Noel Field

Noel Haviland Field (23 January 1904 – 12 September 1970) was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD.

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.

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

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.

In the 1930s, he was an antifascist and sympathised with Soviet peace initiatives, as did many Western progressives at the time.

In 1933 (1934 per Hede Massing's later testimony), Field met the German anti-Nazis Paul and Hede Massing, who had come to the U.S. from Moscow to build a network of Soviet agents among influential left-wing circles.

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.

Based on this account, recent biographer Tony Sharp has determined that Field engaged in espionage for about a year in 1935.

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

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.

As a League of Nations representative in Spain from 1938 to 1939, Field helped to repatriate foreign participants from the Republican side.

During the Civil War, Noel Field and his wife Herta became friendly with a German medical doctor named Glaser who worked in a hospital attached to the International Brigade.

When the Brigade retreated during the final collapse of the Loyalist forces, Glaser's daughter, Erica, became ill and was separated from her parents.

The Fields found her in a receiving camp on the French-Spanish border and brought her with them to Switzerland, where they treated her as their own child.

They intended to reunite her with her parents who had fled to England, but the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 made that difficult, and Erica became a permanent member of the Field home, in effect their foster child.

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

Field began a major collaboration with the Organization to Save the Children (OSE), a French Jewish humanitarian organization, and its Marseilles director, Joseph Weill.

The two organizations later shared the same offices in Marseilles and Noel Field, with help from his wife, set up kindergartens in the Camp de Rivesaltes.

The Fields worked with a number of French Jewish women and collaborated with OSE to liberate Jewish children from French internment camps both openly if possible and covertly if the camp director would not cooperate.

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.

Drawing on the medical expertise of some of the Jewish refugees, Field developed a team of about 20 medical doctors, dentists, and nurses, some with international reputations.

From his contacts in Switzerland, he acquired medicines and nutritional supplements that were extraordinarily hard to obtain.

With the American Friends Service Committee, and his lead doctor, Rene Zimmer, Field implemented a nutritional survey of many thousands of the refugees interned in French camps and provided additional food for those in greatest need.

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.

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.

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.

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.