Robert Dexter, director of the Unitarian Service Committee, recruited Field to pass information to the U. S. intelligence service Office of Strategic Services (OSS). When the Germans occupied the rest of France in November 1942, the Fields escaped from Marseilles and re established a refugee program in Geneva. In 1944, Field returned to southern France, traveling with the French guerrilla, the Maquis, and with the approval of Allen Dulles before the area was fully liberated. He arranged for a colleague, Herta Tempi, to establish a small office in Paris as a relief project for the Unitarian Service Committee.

On 3 August 1948, Whittaker Chambers appeared under subpoena before HUAC. Among the former Federal officials in Washington, DC, whom he named as Soviet spies was Alger Hiss. Hiss warned Field in letters that he should not return to the United States. Two months later, as this affair distilled down to the Hiss( Chambers) Case, Chambers named Field, whose name appeared in newspapers on 15 October 1948. Field's double life ended effectively that day. Field walked out of his hotel accompanied by two unidentified men. He left his papers, luggage, and traveller's cheques in his room as if he expected to return.

Field's wife Herta became increasingly worried about the lack of word from Field. She believed her husband had been kidnapped by the CIA in connection with the Massing and Hiss cases. In the hope of getting information from Czechoslovak authorities, she traveled to Prague and met with members of the StB, the country's secret police. She described her husband's involvement with Soviet intelligence to them. Her account matched Field's confession to the Hungarian secret police (ÁVH), which had been made available to the Czechoslovaks. On 28 August 1949, in Bratislava, she was handed over to the Hungarians, who arrested her and took her to Budapest. Like his brother, Noel, Hermann had for a time worked to help endangered refugees and had shown a preference for communists and antifascists. In 1939, Hermann had served in the Kraków office of the Czechoslovak Refugee Trust Fund to help persecuted refugees, who were preponderantly Jewish, to emigrate to Great Britain.

After the war, the Fields' adopted daughter Erica moved to the American Zone of occupied Germany and got a job with the American Office of Strategic Services. She left to join the postwar German Communist Party and worked as secretary to the communist representatives in the Hesse state legislature. She met and fell in love with U. S. Army Captain Robert Wallach. When her party superiors objected to the relationship, Erica broke her connections with the party and the couple moved to Paris. In 1947, she was refused admission to the U. S. because of her communist past.

Noel Field had in fact been arrested – reportedly on the personal order of Lavrenti Beria – and had been handed over to the Hungarian authorities, who began to prepare the trial of László Rajk, the first of the postwar Eastern European show trials. The trial was held in September 1949, its premise being that Field and his agents had worked to undermine the development of indigenous resistance, especially in Germany, to strengthen the Western influence and create a divided postwar Germany. "Noel Field," stated the prosecutor was "one of the leaders of American espionage," who "specialized in recruiting spies from among left wing elements." Field was tortured and held in solitary confinement for five years, often at the edge of death. A matter of interest to students of the Cold War came to light years later when records from Field's interrogations were found in the Hungarian Interior Ministry archives. In those records Field named U. S. government official Alger Hiss as a fellow Communist spy: Interrogator: What was the essential point of the Alger Hiss case?Field: In the Fall of 1935, Hiss requested that I undertake intelligence work for the Soviet Union I informed him that I was already conducting such work. Interrogator: So you revealed to Alger Hiss that you did intelligence work for the Soviet Union? Field: Yes. In East Germany, in August 1950, six Communist functionaries, including Willi Kreikemeyer, the director of East zone railroads, and the boss of Radio Berlin, were accused of "special connections with Noel Field, the American spy." All were either imprisoned or executed. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had blocked Field's bid for OSS funds for a German communist front group during World War II, later commented, "Field's simple mindedness was indestructible". In October 1955, Erica Glaser Wallach was released from Vorkuta, the Soviet labour camp, under an amnesty declared by Nikita Khrushchev that year but was unable to join her husband and daughters in the U. S. because of the State Department's concern over her earlier Communist Party membership. It took the personal intervention of Allen Dulles to reunite her with her family in 1957.

Field was ideally suited to the Communists' show trials; he had known and assisted many highly placed officials, including resistance fighters and members of the Spanish International Brigades with whom he had maintained contact after the war. In addition, he had contact with Allen Dulles which allowed the Communists to construct a scenario of cooperation with the U. S. directed against the Soviet bloc. It could even be argued that Field had turned his friends into a spy network penetrating Central Europe. Moscow could thus counteract the ongoing uncovering of its own network in the U. S. with the bogus uncovering of an extensive network of American spies headed by the same Field whom the U. S. had charged with being a Soviet agent. It has been suggested that Allen Dulles, informed that Noel Field was on his way to Prague, saw an irresistible opportunity to create havoc among his Cold War adversaries and lit the fuse by instructing Józef Światło, his Polish agent within East European counterintelligence, 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. However, it is more likely that CIA officials saw a chance to sow discord once the Fields had been arrested and fanned the blaze of paranoia and Stalinist terror. It is undisputed that Allen Dulles was delighted by the chaos caused by the Field case and did not express any sympathy for the plight of the Fields or the harsh treatment they received. He even refused all efforts by Field's sister Elsie to help rescue Noel and Herta.