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His name was Noel Field (it sounds like an Irish name, but he wasn’t Irish). He came from a well-heeled, socially-conscious, academic family of New Englanders. He was an earnest, diffident, gawky, idealistic young man who wanted to devote his life to world peace and to helping his more unfortunate fellow human beings. He started his working life as a junior official in the US State Department in the 1920s and early 1930s and flirted with various left-wing causes including the US Communist Party. There he made friends with Allen Dulles, later to become one of the founders of the CIA, and Alger Hiss, later to be imprisoned for Communist Party membership. It is difficult to explain to people 10 years into the 21st century how attractive Communism was to idealistic young middle-class people in the period between the two World Wars. Many such young people saw Communism as the only way to reform a corrupt and collapsing capitalist world during the years of the Depression, and later as the only force able to take on the rising forces of Fascism and Nazism. My own father, who came from a prosperous Central European family, went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, was badly wounded there, and was working underground for Communist parties in South-Eastern Europe at the outbreak of World War Two. Noel Field’s idealism initially led him in a similar direction. In the late 1930s he worked for the League of Nations in Geneva, and in early 1939, as the Spanish Republic collapsed in the face of Franco’s forces, he went to Barcelona to head a League of Nations team supervising the repatriation of foreigners from the Spanish Civil War. Here he met and helped scores of people who were destined to take up powerful positions in Communist-dominated governments in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War: in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia in particular. The outbreak of World War Two found him stranded in the League of Nations offices in Geneva desperate to do something to help the victims of fascism and Nazism who had flooded into France in particular. Meanwhile the American Unitarian Association was looking for someone to head the Unitarian Service Committee’s humanitarian relief operations in France. In 1941 Field and his wife Hertha moved to Marseilles, then part of the unoccupied portion of France governed by the collaborationist Vichy regime, to take up this job. The Unitarians were enormously impressed by Field. “A typical American,” one said at the time,”kind,big-hearted, starry-eyed. He looked you directly in the eyes with an open, friendly gaze.” The Unitarian Service Committee’s work consisted largely of setting up internment camp hospitals and distributing food parcels to an estimated 30,000 refugees from Spain, Germany and 42 other countries in France. Field and Hertha worked with superhuman compassion and selflessness in this new post. After some time, however, there were the beginnings of suspicions that he tended to favour Communist refugees. He always denied that he had ever been a member of any Communist Party, saying “since I am an anti-fascist, I am eager to help communists.” At the same time he was contributing information to the United States’ new intelligence network, the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA), whose European chief was Allen Dulles, operating out the US legation in the Swiss capital, Bern. However he was never a double agent, as was later alleged. As the celebrated American journalist, Flora Lewis, wrote in her 1965 book about the Noel Field affair (‘The Man who Disappeared’), he acted as a “liaison between two groups devoted to a single cause, victory over Nazi Germany” – US intelligence and Europe’s communist parties. In this, he used the extensive contacts he had gained with Communists in the final months of the Spanish Civil War. For example, he introduced Allen Dulles to two leading Yugoslav communists, a meeting which helped to persuade the Americans to switch their support from the ineffective non-communist anti-Nazi resistance in that country to Tito’s far more effective and ruthless Communist partisans. Was he ever a Communist? Probably in spirit. The former head of the Swiss Communist Party told Flora Lewis later that he was “clearly a communist, an idealist caught up in the revolutionary spirit…Field wanted badly to be useful to the Russians.” By the end of the Second World War, Noel Field, now back operating out of Geneva, was European director of the Unitarian Service Committee. But as the Cold War started to hot up, and anti-Communist paranoia started to take hold in the US, the Unitarian leaders back in Boston and New York were increasingly alarmed at the reports filtering back from Europe about communist use of the USC. In October 1947 he was told that the USC’s European operation was being run down and there was no longer a need for a European director. Noel refused a job with the Unitarians back in the US because he wanted to stay in Europe. Many of the people he had helped in Spain and France in 1939-1942 were now in high positions in Communist and Communist-led governments in Central and Eastern Europe. He had helped some of them to return home at the end of the war: for example, he smuggled senior Hungarian Communists back to their country, with OSS help, through Yugoslavia dressed in Yugoslav uniforms. He regularly travelled to Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Prague to visit these old friends. In spring 1949 he was in Prague, looking for work and attending a conference organized by Partisans for Peace, a pro-communist international peace organization. Two men came to his hotel one evening and he left in their company. Nobody was to see him again for five and a half years. Two months later his German-born wife Hertha arrived in Prague to look for her husband. There, at the end of July, she went out to Prague airport to meet his brother Hermann, who had worked in the months up to the Nazi invasion of Poland helping anti-Nazi Czech refugees to escape to Britain, and had been back visiting friends in Warsaw. But Hermann never came through the arrivals gate at Prague airport – he too disappeared, literally into thin air. Three and a half weeks later Hertha walked out of her Prague hotel and never returned. Three Americans had disappeared without trace in communist Czechoslovakia. The US embassy made enquiries and protests, but the governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland flatly denied that Noel, Hermann and Hertha Field were in their countries, or that they had any knowledge of their whereabouts. And there it rested. Except there was one more disappearance to come: exactly a year later, in August 1950, the Fields’ foster daughter, Erika Glaser, the headstrong and attractive daughter of German refugees from Nazism, flew into Berlin to look for her foster-parents. She changed her clothes in her West Berlin hotel, took the subway to the communist Eastern sector (as one could do then), and vanished. 1949 and 1950 were dangerous times in communist Central and Eastern Europe. It was the era of the great communist show trials in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria. Stalin was determined to impose Soviet-style and Soviet-dependent totalitarian governments on these satellite countries, and was deeply suspicious of the kind of ‘national communism’ which had led Tito’s communists to break away from the Soviet Bloc in 1948. The Soviets were particularly suspicious of those Communist leaders – many of them now in senior government positions – who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, fought alongside non-communist resistance movements against the Nazis, or spent the years of the Second World War in the West. The methods of secret police terror, mass arrests, purges of leading Communist party members and show trials which he had used in the Soviet Union in the 1930s were exported to these countries, from whom he demanded unquestioning obedience and subservience. At the time of Noel Field’s arrest, preparations were being made for the first of the great post-war show trials, of a group led by Hungarian Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk , a friend of Field’s. Nobody knows who first – probably under torture – named Noel Field as a key US intelligence agent. Field was taken from Prague to the Hungarian secret police’s prison in Budapest. He was never to appear in open court but his name was to become a key piece of concocted evidence in the large number of forced confessions of defendants and witnesses in show trials in four countries. He was accused of being an “American master spy” and the Office of Strategic Services’ key specialist in recruiting American spies among the so-called ‘left-wing elements’ in Central and Eastern European émigré groups in France, Spain and Switzerland at the outbreak of World War Two. He was accused, in particular, of working with Tito’s Yugoslavia to undermine the Soviet block and pursue an independent national communist path, which in the paranoid eyes of Stalin and his henchmen in the satellite countries was equivalent to taking the US side in the Cold War. The facts were distorted from a pattern of the US’s strategic decision to fight Nazi Germany with communists as allies, to a pattern of American wartime determination to subvert the Soviet Union. The humanitarian Unitarian Service Committee which Noel Field headed was portrayed as “a cover organization of the American secret service.” The cruel irony was that at the same time as Field was being accused of being an American “master spy” in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, back in the United States, as anti-communist paranoia started to reach fever pitch in American government circles, Field was being named as having been a Soviet agent in the 1930s during the espionage trial of his former State Department friend Alger Hiss. Noel and Hertha Field were held in Hungarian prisons until November 1954. By that time the death of Stalin had led to some questioning in the Central European satellite countries of the show trials of his era. The initial cause of the Field’s release were revelations by a communist defector to the US, a very senior member of the Polish secret police, of the trumped-up charges against large numbers of people, including Noel’s brother Hermann, which had led to that country’s purges and show trials. The revelations forced the Hungarians also to examine their own files and their own so-called ‘evidence’ against the Fields. When they were released, it was as innocent people with all charges against them wiped out. A month later they applied for political asylum in Hungary. In the following year their foster-daughter, Erika Glaser, was released from one of Soviet Siberia’s most notorious prison camps and returned to the West. Noel Field’s strange and tragic story is a mystery, and remains a mystery to this day. He never returned to the West. After the 1956 Hungarian uprising against their communist rulers, and the Soviet invasion which put those rulers back into power again, Field issued a slavishly pro-regime statement saying that no number of defectors could “hamper the forward march of Hungary and other countries of the Socialist camp along the highroad toward communism, which all other nations will ultimately follow in their own manner.” He included the United States among these nations, expressing his conviction that “the American people would one day choose communism.” He never spoke about the huge injustice that had been done to him and his family by the Communist system. So what are the lessons of Noel Field’s extraordinary life? I suppose in one sentence it is about the bewildering pitfalls for men and women of goodwill – idealistic, often innocent, sometimes naïve – who try to walk a hopeful path through a world in agony. Flora Lewis concludes her book The Man who Disappeared with these lines: “He was an ordinary man, a bit sweeter-tempered and a bit fussier and more frail than most. In other times, other circumstances, he would have lived a useful life with the normal amount of sadness and joy, failure and achievement, or perhaps even rather more than normal on the good side. But the times and circumstances were outrageously extraordinary, and he had the proud ambition to be an extraordinary person. It was beyond his capacity. He never managed it. It is not Noel but his story, which is not really his story at all but that of the way in which stronger or more self-knowing people used him, that offers special insights.”
Andy Pollak |