Noel Field

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Noel Field : biography

January 23, 1904 – September 12, 1970

Post-war activities

In 1949, Field moved from Switzerland to Prague. On the one hand, his aim may have been to obtain appointment at Charles University. On the other hand, as the Hiss-Chambers Case opened in the US, he may have been trying to escape recall to the States to testify—or he may have been recalled behind the Iron Curtain. Franz Dahlem helped him obtain a residence permit in Czechoslovakia. A few days later, Field walked out of his hotel while accompanied by two unidentified men. He left his papers, luggage, and traveller’s cheques in his room as if he expected to return.

Arrest of Herta Field

Field’s wife Herta became increasingly worried about the lack of word from Field: she believed that her husband had been kidnapped by the CIA in connection with the Massing and Hiss cases. Eventually, she traveled to Prague in the hope of getting information from the Czech authorities, where she met with members of State Security. She described her husband’s involvement with Soviet intelligence to them. Her story matched with Field’s confession to Hungarian security which had been made available to them. On August 28, she was handed over to the Hungarians in Bratislava, who arrested her and took her to Budapest.

Arrest of Hermann Field

Meanwhile, Field’s brother Hermann wrote to two Polish friends, Mela Granowska and Helena Syrkus (also spelled "Cyrkus", Syrkus was an architect, 1900–1982), and asked for their help in getting him a visa to visit Warsaw. The two women passed on the letter to the Bezpieka and were ordered to ensure that Hermann traveled to Warsaw, where he was arrested while on his way to the airport to leave the country. Hermann Field was imprisoned in the cellar of a suburban house in Miedzeszyn, where he was interrogated for three years by operatives of the Tenth Department. Like his brother, Noel, Hermann had for a time worked to help endangered refugees and had shown a preference for communist and antifascist individuals. In this capacity, in 1939 Hermann had served in the Kraków office of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund to help persecuted refugees, who were preponderantly Jewish, to emigrate to Great Britain.

Arrest of Erica Wallach

After the war, the Fields’ adopted daughter Erica had moved to the US Zone of occupied Germany and got a job with the OSS, later leaving to join the German communist party, and work as secretary to the communist representatives in the Hesse Regional Parliament. She met and fell in love with US 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 US because of her communist past. In June 1950, Erica decided to search for her vanished foster parents. From Paris, she called on Leo Bauer, an old friend from the Swiss exile group, who at that time was editor-in-chief of East German radio. The call was monitored by the MVD, and Bauer’s Soviet superior ordered him to invite Erica to East Berlin, where she was arrested. Erich Mielke at one point offered her an immediate release if she revealed the members of her spy network. She was condemned to death by a Soviet military court in Berlin and subsequently shipped to Moscow’s Lubianka prison for execution. After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, her sentence was reduced to hard labor in Vorkuta, in the Soviet Arctic.

Show trials

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 occurred in September 1949, its premise being that Field and his agents had worked to undermine the development of indigenous resistance, especially in Germany, in order to strengthen 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, and in those records Fields named Alger Hiss as a fellow Communist spy: [Interrogator’s question]: What was the essential point of the Alger Hiss case?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’s question]: So you revealed to Alger Hiss that you did intelligence work for the Soviet Union?Yes.