35 Facts About Noel Field

Noel Haviland Field was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD.

Noel Field's name was used as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia.

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.

Noel Field was born in south London in 1904, the first son of Brooklyn-born zoologist Herbert Haviland Noel Field, who directed an international scientific bibliographical institute in Zurich, and his English wife.

Noel Field began his career at the State Department in the late 1920s.

In 1933, Noel Field met the German anti-Nazis Paul and Hede Massing, who had come to the US from Moscow to build a network of Soviet agents among influential left-wing circles.

However, in 1936, Noel Field accepted a post in Geneva with the League of Nations.

Massing arranged for Noel Field to make contact with Ignatz Reiss and Walter Krivitsky, who was in charge of Soviet intelligence in Switzerland.

Noel Field was deeply moved by the Spanish Civil War and became involved in efforts to aid victims and opponents of fascism.

In October 1940, Noel Field resigned his post in Geneva and in 1941 became director of the American Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's relief mission in Marseille, providing relief for endangered Jewish refugees including antifascists and leftists, and helping many to flee to Switzerland.

Noel Field began a major collaboration with the Organization to Save the Children, a French Jewish humanitarian organization, and its Marseille director, Joseph Weill.

Also beginning in early 1941, Noel Field established an extensive medical program to provide aid to Jewish refugees in hiding, those waiting to emigrate, or those held in internment camps.

Noel Field developed a roster of several hundred refugees whom he attempted to help emigrate.

Unlike some members of the Unitarian Service Committee and Fry, Noel Field did not face hostility from the staff at the US Embassy in Marseille for his activities, possibly because he sent many of his refugee clients to Switzerland, rather than to the US In 1942, Robert Dexter, director of the Unitarian Service Committee, recruited Noel Field to pass information to the US intelligence service Office of Strategic Services.

In 1944, Noel 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.

Noel Field arranged for a colleague, Herta Tempi, to establish a small office in Paris as a relief project for the Unitarian Service Committee.

Noel Field served Allen Dulles, then head of the OSS and later of the Central Intelligence Agency, as liaison to Communist resistance fighters when they were needed for OSS operations.

Between March and May 1949, Noel Field moved from Switzerland to Prague, in Communist Czechoslovakia and Franz Dahlem helped him obtain asylum.

On 11 May 1949, Noel Field walked out of his hotel accompanied by two unidentified men.

Noel Field left his papers, luggage, and traveller's cheques in his room as if he expected to return.

Noel Field believed her husband had been kidnapped by the CIA in connection with the Massing and Hiss cases.

Noel Field described her husband's involvement with Soviet intelligence to them.

Noel Field's account matched Field's confession to the Hungarian secret police, which had been made available to the Czechoslovaks.

Noel Field left to join the postwar German Communist Party and worked as secretary to the communist representatives in the Hesse state legislature.

Noel Field met and fell in love with US Army Captain Robert Wallach.

Noel Field was condemned to death by a Soviet military court in Berlin and shipped to Moscow's Lubianka prison for execution.

In those records Noel Field named US government official Alger Hiss as a fellow Communist spy:.

Noel, Herta, and Hermann Field were released in October 1954.

Noel and Herta Field opted to settle in Budapest, where, despite the torture inflicted on them, they did not condemn the Communist regime, leading some to dub them apologists.

Noel 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.

The journalist Drew Pearson maintained that the Soviets, encountering resistance to demands for grain and for military support from nationalist Communist leaders in Eastern Europe who had spent the war outside the USSR, used the myth of a Noel Field-led spy network to purge them all.

Pearson speculated that Noel Field was arrested and incarcerated to prevent him from discrediting the trumped-up charges of disloyalty.

Noel Field even refused all efforts by Field's sister Elsie to help rescue Noel and Herta.

Noel Field died in 1970, and his wife Herta in 1980.

Noel Field's story became the subject of a 1997 documentary by the Swiss film producer Werner Schweizer, Noel Field - Der erfundene Spion.