Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field

Table of contents :
The Story of Noel Field
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
EPILOGUE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

NOEL FIELD

Blackstane-Shelburne

RED PAWN The Story o f Noel Field

FLORA LEWIS

Garden City, N ew York

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. 1965

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-10639 Copyright © 1965 by Flora Gruson All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America

RED PAWN

CHAPTER I

There are Palace Hotels and Palace Hotels around the world, some stretching to live up to their name and some frankly mocking it. The Palace Hotel in Prague probably meant to be in the first group, somber and imposing with a bleak, high-ceilinged lobby and a broad wood-paneled stairway to give a tinge of grandeur. But by 1949, or by another calendar reckoning the year 2 a .c. (after communism came to Czechoslovakia), it was only dreary and depressing, the transient home of a dwindling group of foreigners who no longer cared to chat with strangers and avoided asking or telling each other the purpose of their visit There was always a silent assort­ ment of them in the lobby or in the gloomy café up the stairs, star­ ing, leafing through the multilingual collection of communist newspapers that lay about on empty tables, waiting mutely without explanation. Foreigners with money to spend, or whom the government chose to pamper with deluxe treatment, stayed at the Alcron, dingy too in 1949 but more alive with comings and goings, brightened now and then with a diplomatic sari or an easy burst of tourist laughter. There was something about the atmosphere at the Palace that made people glance swiftly around and lower their voices as they pushed through the revolving door from the narrow, time-softened Prague street. There was nothing apparently sinister, just a lumpy inelegant reserve that was totally devoid of either the palatial or the carefree air of travel. A tall gaunt American checked into the Palace in the spring of 1949. His name was Noel Haviland Field, and with his soft voice, his stooped and shambling gait, his thick but neatly combed gray hair, he had an air of gentle culture and transparent goodness that usually brought him trust and respect

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For two years he had been without a job. It was a serious discom­ fort, although not a tragedy because there was a steady if small in­ come from his father’s estate, and he had trained himself to frugal living years before. Besides, with his education and his immense ex­ perience of Europe, all the racked and tom and bled-out parts of Europe, he could always manage to pick up a bit by writing. To save expenses, he and his wife Herta had closed their Geneva apart­ ment, stored their furniture, and moved into a family hotel in Ge­ neva until they could find another place to settle. Noel told friends in Geneva and Paris that he was going to make his headquarters in Prague for a while and roam Eastern Europe to gather material for a book on the stark new structures that were being hammered to­ gether as Peoples’ Democracies, the communist empire between the Soviet frontier and the high-tide mark of the Red Army at the end of World War H. To others, Noel had said that he wanted to study at Prague’s ancient Charles University, revered over centuries as a center of enlightenment. And to others yet, he said he had hopes of finding a job as a visiting professor, perhaps of languages or modem literature. He had already collected two big suitcases of material on earlier trips to Prague and Warsaw, and had left them with friends to be sent on when he flew home to Geneva. The Prague suitcase had never arrived—lost, stolen, sequestered? There could be a dozen explanations, and there was none. It seemed somehow ominous. He wrote to his sister Elsie, in the United States, that he was getting extremely worried about the Prague suitcase, now more than two months overdue, because it contained “some material that could never be replaced,” and suggested he was going to Prague to track it. In April, Noel and Herta went to Paris for a few days. The first Partisans for Peace congress was being held, a forerunner of the procommunist Stockholm Appeal, and Noel told friends he was attend­ ing as an independent observer. A French newspaperman who rec­ ognized Noel, standing disconsolately in front of the Salle Pleyel where the congress was held, had to sneak him in past the guards, however, for Noel had no admission card. With increasing excitement Noel talked to friends about his com­

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ing trip to Prague and his plans to work there. On May 5 he boarded an Air France plane and flew directly to Czechoslovakia. He left no address with acquaintances in Paris. But he said they could always reach him at the Journalists’ Club, where he often dropped in for a meal and a sociable hour or two with the new elite, the Party newspapermen whose gossip, seldom idle, echoed the cold, secret voices of the leaders in the gray concrete Party building and sometimes carried a hint of things unheard. The girl who looked after the cloakroom at the club would take letters and messages for him, he said, and hold them in the drawer behind her counter where she kept cigarettes and matches to sell. Herta went back to Geneva to pay off their bills, pack up, and get her own visa for Czechoslovakia. Five days later, on May 10, both of them wrote letters to Noel’s sister Elsie. Noel wrote about how the looks of Prague had changed under the new regime. He said there was plenty of food, but prices were high. He was looking around for a place where Herta could do some light housekeeping, because he was having another bout of his old stomach trouble and didn’t want to live on heavy Czech restaurant food. Herta’s letter to Elsie said she had spoken to Noel on the telephone and that he was cheerful and eagerly awaiting her arrival. He told her that a friend she knew, but whose name he did not want to mention on the phone, was coming to see him. Noel had several friends in Prague, people he had met in wartime in the West and people he had come to know on a series of visits to Czechoslovakia since the war. Some of them were now very impor­ tant, as important as a person can be in a Peoples’ Democracy. But Noel himself was not a widely known figure. The people who watched him come and go at the Palace, off for appointments or long lonely walks through the beautiful stony city, saw nothing ex­ traordinary in him. An odd American, perhaps, but there were so many odd Americans, odd all sorts of people wandering about Europe in those days. Whomever he had seen, whomever he was trying to see, Noel took it calmly when two men came to the Palace to fetch him a day or two after the letters to Elsie had been sent. He acted as though he had been waiting for someone to take him to an impor-

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tant meeting, and strode off with the men after they had spoken to him. But he said nothing to anyone else; he took nothing with him. Noel and the two men turned in the direction of Wenceslaus Square, and he disappeared without a trace. A few days later, the Czech friend whom Herta thought he had referred to on the telephone went to call on Noel at the Palace. The manager said Mr. Field had gone out with two men and had still not returned. Several days later the manager said again that the room was still paid for, and he understood Noel had gone on a short trip to Hungary, leaving his things behind. Then he reported he had had a telegram from Noel in Bratislava, near the Hungarian border. Finally, a few weeks later, there was another telegram saying that a man named René Kimmel would come from Bratislava to pick up Noel's things and pay the mounting bill. Elsie learned later that the friend looked up the wire in the Bratislava telegraph office and did not recognize the signature as anything like Noel’s. It was a month later when the manager of the Palace told an inquirer that René Kimmel had turned up and taken away all Noel’s belongings, but no one else ever saw Kimmel. There was nothing but the hotel manager s word to suggest that he existed at all. Nor, after he walked out of the door with the two strangers, was there another sign anywhere that Noel Field still existed. The malicious bise that blows damp Alpine cold but none of the mountain freshness down on Geneva all winter dies in spring, leav­ ing the city to sprawl in warm comfort around its end of a picturepostcard lake. Horse chestnuts bloom in the streets, lilacs bloom in the gardens, and minute sails bloom prettily on the water. There is a tenderness in the air to lift all but the heaviest spirits. But the spring of 1949 gave no solace to Herta Field. Herta was not flighty or hysterical, far from it. If ever a woman was solid and sturdy of mind as well as body, it was Noel Field’s German-bom wife. Her determination, her energy, her courage had been tested before and not found wanting. But even the firmest people have a staff to hold them upright, although some keep it secret. The mainstay of Herta’s life, no secret, was her adoration of her well-bom, well-educated, well-mannered husband. Her char­

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acter was in many ways stronger and more decisive than his, but all her strength and her decisions were concentrated on maintaining what she always considered her incomparably fortunate and hon­ ored place as Noel’s wife. She shared his ideals and his secrets, guarding them with her life. She fussed about his medicine and his muffler. For Herta, Noel could do no wrong; without Noel nothing could be right And the weeks went by without news from Noel. In July, relatives invited Herta to join them for a seaside vacation. Herta did not answer the letter, so they telephoned her from Paris. She sounded strange on the phone, they said later, but when they asked about Noel she assured them he was all right, but that she had to stay in Geneva in case he should want to call her. It was not like Herta to be so illogical and distant, but insisting did no good and they gave up. Herta had moved into the apartment of a friend who was away for a time in Rome, a roomy, pleasant place in one of die handsome modem buildings on a hill above the Old City. She puttered among the bibelots, wandered about the dty, in growing despair. When the friend, a widow, returned from her trip, she could not help notice that Herta was writhing with worry. The two women had been friends for several years, and discreetly, sympathetically at first, the hostess offered to listen to Herta's troubles. Herta was fiercely secretive, evading all questions, shrugging aside as futile all the offers of help. Finally, a little impatient at Herta’s strange be­ havior, the other insisted. “If you’re going to live with me as my guest, and friend," she told Herta one evening, "how can I help you if you refuse to tell me what’s bothering you?" At last, Herta blurted it out. “I have had no news from Noel," she said explosively. “I want to go to Prague. I’d much rather be in prison with Noel in Prague than be free here in Switzerland.” It was the first time she had spoken the dread word “prison" since Noel had disappeared. And she never explained what knowledge put the picture in her mind and made her feel it was the right one. She would say nothing more, but she decided to pack up and fly to Prague.

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It was July by then, two months since Noel had taken off so jauntily from Paris. His younger brother Hermann, an architect, came to Europe to attend an architects’ congress in Bergamo, Italy, and then go on to Poland for a visit. Two years before, he had or­ ganized and led a tour of American architects around Eastern Europe to look at the rubble legacy of war being piled up again into new buildings, new cities, and he had friends in Warsaw. Hermann stopped briefly to see Herta in Geneva. Then she took off for Prague. It was agreed that as soon as his congress in Ber­ gamo had ended, he would come to Prague to help her in the search« When he arrived, toward the end of July, Herta had checked into the Palace Hotel, but she had got no farther. Together they went to the police. “Noel Haviland Field?” the men behind all the desks would say, pronouncing the foreign name very carefully. And they would shuffle industriously through papers, looking at each as though they expected it to be the right one, giving a little grunt of sympathetic disappointment each time it was not. Politely, with kindly smiles, they would promise to look further, to check, to inquire, and just as politely they always finished with the same answer: “No, we know nothing about him.” Both Herta and Hermann stayed carefully away from the one place Americans in trouble would naturally seek help—the rabbit warren of an old palace sprawling up a hillside across the Vltava River and now, with the Stars and Stripes fluttering above its great arched gateway, the United States Embassy. Hermann explained later that they made their search so furtively and so alone because they believed there was a better chance of prying Noel loose from whoever clutched him if there were no official protests and no noise. Eventually Hermann went on to Warsaw, promising to stop again in Prague on his way home to see what more could be done. It was nearly three months since Noel had disappeared. No one but his wife and brother even knew that he was missing. Hermann wrote from Warsaw to his sister Elsie. On August 3, he said, Herta had telephoned from Prague, asking him to join her there. Her tone, he told Elsie, was urgent, but he said nothing more.

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The streets had been cleared and most of the rubble piled up and carted away from Warsaw by midsummer 1949, but it was a bleak and broken city, still showing that it was there at all because one thing, and only one thing, had emerged unshattered from the wreckage of the war: will power. Now even the will power that had so bitterly preserved itself against the Nazi onslaught seemed about to crumble, like the few tottering buildings that had with­ stood the fury of destruction but had lost their healthy balance and were inching toward collapse. It was a gloomy, grim city, shivering with apprehension despite the summer skies because the shadows of a new round of purges, a new campaign of persecutions, were al­ ready dear on the horizon. Prague somehow drew itself in, dosed and cold, at danger signs. Warsaw chattered nervously. Hermann Haviland Field, tall like his older brother but more lithe and not so gangly, more degant and not so tweedy, more confident and not so intense, went on endless rounds of sight-seeing, gazing at the dirty open sites where he had seen famous buildings on his trip to Warsaw just before the war and at the duttered sites of raw new building. His frequent companions were Simon and Helena Cyrkus, leading architects on the government Reconstruction Board. It was Helena, a plump, enthusiastic woman, who had ar­ ranged the visa for Hermann. But for all their government con­ tacts, the Cyrkuses could give no help in tracking NoeL Wherever he tried, Hermann met only blank disbelief. Hermann had left his English-born wife, Kate, and their two chil­ dren in London. He sent word to Kate that he would be flying to Prague to see Herta once more on August 22, and would fly to Lon­ don the next day to pick up the family and sail home. On the morn­ ing of the twenty-second he went in the Cyrkuses' little car to Okçde, Warsaw's airport. There was the usual fluster in the waiting room as they exchanged warm farewells and promises to write, and Helena waved as Hermann joined the line for passport and customs inspection. The passengers filed through into the departure waiting room and boarded the rickety plane, a Soviet version of the famous American DC-3 workhorse, for the two-hour flight to Prague. Herta went out to the Prague airport to meet the plane. She was

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seriously unnerved by now, for she had still heard nothing of Noel. It was three and a half months, and all she had gotten in Prague were such bland denials that they seemed to cast doubt on whether a man named Noel H. Field had ever existed at all. She took to strange habits. An American friend, knowing she was in Prague, went to ask for her at the Palace. Herta was out, but she had left a list of places where she intended to be each hour of the day. Won­ dering about this businesslike efficiency that was so out of character for Herta, the friend tracked her down and invited her to supper. Herta refused curdy and told the friend, a social worker named Dorothea Jones, aI can’t talk to you, I’ve got to go to bed. It’s all right though, I know Noel is all right I know I’ll find him.’’ But she gave no explanation. When the plane from Warsaw came in, Herta posted herself at the opaque glass door leading from the immigration and customs room. Impatientiy she scanned each face as it came through. Finally she asked a passing airlines employee if there were any more pas­ sengers from Warsaw. There was no one left. She persuaded the officials to show her the flight manifest There was no Hermann Field on the list. Someone remembered the tall, slim American entering the waiting room in Warsaw. Others thought they re­ membered his coming out to board the plane, but no one was sure. Certainly there had been nothing untoward during the flight; no one had noticed anything unusual. Like his brother Noel, Hermann had vanished. This time, it seemed literally into thin air. There was little more Herta could do. There were no more planes from Warsaw. She probably telephoned Warsaw and was assured that Hermann had packed and left just as he had planned. Still, she waited a few more hours. The next day she sat down and wrote to Hermann’s wife that Hermann had failed to reach Prague. She could have telephoned London, but she did not. Kate Thomeycroft Field, an apple-cheeked, bright-humored, nononsense Englishwoman, was not the type who mulls over night­ mares of catastrophe. On the same day that Herta mailed a letter saying Hermann had not arrived on the plane from Warsaw, Kate went out to meet the flight he was to have taken on from Prague. A quick check showed he had neither appeared nor canceled the res­

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ervation, and she was certain Hermann would have let her know if he had changed his plans. She marched directly to the American Embassy on Grosvenor Square and reported that Hermann Field was missing in a communist land. The wires went out—the first in what was to become an enormous file of diplomatic messages on the Field case. In Prague, Herta finally, although still guardedly, decided to speak to the embassy. She told them in precise detail about the plane that was to have brought Hermann. Asked why she stayed on in Prague, she told them for the first time that Noel too had dis­ appeared. There was a long list of all the usual questions, and she answered them, but she volunteered no further information or sus­ picion. It was sinister enough, two Americans vanishing without trace or explanation, but the diplomats in Prague had no reason to see any extraordinary significance in the mystery. Checks were begun, and Herta was promised a report as soon as anything came in. She went back to the Palace H otel That was on the twenty-fifth of August. The next day, August 26, die embassy tried to reach Herta. She was no longer at the Palace. Herta Field had vanished. “One little, two litde, three litde Indians . . .* The nursery rhyme was coming true. Three Americans, one after another, gone. There were headlines and head-shakings, diplomatic protests and fingershakings, but no clues. The governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland formally and flady denied that N oel Hermann and Herta Field were in tiieir countries or that they had any knowledge of where the Fields might be. There seemed nothing more to say, and no use saying it. After a time the fuss died down. It was exactiy a year later, on August 26, 1950, that Erika Glaser Wallach, foster daughter of Noel and Herta Field, stepped onto the covered apron of Berlin's Tempelhof airport after a flight from Frankfurt. Erika was a slim, headstrong, attractive young woman of impulse. The impulse had taken her to seek the trail of the missing Fields in the only city that is half free, half communist. West Berlin was just beginning to recover after the long hunger siege of the blockade, lifted a few months earlier. But the East and the West

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were at war, a distant remote-control war that was Stalin’s last vicious probe of Western resistance, and the rulers of East Berlin, lijce those of all communist places, were more enemy-conscious than ever. Still, the war in Korea was very far away, and Erika was con­ centrating on immediate dangers. She was frightened, and she was determined to be brave, a combination that makes people fool­ hardy. She checked in at a small hotel and began to telephone. She had already been warned against going to Berlin by an American consul who said bluntly, “Three Fields have disappeared already. We don’t want anything to happai to you." When she insisted she would go anyway, the consul offered to send someone along for protection—and probably for observation, since the United States Government was as unsure as the public whether the missing Fields had been kidnaped, lured, or had volun­ tarily arranged to melt into the communist pot. Though her hus­ band, Robert Wallach, was American, Erika had only the papers of a stateless refugee. She had adamantly turned down the idea of an American bodyguard, convinced that if the communists found her in such company she would surely be shot as a spy. And then, telling no one but her husband, she had sneaked off quickly to Ber­ lin before one bureaucrat could tell another bureaucrat and arrange to bar her flight, or have her followed. After telephoning, she changed her clothes and locked her money and papers in the cupboard. Then, without leaving a word for any­ one, she walked out on the streets of West Berlin, took a subway to the East sector, and vanished. That made four. Four people, three of them American citizens, with families and friends, with records, with pasts, had marched or stumbled or fallen into seeming non-existence. There was nothing on the face of it to show why. The threads that led them were invisible, some hidden carefully in the past, and some still being woven for the future. But there were threads. There had to be. At the end of the third week of October, 1956, such a violent ex­ plosion rocked the Soviet empire that it seemed the whole iron

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structure might be starting to tumble down. The first crash came in Poland where the communist leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, just res­ urrected from the living death of prison and anathema, told ofiF the leader of the communist world and sent him packing. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, head of the Soviet party and so of the empire, had tried to use the Red Army to force Gomulka to obeisance. But the Pole threatened to fight and display before the world the violent desire of all Poles including communists for release from Moscow’s tightest bonds. The Polish sparks ignited Hungary, and that whole country went up in the flames of desperate rebellion. Children threw milk-botde gasoline bombs against the tanks that rumbled past their homes, trying with their skinny arms to blast away the nations alien masters. Romania stirred. From distant China, communist chiefs sent urgent messages of fear for the fate of the whole red world. Force was mustered, the fires doused, and die cracks patched up. But in those days of excruciating tension, driblets of old and fearful secrets oozed out almost unnoticed in the melee. In a soft voice, broken sometimes almost into whines, a man whose very name had been the terror of Poland tried to explain away his heavy share of guilt for allowing things to come to such a pass. He told his com­ rades that he had been obliged to order the tortures, the persecu­ tions, the massive crimes that finally provoked such an eruption of hate, because he had been touched with the curse of Noel Field. He did not need to explain what it meant. “We know very well the fate of those who in 1949 and in the years after were charged with having been in contact with Field,” he said. “There is no doubt that had Comrade Bierut not defended my case so well, I could at the most be exhumed today.” Comrade Bierut, Boleslaw Bierut, the head of the Polish Govern­ ment to the rest of the world, had been the leader of his country’s Communist Party from 1949 until his death in Moscow in early 1956. He was Soviet viceroy in Poland. The man who was speaking, whose life had been saved, was Jakub Berman, Bierut’s second-incommand. From the time the Red Army installed the Polish communists in power, the pale, liquid-eyed Berman had been in charge of secret police and propaganda, the man whose hand con­

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against the others; assortment of responsibilities, so that each might mark out a different direction for the purge to spread; specific back­ grounds, so that each might blacken a whole area of experience, automatically casting guilt on all who shared it; and importance, so that no head should feel secure when the mightiest were seen to roll Noel Field was named in the indictment in connection with the case against Tibor Szoenyi. He was identified as “one of the leaders of the American espionage service” working under “his chief, Allen Dulles, who was the European head of the United States espionage service called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).” The indict­ ment went on to say that “Field specialized in recruiting spies from among so-called ‘left-wing* elements, and the various émigré espio­ nage groups of different nationalities in Switzerland were subordi­ nate to him” xhe indictment connected Rajk to Dulles through Szoenyi The scope of the trial was made dear in this initial document It was to prove that “Rajk and his accomplices” conspired with the “aim of tearing Hungary out of the camp of the defenders of peace, which is the only guarantee of the freedom and happiness of our people, of chaining our country to the imperialist war front and thus lowering it to be a satellite and toy of the imperialists. They hoped to realize this aim with the armed help of the present leaders of the Yugoslav state, Tito, Rankovich, Kardelj and Djilas.” The defendants were charged with seeking to give the land distributed to peasants back to the great estate owners, the nationalized industries back to the capitalists, and to make Hungary, which once with Austria had ruled all of central Europe induding the Serbs and Croats, into “a Yugoslav colony.” And all the defendants were communists. In effect, their major role was to substitute for Tito, who had de­ fied Stalin and could not be brought directly to book. The first aim of the trial was to justify the excommunication of the Yugoslavs from the Kremlin’s favor and to make their disgrace effective by demon­ strating that any contact with the Yugoslavs, any sympathy, or in­ deed anything less than active hostility by all other communists, was nothing less than treason to the cause and was punishable as such. There was, once, a method of defining “enemy” so that treason

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could be pointed out and judged. It was the declaration of war. Sta­ lin used show trials instead, a more devious and flexible technique which reduced the risks. But Tito's real crime in Moscow's eyes was never listed in the accusations and the propaganda blasts. It was a confusion of priorities, putting what he considered the interests of his own Communist Party and country above the decreed interests of Moscow. The Rajk trial was, then, also required to show that sid­ ing with Moscow against Yugoslavia was not enough. It was also necessary to side with Moscow against one’s own country. This is the one point where there was some element of truth in the charges, though it was not made overtly, because Rajk had been stirred by feelings of Hungarian patriotism and had sought, like Tito in Yugo­ slavia and Gomulka in Poland, to restrain the greedy demands of the Soviet Union in the exploitation of its satellites. The sin was listed in the lexicon as “bourgeois nationalism.” The straightforward meaning was failure to redefine patriotism as Moscow first, last and always. The redefinition was not mere Soviet chauvinism; it too had its inner logic. In Stalin's first serious fight for power, against Leon Trotsky, the issue was whether the concerted aim and effort of com­ munism should be to build the might of the Soviet Union or to create a worldwide system of alliances by upsetting governments elsewhere and replacing them with cobelievers in the Bolshevik faith. Stalin won and never deviated from his principle, even to the point of cooperating with the fiercest enemies of communism abroad against the less violent, the sympathizers and the cobelievers. The story of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of truce between Stalin and Hitler was not only a matter of state affairs; under it foreign communists were sacrificed and even handed to the Gestapo when necessary. After the war, having acquired a whole new empire unschooled in the full requirements of Stalin's principle, it was necessary for Moscow to complete the incorporation of alien peoples into its single system. It is a mistake to speak of Russian colonialism. The Russians have never really run a colony, which implies a permanent distinction between dependencies and the motherland. Rather, in a tradition unchanged by the revolution that replaced the Czars with the So­ viets, the attempted technique was conquest and incorporation that

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would, in the end, erase the distinction in favor of expanding Rus­ sia’s national boundaries. Presumably, the development was meant to be gradual. Tito destroyed the process and provoked a test by proclaiming his “own road to socialism.” That made it necessary to speed up the effort in undigested areas still under direct Moscow control. This was the great issue of the Rajk trial. There were other sub­ sidiary ones that followed in the circumstances of the reasoning. The drawing of lines against the West had internal as well as external implications. Inside the Soviet Union, there was the problem of mil­ lions of returned soldiers who had for the first time seen something of the rest of the world they had been taught to despise and disdain. They had seen it in the horrible march of war, but still they had seen things to contradict what was proclaimed as absolute truth. They had to be disabused of any nascent doubts. The problem was even greater, of course, in the newly acquired countries where so many had personal memories of life outside the Soviet sphere. To begin with, at least the leadership in the satellites needed to be cleared of those who might be subconsciously tainted. So the Rajk trial and others that followed elsewhere were used to demonstrate the unreliability of those who had spent the war in the West, who had come into contact with the foreign and particularly the Ameri­ can devil and might doubt the story about the horns. There was one further theme of wide importance, as virulent but more difficult to explain. That was Spain. In America at the time, preoccupied with its own frightened reaction to the drawing of lines, the irony was scarcely noticed that while Americans who had par­ ticipated in the Spanish Civil War were being hounded as com­ munists, eastern communists who were veterans of Spain were being arrested and killed as capitalist agents. The extraordinarily broad effects of the Spanish Civil War have scarcely been tabulated. They reached far and lasted long, well after the cruelties on the peninsula had been drowned in memory by the vast cruelties of World War II. The Russians who had been in the Spanish war were virtually all automatically liquidated on their return to their home­ land, as the follow-up to the great army purges. The Rajk trial pro­ claimed that Spain was also an ineradicable stigma on satellite com­

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munists. The reason was partly the aftermath of the bitter jumble of violent feuding that went on among the communists in Spain, as well as between them and the anarchists, the various brands of so­ cialists, and the plain patriots and idealists on the Loyalist side. It had left old scores to settle. There had been in the International Brigade in Spain a Hungarian battalion named for Matyas Rakosi, who was then in Moscow working for the Comintern. Rajk was the head of the battalion, but Moscow sent out a political commissar who had once been a trader in Vienna and who was intensely dis­ liked by the other Hungarians. There were angry quarrels, and many names were ticked off to be punished in future for their in­ subordination to Moscow’s delegate. Another part of the reason for persecuting the veterans of Spain was probably the fact that never outside of the strictly controlled machinery of the Comintern had communists from different coun­ tries and different backgrounds been so mingled together. It made possible a comparison of notes that revealed the intricate contra­ dictions of Moscow's line as propounded simultaneously in different places. They were not to be left to infect others with their knowl­ edge. Still, these obvious reasons do not seem adequate to explain the special fury of persecution against the "Spaniards,” as those who had been in the Spanish war came to be called. Possibly it was simply an extension to those newly enclosed in Moscow’s domain of the Russian purge of "Spaniards” just before World War II, a way of demon­ strating that the old purges could not be cheated by accidents of ge­ ography. At any rate, much was made in the trial of Rajk’s service in the Spanish war, and from then on the other Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and German communists who had been in Spain were marked. These vast political motives, involving the fate of continents and cementing the lines for unforeseen future struggles of such colossal impact as the Sino-Soviet dispute, swirled far above the head of Noel Field. They would have existed and wreaked their work if Noel, his wife and his brother had never existed, for none of the Fields was vital at any point in the development. But through ex­ traordinary convolutions of chance, Noel embodied perfectly the

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point of contact of the several strands. His own motives ware ir­ relevant. It was ironic that he was an idealist, that he had truly given much to relieve human suffering, that his deepest sympathies were with the communist cause. But it was beside the point. The point was that a huge machine of violence was to be set in motion and it needed a linchpin. The measurements of Noels life fitted the needs precisely. He was chosen, and used. There was a subtle, terrifying cleverness in the technique of dis­ torting myriad little facts, all true, and by a slight twist here and a sliver there producing a huge lie. Rajk, unlike Petkov, was success­ fully trained to play his appointed part. At one point in his tes­ timony, for example, when he had explained that he had been working with the United States to liquidate the communist regime in Hungary, the president of the court prodded him to a fitting detail. President: "Dont you remember something in connection with what happened in the French camps [internment camps] which is directly related to the things you have just said now?" Rajk: "Yes, I do. Before I got in touch with Kovach [a lieutenant colonel of the American Military Mission in Budapest under rights solemnly agreed to in the Hungarian peace treaty], there was al­ ready an earlier attempt by die Americans to organize me as a mem­ ber of the American intelligence agency. It was in the Vemet internment camp that an American citizen called Field, who was as far as I know the head of the American intelligence agency for cen­ tral and eastern Europe, visited me in the internment camp after the end of the [Spanish] Civil War. He referred to an instruction he had received from Washington that he should speak with me and help me to get out of the camp and return home to Hungary. He even told me that they would like to send me home because as an agent who had not been exposed I would, working in the Party according to the instructions received from the Americans, disorganize and dissolve the Party and possibly even get the Party leadership into my hands. But my contact with the Americans ended after my meet­ ing with Field, for he arrived in the camp when I had already agreed with the Gestapo major that I should return home through Germany as I have already said."

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(Noel did help Rajk get out of Le Vemet but in defiance of the Gestapo, on instructions from Hungarian communists in Switzer­ land.) The next defendant to testify, Gyorgy Palffy, had no connection with Noel, but it was his job to show that through Rajk, recruited by Noel, the Americans had subverted the army. Lazar Brankov, the Yugoslav, had also never met Noel Field, but he knew some of the Yugoslavs and Hungarians for whom Noel had arranged OSS help in Switzerland. It was Brankovs job to show that Yugoslavia was a subdivision of American intelligence and provided spy rings in Hungary for the Americans. Noels success in persuad­ ing the OSS to provide transport for the Hungarian communists in Switzerland at the end of the war, so that they could hurry back to Budapest through Yugoslavia to establish a communist regime be­ fore the United States could intervene, was a telling point in con­ demning them all. Brankov, like the others, confessed to everything and supplied the required details. That made him a traitor in Yugoslav eyes, for though Belgrade was well aware of the niceties of extracting false confessions, it had no tolerance for the victims of the technique. Eventually, years later, Brankov was released. Feeling unable to go home, he made his way to the West and wrote the only book on what it was like to be on the wrong side of the Rajk trial He an­ swered the perplexing puzzle of why the defendants, broken to ab­ ject confession in the period of preparation, failed to rally even a moment’s strength in the glare of public trial that might, in one blinding flash, have saved truth and honor. They did not suppose compliance could save their lives. They were, of course, men broken by months of evil treatment and harangue designed to convince them of their own guilt. Rajks resistance finally broke when his wife and child were arrested and he was told he might bargain confession and his own full compliance to save them from torture, according to Brankov. But there was an additional, brilliant precaution which doused the spark of remaining defiance. The sessions of the trial, Brankov later disclosed, were held four times each. Four times in a row the defendants were brought into the dock of a crowded court­ room, put through the same questions and answers by the lawyers

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and the Judge, stared upon In the same way by foreign-looking ob­ servers busy making notes. The prisoners never knew which one of the four sessions was really public, which three dress rehearsals where an outburst of honesty would be muffled without the slight­ est echo. It was in the testimony of Tibor Szoenyi, whom Noel knew best, that the great mass of circumstantial evidence meant to clinch the case of treason was produced. Much that was true was eminently usable: all the details of contacts with the OSS and money and help passed along by them through Noel. The facts were simply dis­ torted from a pattern of American determination to fight Nazi Ger­ many with communists as allies, to a pattern of American wartime determination to fight and subvert the Soviet Union. The numerous cases where the communists had hoodwinked the Americans and used OSS money for their own ends were, with a flick of the mind, reversed to appear as though the United States had really gotten its money's worth. But there ware also points where, for the purpose of perfecting the closed propaganda circle of villainy, the facts as well as their context were reversed. If he ever got around to reading the text of the Rajk trial when at last he could, it must have astonished Noel to find Szoenyi describing him as an ardent follower of the de­ posed American communist Earl Browder. “Printed copies of Brow­ der s books in French and German were distributed in great number by Lompar (a Yugoslav representative of Tito in Switzerland during the war) and Field, both in Switzerland and France, on behalf of the American secret service,” Szoenyi told the court Noel's photograph, along with that of Allen Dulles and Yugosla­ via's police chief Alexander Rankovich, were shown to the defend­ ants at the trial for identification. Szoenyi recited the sums of money Noel had given him, from OSS and from Unitarian Service Com­ mittee funds, and he identified the USC as a “cover organization of the American secret service.” Links ware drawn to .similar “plots” in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, although few people in those countries were directly named. The other satellites were to produce their own shows. Other witnesses, not in the prisoners’ dock, were called to testify and fill in details. All of them were prisoners themselves, although

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this was not always brought out at the time. Sandor Cseresnyes, who had been press chief in Rajk’s ministry, was one witness used to draw links from Rajk to the British and French secret services, as well as to the Americans and Yugoslavs. Cseresnyes had in fact worked at the American radio and monitoring station established in Bari, Italy, toward the end of the war as a major contact point with eastern Europe. According to American communists who worked there at the time and later turned against the Party, the Hungarian communists had made good use of Bari for their own purposes of preparing for a communist take-over of Hungary after the war. But again it was one of those wartime collaborations between allies later turned enemies that was virtually impossible to measure in terms of who got the best of i t Nothing much, however, was made of the Bari operations in the Rajk trial, perhaps because more detail would in fact have shown that the Americans had been faithful and co­ operative allies. Another witness, Ivan Foldi, gave a rather general report on how he "transmitted spy reports” to the Americans through Noel Field in Geneva in 1946 and 1947, bringing the story into the postwar years. Foldi did know Noel and described some meetings with him. Later, he said, all espionage communications between his Hungarian ring and the Americans went through the Yugoslav diplomatic pouch— at a time, it should be remembered, when the temper of hostility between the United States and Yugoslavia was at the boiling point following the incident in which the Yugoslavs shot down two Ameri­ can planes. The long parade of witnesses gave variations on the same points. In his summation the prosecutor said plainly that the trial was to pass judgment “not only on Rajk and his associates here in the dock, but their foreign masters, t&eir imperialist instigators of Belgrade and Washington as well.” And Noel Field had been the key to a presentation that was credible if only its first upside-down premise was accepted. Rajk, Szoenyi and Szalai were sentenced to death and executed. The others were given long terms of imprisonment. It was, from the officials’ point of view, a satisfactory trial. All had gone smoothly, many details had been produced for an astonished world, the firm basis had been laid for the arrest of masses of people

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who had ever had anything to do with Noel Field, with the Uni­ tarians, with the Spanish Civil War, or with the Yugoslavs. Fair warning had been given to all the population to stay away from the few Westerners allowed to remain in the country. The police proceeded to draw correctly the intended conse­ quences of the confessions and convictions. The wave of persecu­ tions pulsed far beyond the borders of Hungary. It reached even to Cleveland, Ohio. In a cellar there, an American communist of Hun­ garian origin named John Lautner was stripped naked, beaten and interrogated about Noel and Hermann Field. Then he was made to sign a statement that he had received a fair hearing and was ex­ pelled from the party. Lautner had been one of the communists working at Bari and knew Cseresnyes and many others who had spent the war in the West and had used that route back home. After the war he returned to America. The Hungarian section of the American Communist Party had been cooperating with other Hungarian-American organizations to send relief goods to the old coun­ try. But in 1947 the others refused to continue working with the communists, who then were faced with the problem of getting the supplies they collected shipped and delivered. Another man told Lautner, then security officer and head of the New York state com­ mission of the American Party, that he could find a solution: through communist connections of which the headquarters of the Unitarian Service Committee were unaware, it was arranged that the Uni­ tarians would handle the movement of the communists’ relief sup­ plies. According to Lautner, the Party’s collection centers through­ out the country produced large quantities of goods and, in addition, a million dollars of United States Government money for aid to Hungary. He had no idea how they wangled the government money, but they did. After the Rajk trial, Lautner was told to go to Budapest for talks with Party officials there, but he failed to get a passport. The reason was not, he felt sure, that United States officials knew him to be a communist, but that disappearances of the Fields and the arrest of Robert Vogeler, another American in Budapest, had determined the State Department to curtail travel there. It probably saved his life. When Lautner reported to his comrades that

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he could not get abroad, the summons to Cleveland came instead, and the purge was effected there. With the conclusion of the Rajk trial, Noel had no further special role to play in its reverberations. But it made things no easier for him. His usefulness was far from ended. The Rajk trial was only the start of a saies. The next was the trial of Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria where Noel Field’s new Moscow-fabricated reputation was again used as a sup­ posed proof that lifelong communists had turned traitor to the cause. Kostov revoked his confession on his first day in court, but it made no difference. The purge machine was rolling.

CHAPTER XV

The shadowy existence of Noel as a name in the trials was the only sign of what had become of the three missing Fields. Her­ mann s wife Kate and Noels sister Elsie made regular pilgrimages to demand that the State Department do something about finding them. The State Department fired off protest after protest, but never produced so much as an acknowledgment from the communist gov­ ernments that the Fields were anywhere in their part of the world. In the second trial of Alger Hiss, which took place after Noels arrest, Hede Massing had told her story about recruiting Noel for her spy ring in the mid-thirties. It was bewildering, to say the least, to hear Noel Field named at about the same time as a Soviet agent in Amer­ ica and as “an American master spy0 behind die Iron Curtain. It was a time of sensational revelations, of scandalous accusations coming one after another, all so wild that it seemed impossible to choose among them. The general reaction was to believe all or none. Highly respectable, thoroughly patriotic Americans who had known Noel in Washington and Geneva rushed to defend him against the monstrous idea that he had ever been anything but an honest, hard­ working humanitarian. His sister Elsie indignantly denied that he had ever been involved with communists at all. Desperately pursu­ ing help wherever she could find it, Elsie approached Paul Massing, but they quarreled when she insisted to Paul that it was no use try­ ing to trace Noel through the obvious lines of the communist net­ work because that had nothing to do with her brother. And Noel had told so many people that he was not a communist or a sympathizer, he had seemed so sincere and gentle and yet righteously independ­ ent, that those brought up to believe in innocence until guilt is proved felt impelled to share Elsie’s anger. Still, as time passed and nothing more came to light, excitement about the Fields subsided,

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and it became just another case in the files, living only in the hearts of friend and family. Kate Field later wrote for a Boston newspaper what it felt like. “Your husband is off to the continent on a short business trip,” she wrote. “It’s a lovely sunny day and you're all at the airport to see him off. He has given you a final hug and told the children to look after mother.’ Then his plane climbs into the sky and out of sight. And that is the last you see or hear of him. . . . There is silencecomplete, uncanny and frightening. He is trapped behind the Iron Curtain and he might be alive or dead. You are never told. ‘Cloak and dagger stuff you might say. I t couldn't happen to ordinary peo­ ple.' But it happened to me and I'm an ordinary woman . . . the loneliness of those years. When I told people my story they just gasped. It was like something out of a book, not real life. Gradually, I gave up telling people. I was a misfit In a bustling, happy coun­ try at peace, I was caught up in a private war of my own.” She sent a letter to the Kremlin, begging, “Please do something about my husband. My two little boys and I need him desperately.” The answers were always the same, “we are making inquiries.” She sent thousands of letters and telegrams to embassies, Stalin, the Red Cross, governments. Her children, she said, would sometimes break in on her and say, “Now let's go and do something to get Daddy out.” When they ate chicken, the children would break the wishbone to­ gether and, she wrote, “whichever won the wish would turn his eyes on me, full of love, and say comfortingly, ‘You know what I'm wish­ ing, Mummy, but I'm not telling because then it wouldn't come true.' I could get along all right on humdrum, unsentimental days of the year—they were filled with cooking, housework, darning socks, the usual daily round. I began to hate Christmas, birthdays, all those anniversaries when families should be united and content. . . .” Elsie went to Geneva, hoping to pick up some threads that might lead to Noel, Herta and Hermann. She wisely ventured no further east. Panic-stricken, she left her baby with a friend while she plod­ ded to various offices, warning that the child must never be left alone for a moment because there might be a danger of kidnaping. It did seem that any connection with the Field family was a guaran­ tee of disaster.

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One woman in the family took a different attitude. It was Erika. She knew a good deal more of the real story than Elsie, and finally decided to do something about it. Inexplicably, she made her im­ pulsive decision in the summer of 1950, a whole year after the three disappearances. But then she acted rapidly and recklessly. Although she had left the Party, Erika kept in touch with Leo Bauer from time to time. Leo had helped her get a job as interpreter at the Partisans for Peace Congress in Paris which Noel had at­ tended just before his last trip to Prague. But the correspondence was not frequent. She had, Erika said later, lost the address of Leos relatives in West Berlin. Because Erika had been refused admission to the United States, she and her husband Bob had remained in France. One day she telephoned Leo at the communist radio sta­ tion in Berlin where he worked. She did not give her name but made sure he recognized her voice. It was urgent for her to see him im­ mediately, she said, begging him to meet her in Frankfurt Bauer told her that it was impossible for him to make a trip to Western Germany, and to get her off the phone, he promised to write her a letter. When he put down the receiver he was in a cold sweat. Nor had he long to wait for confirmation of his worst fears. The Russian who worked in the radio station of which Leo ostensibly was boss called him five minutes later and demanded to know just what the conversation was all about. Telephone conversations be­ tween even ranking communists and the West did not go unmoni­ tored. Leo put the best light on it that he could, explaining that he had not heard from Erika for a long time and had no idea what she expected from him. In any case, he said, he would not go. He was in trouble, and he knew it. Three days later he was called in again. Hermann Matem, head of the control commission of the East German Party—a kind of Party vigilance office—was there as well as the Russians. Bauer was asked what he had decided. He said he would write to Erika that he would not go to meet her, and that if she insisted on seeing him, she would have to come to Berlin. Bauer’s office was in West Berlin, at the Deutschlandsender, an anomaly later corrected. He supposed that if Erika did come, she would either appear there or send word to him through his West Berlin relatives. He did not mention that to Matern, with whom he

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had worked closely for many years. Nor did Matem insist that he ask Erika to meet him in East Berlin. But he typed the letter, instead of writing Erika by hand as usual, making it utterly impersonal in the hope that coldness of tone would serve as a warning. He gave it to Matem to mail. Matem told Bauer that was correct behavior, proving to the Party that Leo was not seeking to hide anything. Leo was already under Party observation as part of the aftermath of the Rajk trial. There were no restrictions on his movements, but a chauf­ feur was assigned to him, and Bauer knew reports were being made on all of his activities, day and night. He was in trouble. The letter to Erika was sent in June. When the month ended, and then another, and Bauer heard nothing further from Erika, he supposed she had understood the warning and sensibly decided against coming even to West Berlin. On August 23, 1950, Bauer was arrested. The communists, of course, said nothing. But because he worked in the Western sectors, his disappearance was noted and reported in a West Berlin newspaper on August 24. Erika, to her misfortune, missed that report. According to her, Leo’s letter reached the address of a friend she had named in Swit­ zerland when she had gone off to the Mediterranean on holiday. She found it when she returned. It occurred to her that there might be some kind of trap, but she thought Leo would in that case have sent some additional warning. Not long before, Bob Wallach had been to the U.S. consulate in Geneva to get a passport for their new­ born son, whom Erika wanted to take on a trip to visit her mother in England. The consul pricked up his ears and said he was inter­ ested in Erika’s travel plans in view of the disappearance of three members of her foster family. Although she had sworn in peevish temper never to go into an American consulate again because of her troubles trying to get an immigration visa at the Paris embassy, Erika did decide to have a talk with the Americans after receiving Leo’s letter. Without mentioning the letter, she said she had changed her mind about England and was planning a trip to Berlin to see a high com­ munist official who might have some information about the Fields. She asked the American official, a Mr. Thomas, if he could help her with papers.

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That was not his department, he answered, but he urged her per­ sonally not to go because she would be arrested. This is Erika’s recol­ lection of the incident She answered, in what she described as her “quite highbrow” manner, “Who wants to arrest me? I’m not that important, what do you think?” Again he repeated his warning. Erika waved it aside, saying she owed a great deal to the Fields and wanted to do anything she could for them, even if it involved a risk. She went on with an impassioned speech of loyalty and duty, and then another idea occurred to her. Wouldn’t it be helpful to the State Department in trying to track down the Fields if they could find out, even unofficially, exactly where they were? Yes, indeed, said Mr. Thomas. Then, Erika responded triumphantly, why not let her try? The American considered. There was a possibility, he thought, but he had no authority to make the decision. He suggested that Erika wait until he asked Washington for permission, and then the State Department might even be willing to pay her way and send someone with her to look out for her security. Erika turned the proposition over rapidly in her mind. She thought to herself, she said later, “Dont send me as an American agent, because then I am licked from the beginning. If I ever do get caught by the other side, my head will come off at once.” But she only told Mr. Thomas that she would think it over and let him know before doing anything. But she had already decided what to do. That was August 25. She hurried home and convinced her husband that she must go imme­ diately, before the American authorities had a chance to stop her. They took off for Augsburg, where Bob Wallachs brother was sta­ tioned. The next day Erika went on to Frankfurt to catch a plane to Berlin. At the Frankfurt airport she put through a call to Leo’s office and was told that he was out. It was noon when her plane landed at Tempelhof airport in West Berlin. Again she called Leo from the airport, only to be told that the office was about to close as it was Saturday. It was suggested that she call again on Monday. She hurried to the Deutschlandsender building. No one but the doorman was there. Suddenly she was in a frenzy of frustration. She

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took a room in a small hotel and plunked down her things, thinking desperately of where she might find Leo’s home address. At that time, though it is so no longer, it was possible to make telephone calls from West to East Berlin. Erika remembered the Goldhammers) who knew Leo. Bruno Goldhammer was also an important Party functionary. He was not in, but his wife Esther answered Erika’s call. Esther was strangely cool and abrupt to an old friend. She said she did not know where Leo lived and that the only place Erika could find out would be at communist headquarters in East Berlin. No doubt Esther Goldhammer knew of Leo’s arrest. Her own husband was also arrested, and it could have finished off her too if she had told Erika that on the phone. But Erika was apparently too self-absorbed to detect the nervous hostility in the other woman’s voice. She hung up and wrestled with decision. As she retold it later, this was her inner dialogue. “Well, this seemed to be, after all I had tried, the only possibility, the only little chance of finding Leo Bauer, at Party headquarters. Now, of course, that sounds absolutely ridiculous, when I say that I actually considered going to Party headquarters, having been the archenemy. But I was already so desperate, I was so sick at my stomach, I hadn’t eaten since last night, and I couldn’t even put down a piece of bread. I was so sick from fear I was shaking. “And I just saw my bed standing in that room, and I had just one desire, to crawl into that bed, and pull the blanket over me, and go to sleep and never wake up. But I decided, No, I can’t do that. What am I going to tell Bob when I come home—come home and say I just went to sleep. I was too scared to go to the East? I can't do that. So what is going to happenPNothing is going to happen. Why should anything happen to you? Nothing ever happened to you before. You will pull yourself through. You will manage. You go.” Erika changed her clothes, locked her valuables and documents in a cupboard, and took the subway to East Berlin. The things in the hotel room, found later by Allied authorities, were the last trace of her. Erika went straight to the Communist Party Headquarters build­ ing but could not get beyond the doormen once again. They proba­

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bly knew what had happened to Leo Bauer; it was just as he was emerging from the same building that he had been arrested three days before. But they told her only that there was no one inside who could help her. There was a political conference going on, they said, attended by all the top officials, and all the people of Bauer s rank were there. She might inquire at the conference hall. Erika went there on a streetcar. It took some arguing to get past the police lines surrounding the building, but she insisted she must go inside to find Leo Bauer. Eventually she was escorted to a radio office. There she was told that Leo had gone to Thuringia for the weekend to fetch his wife, who had been ill, and that she should try to call him in a day or so at his office. She went out, bought a lemonade, and was preparing to go back to West Berlin, half dejected at the failure of her mission, half overjoyed at what seemed her own im­ munity. “My God, I made it I made it,” she said to herself. T m going to get out, and I'm going to get back to the hotel, and I’m going to write a card to Bob, because we had arranged that I was going to send him a card right away, how long I intended to stay and whether everything was all right. I am going to write him that unfortunately, it didn't work, and I will just have to stay until Monday. I was just figuring that out in my mind,” she said later, “when I heard steps be­ hind me. And then I knew that was the end. I didn’t even turn around. And after a second, somebody just put a hand on my shoul­ der, and said, ‘Criminal Police. Would you please come around the comer with me?'” She was taken back into the building, and then driven to the se­ curity police prison on Schumannstrasse. Altogether, Erika was in two German and two Russian prisons in East Germany. After two and a half years she was tried in secret, sentenced to death, and shipped to Russia for execution. After six months in a death cell in Moscow, during which time Stalin died, the sentence was commuted to fifteen years in a slave labor camp, and she was sent off to the infamous Vorkuta camp above the Arctic Circle. Her ordeal was fairly typical, though no more bearable for that. It was only her extraordinary stamina, her robust and resilient na­

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ture, that brought her through. Three times she was kept sixteen days in the Karzer, a special punishment cell. Small, freezing cold, flooded, it was the dread of prisoners. Erika was stripped when she was put in, and given only a pair of much too large men’s under­ pants to wear. She had to jump up and down for hours to keep her­ self from freezing. Her hands were bound behind her in heavy iron handcuffs and it was hard trying to hold up the wretched pants. The interrogations, as usual, were conducted through most of the night. The prisoners were allowed no sleep in the daytime. Some­ times she was badly beaten. For weeks at a time she was not al­ lowed to wash. Her only clothes were the summer outfit she had been wearing when she was arrested. The interrogations switched between periods of brutality and periods of wheedling kindness, when the questioners would be changed and men with soft voices would offer cigarettes, vodka, gentle words of reminder about children, family, loved ones, and the promise of an easy future if she would “cooperate.” The purpose of the questioning was not merely to extract a confession of spying for the Americans. The interrogators wanted incriminating material on other current or potential prisoners. Erika was asked who sent her to Berlin, details of her spying, of Noels spying, his associates. It went on for months. Her insistence that she could give no answers because she was not a spy only angered the officials, who were sometimes German, sometimes Russian. At one point, because of the turn the questioning was taking, she was shaken with fears that she would be turned over to the Hungarian police for further ques­ tioning. They had earned a reputation for barbarous brutality far exceeding that of other guardians of communist law and order. Similar things were happening to Leo Bauer. He realized even­ tually that Erika had been arrested when questioners brought him up on some small fact or date, saying that Erika’s version conflicted and how did he account for that? Because of his status and background, however, Leo’s questioning was much more political, at times more sophisticated. Like Brankov, the Yugoslav in the Rajk trial, he was asked incriminating questions about many leading communists in all the satellite countries and about Russians serving in those countries, hints of sensational ar­

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rests yet to come. He was questioned at length about Erika, who was represented as a sort of queen of spies, and for months on end about Robert Rompe, the German who had so long been a Soviet agent, and Panin, the Soviet political adviser in East Berlin. Leo supposed that Rompe must have been arrested too,* from the questions about his meetings with Hans Holstein and other Ameri­ cans implying that Rompe had been an American spy. It was Bauer who first brought up the name of Panin during the interrogations, however, mentioning to defend himself that he had always kept the important Russian informed of his own connections with the Ameri­ cans. For the next five weeks the interrogators sought to establish that Panin was also an American spy and Erika’s lover—it was stand­ ard procedure to insist that the two must go together. Later, at his secret trial in a Soviet prison in East Germany, Bauer was severely dressed down by the judge for the pains the questioner had taken. “You told us stories about Panin,” the Russian judge said. “He is one of our greatest patriots. He is ready to shoot you himself for saying he was an American spy.” Bauer could only conclude that he had stumbled on one of the cases of rivalry between Soviet counterintelligence and the Soviet espionage organization, and that Panin’s espionage branch had won. So far as is known, Panin never got into trouble. Nor did Rompe. He sailed untouched through the purges and is now a chief scientific adviser to the East German Government, living handsomely in a twenty-two-room villa. One of the recurrent charges in the investigations was that the wartime cooperation of the German communists with Noel Field, and through him with the OSS, had been kept secret from Moscow. In effect, the Russians were not informed of all the details at the time because the émigrés in Switzerland did not have communica­ tions with Moscow or with the secret Soviet agents operating in Switzerland. But as soon as they could, in 1945, they made full re­ ports to the Russians, including the smallest details of what had gone on all dining the war. The intricacy of the questions showed that the interrogators had indeed been supplied with plentiful dossiers. Nonetheless, the com­ munists’ inability to report everything at the time it happened was

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cited as proof that they were working against Moscow under U.S. orders. Finally, at the end of 1952, Leo and Erika were brought together and tried jointly. They were even shipped to Russia on the same prison train, although they never managed to speak. Leo had a glimpse of Erika on the platform at Brest, just beyond the Polish border, where the prisoners were unloaded and jailed for a few weeks before being sent on to their destination. Bauers was the slave labor camp at Bratsk, in Siberia, where the prisoners built a great dam. He had been sentenced to death and reprieved.

There never was a show trial in East Germany. Nobody quite knows why. Some suppose that not enough of the prisoners broke down and made the proper confessions. Others thought that it kept being postponed because there had always been hidden opposition inside the Party to its leader, Walter Ulbricht, and the dear lines of precisely what the trial was to disclose about treason among the East German communists could never be agreed upon. Quite pos­ sibly the reason was simply that preparations were still going on when Stalin died in March, 1953, and a halt was called to the madness. The lack of a spectacular public trial in no way crimped the purge focused on the Field case, however. There was a long list of arrests and purges, virtually all the Germans Noel had met or sought to help in France and Switzerland. The prominent names included Hans Teubner, Fritz Sperling, Bruno Fuhrmann, Lex Ende, Willi Kreikemeyer, Paul Merker, Bruno Goldhammer, Maria Weiterer. Paul Bertz killed himself. Gerhard Eisler, Hede Massing’s exhusband who had made a spectacular escape from the FBI by smuggling himself aboard the Polish liner Batory in New York, lost his high-ranking job in East Berlin and was in trouble. But he man­ aged to stay out of prison. Lex Ende’s widow Gertrud said later that as soon as Noel was named in the Rajk trial, her husband realized what was coming and told her, “Thank God I had practically nothing to do with Field.” They had met only once, for half an hour in Marseilles, when Franz Dahlem s wife asked Ende to arrange a meeting with the American in the hope of getting her husband out of the internment

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camp. (Noel failed; Dahlem was sent to a concentration camp in Germany.) But that half hour was enough to mark Ende. He too was charged with being an American agent, working for Field. As proof, it was said that he had failed to get false documents and ra­ tion cards for German comrades interned in the French camps. But Ende himself was living illegally in France at the time, and could not have managed it. He was not jailed but was expelled from the Party and forced to go to work in a foundry in a small East German town. He died six months later, brokenhearted, still believing in the Party and insisting that it had simply made a mistake. Gertrud lived on for a time in East Germany as a pariah, shunned by all their former friends and unable to find work. Finally, in 1952, she fled to West Germany. Marthe Kreikemeyer heard nothing of what happened to her hus­ band after his arrest in 1950 until, many years afterward, her per­ sistent questions brought a terse official reply that he had died five days after being arrested. Like Bauer and the others, he had been questioned and observed by the Party for a long period before ar­ rest Kreikemeyer explained everything and pointed out that he had made a full report immediately upon returning to Germany in 1945. When the Party interrogations were ended and he thought he had at last cleared himself, the police came and took him away. Years later, when the Field case was closed, a small announce­ ment in the East German papers disclosed that some 300 commu­ nists jailed and disgraced because of direct involvement with Field had been rehabilitated. For a number of them, it was too late to save anything but a posthumous reputation. The case had been pursued so vigorously, so many human conse­ quences had been drawn from the slogan that Noel Field was “an American master spy,” the story had been built up with so many circumstantial shreds and on so many prostrate bodies that even some of the victims came to believe it Wolfgang Langhoff, the brilliant theatrical director who had headed the Free German Com­ mittee in Switzerland, had a relatively easy time of the purge, presumably because of his international artistic reputation, but nonetheless was penalized. Afterward he said that the trials and re­ ports had convinced him. “I saw how terribly stupid I had been, I

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should have known better. I knew Field was in touch with Dulles, I knew about the OSS connection and so on. I thought the Party was right, I had been unforgivably careless and deserved reprimand.” Leo Bauer felt that the responsible officers among the long pro­ cession of his interrogators did not believe it, but were determined nonetheless to do their duty of proving it. The threads all led back to Moscow, to Stalin himself, and no one can say whether the pock­ marked old tyrant really believed in the gigantic conspiracy he had unraveled step by careful step. Many who know the ways of the Kremlin think he probably did believe the nightmares of his own dreaming. That may well have been so, for the “plots” and “plans” and “rings” that were “unmasked” in the purges did follow the pat­ tern of Stalin’s own devious mode of operation. And there is always a tendency to believe that one’s own mirror image is a real face. The other side of the looking glass, however, seems to have in­ finite depth. There is no limit when you start to probe there; each step leads to another. The next big eruption of the purge was in Czechoslovakia, with the Slansky trial in 1952. Arrests had been going on in Czechoslovakia at a quick pace ever since the Rajk trial; the people involved with Noel were all in jail. But the Slansky trial was to weave a new element into the coarse tissue provided by the Field case, completing as it were the set of purges begun in 1949 at the same time that it opened what was to have been a new and yet more terrible series. By October of 1949, several important Czech communists con­ nected with the Fields in one way or another had been arrested. Among them were Evzen Klinger, chief of the Foreign Office press department, Evzen Loebl, deputy chief of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and Vilem Novy, the editor of Rude Pravo. Late in 1949, when Czech Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis was representing his country at the United Nations in New York, rumors spread from Prague that Party chief Rudolf Slansky was planning to purge Clementis on his return. There was speculation that Clementis would take heed and seek asylum in the United States. But President Klement Gottwald, not a friend of Slansky’s, sent Mrs. Clementis to New York to persuade her husband that he should go home and would be safe. Clementis was arrested shortly

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after his return. No more was heard of him for some two years. An American newspaperman, the Associated Press correspondent Wil­ liam Oatis, tried too hard to find out just what happened to all the officials who were disappearing, and disappeared himself. But Oatis was an indirect victim, who had no links in the Field case. The only reference made to it by his interrogators in the Prague prison was once when they told him, “You know, we’ve had an American in here before, Noel Field.” Presumably, it was a reference to the period when Noel was brought back to Prague for interrogation in connection with the Czech cases, after the Rajk trial. He was, according to reports from other prisoners, also taken to Berlin and Moscow at various times for questioning. In March 1950 the big purge was rolling in Czechoslovakia. Ladislav Kopriva, a member of the Central Committee, made a published speech announcing that the Czech Party, trade unions and na­ tionalized enterprises had been found teeming with Western and Titoist spies and saboteurs. By the beginning of the following year it was disclosed that 169,544 communists, over a tenth of the Czech Party s total membership, had been purged. Information Minister Vaclav Kopecky said ominously, “Let us remember how the whole international network of Anglo-American espionage was unmasked in connection with the well-known Noel Field. . . .” But still the affair proceeded slowly, as slowly as in Poland and East Germany, as preparations for the great Prague trial were made in secret It seems clear that there must have been a number of switches in the planning as it developed. Suddenly Rudolf Slansky himself, the master of the Czech purge, disappeared. On November 20, 1952, he reappeared in the prisoners’ dock of a Prague court­ room, on trial for treason and espionage, alongside his own victim Clementis and twelve other ranking Party officials. A new twist in the technique of assuring full propaganda value without risk of slip-ups was used in the Slansky trial. No Westerners were admitted to the courtroom, but the proceedings were broadcast in extenso from edited recordings. Unlike previous trials, the Slansky trial was an amalgam of con­ flicting strains. The complex reasoning that brought the unusual

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assortment of prisoners into a single dock remains mysterious to this day. Slansky and Clementis were enemies of opposing tendencies. No one in Czechoslovakia had been more demonstrably devoted to Moscow, less inclined to Tito-type concerns of national interest than Slansky. Clementis, on the other hand, was a Slovak yearning for ethnic self-assertion. He had shown nationalist feelings. In addition to everything else, the trial reflected what must have been bitter behind-scenes feuding in the top regions of the Czechoslovak Party, and Moscow’s verdict appears to have been, a plague on both your houses. The important new element in the Slansky trial was anti-Semi­ tism. It was stressed heavily. The foundations were laid for the “doctors’ trial*’ foreshadowed in Moscow at the beginning of 1953, a plan that gave every evidence of being prepared to trigger a vast campaign of persecution against the 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union and those in the satellite countries who had somehow man­ aged to survive the Nazis. Stalin died before the “doctors’ trial” could be held, and the whole plan was called off. The frame on which the anti-Semitic campaign was to be built appeared, how­ ever, in stark outline in the Slansky trial. It was set down pady at the very start of the indictment, which accused the fourteen de­ fendants as “Trotskyist-Titoist-Zionist-Bourgeois-Nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czech people and of socialism.” Ten of the fourteen defendants, including Slansky, were Jewish. Two Israelis, Mordecai Oren and Simon Orenstein, had been ar­ rested in Czechoslovakia and were made either to testify or to pro­ vide depositions to show that “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” was the servant of “American capitalist imperialism” and one of its major arms for subverting and then conquering the world. The prosecutor, in his summation, ominously concluded that the trial “warns not only our own Communist Party, but also the other Communist and workers’ Parties against this dangerous agency (Zionism) of the U.S. imperialists.” There was even the germ of the “doctors’ plot” idea in the proceedings. Slansky testified that he had arranged for a doctor named Haskovec to care for President Gottwald with the aim of “shortening our beloved President’s life” and killing him when the

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plot matured to turn Czechoslovakia into a "fascist-imperialist capi­ talist” country. Slansky, who had spent most of the war in Russia and returned from the East with partisan brigades, knew few if any Westerners. The obstacle was easily turned. He headed what was alternatively called "the anti-state center” or “the Slansky gang,” many of whose members did have extensive Western contacts. A tremendous hodgepodge of “agents” was named, including many Western news­ papermen, diplomats, politicians, businessmen and representatives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which had done much to help Czechoslovakia after the war. But the main links in the case were Hermann and Noel Field and Konni Zilliacus, a left-wing British socialist MP who at home had been consid­ ered unwarrantably warm in his sympathy for Eastern European communists. Few details were given about the alleged espionage and recruit­ ment of spies performed by Noel and Hermann, but their names were repeated again and again in connection with the defendants or witnesses they had known and befriended—Vilem Novy, Arthur London, André Simone, Evzen Loebl, Ludvik Frejka, and others identified as Goldmann, Namek-Karpeles, Holdos and Pavlik-Pollitzer. The Czechoslovak Trust Fund, set up under Lord Layton to make some amends for Munich by helping Czechs flee the Gestapo after their country fell to the Nazis, was mentioned many times as a tool of British intelligence. Hermann, who had worked for it in Cracow, was the agent who recruited spies for the fund, the prose­ cutor said with “confirmation” from the defendants. “Meanwhile, a similar organization was set up in Switzerland by Noel Field, the closest collaborator of agent Allen Dulles, who was in charge of American espionage in Central and Eastern Europe.” With the links to Zilliacus, this was supposed to establish the existence of a vast spy ring headed by Rudolf Slansky to sabotage and overthrow the com­ munist regime in Czechoslovakia. Hardly any conceivable aspect of life in the country was omitted from the trial. The transcript of the broadcast provides a bewildering tangle of accusations in so many directions that it can scarcely be summarized. The trial’s role as one of a planned series was made

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dear by repeated references to Rajk, to the "imperialist agent Gomulka” who had by then been arrested in Poland, and to iinlw between the Czech defendants and officials in the other satellites. It was performed to fulfill all the purposes of the Rajk trial, includ­ ing proclamations of Moscow’s righteous dominance, attacks on Tito, disruption of contacts between Czechs and Westerners, condedination of the Spanish war veterans, and then several more. The conspirators were said to have penetrated and sabotaged the state direction of agriculture, trade, finance, diplomacy, the army, the secret police, and the bureaucracy in general. Everything that went wrong in the country when the communists took over in 1948 and made a brutal, slapdash effort to catch up with the other satellites in communization was laid at the defendants’ door—a welcome ex­ planation, for a great deal had gone visibly wrong. The prosecutor made the point, stating, "It has become clear that many obstacles and difficulties which one thought were just ac­ companying the development toward socialism were, in fact, the outcome of the deliberate disrupting activities of the accused.” They purposely, on British and American orders conveyed by the Fields and others, had made bad economic plans, ruined agricul­ ture, diverted trade and turned profits into losses, it was claimed. Another dividend of the trial was to discredit the Czechs abroad and to make the dead President Bend* a "fascist-imperialist agent.” Bend» had been loved. Even his memory could not be allowed to live after him. It was ironic, because it was the determined, insistent effort by BeneS to compromise with Moscow and the communists at home that, in the end, enabled them to succeed in taking over the whole state with the coup of February 1948. Had he been more alert, more resistant, more prepared to explain to his people what was happening and call on them to protest, there is at least a good chance that Czechoslovakia would have remained on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The defendants in the Slansky trial were, of course, but an im­ perceptible fraction of those caught in the purge. After Slansky, they were Bedrich Geminder, a ranking member of the Party’s powerful secretariat; Ludvik Frejka, in charge of economic affairs in Gottwald’s office; Joseph Frank, deputy of Slansky; Vladimir Clementis,

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Foreign Minister; Bedrich Reicin, Deputy Defense Minister; Karel Svab, Deputy Minister of National Security; Arthur London, a Dep­ uty Foreign Minister; Vavro Hajdu, another Deputy Foreign Minis­ ter; Evzen Loebl, Deputy Foreign Trade Minister; Rudolf Margolius, another Deputy Foreign Trade Minister; Otto Fischl, Deputy Finance Minister; Otto Sling, another Deputy Finance Minister and secretary of the Moravian branch of the Party; and André Simone (né Otto Katz), once editor of the Party's main newspaper Rude Pravo.

They all made the requisite confessions. The only moment when the trial seemed near to getting out of hand was during the testi­ mony of Maria Svennova, widow of a partisan leader killed during the war who had been proclaimed a martyr. Slansky was accused of murdering Jan Svennova, and his widow Maria had been arrested as a member of Slansky s ring of conspirators. Her “confession” brought her almost to a tearful breakdown in the dock. Arguments about the true significance of the machinations be­ hind the Slansky trial still persist. Slansky and ten of his codefend­ ants were executed. But later, when the pendulum had reversed and the time come for release of the living and rehabilitation of the dead, the Czech Party leadership still stubbornly refused to take back its vilification of the ruthless Slansky. Year after year, the re­ verberations of the case have brought renewed quarrels among Czech communists. They cannot lay his ghost. Finally, under restive pressure from the Party ranks, Slansky*s conviction was posthu­ mously reversed in August 1963, but still he was only partially re­ habilitated. After the Slansky trial, and even after die death of Stalin, the list of victims in the Field case continued to grow. The scene of sensa­ tional purges shifted again to East Germany, where along with many others unnamed, Franz Dahlem and Anton Ackermann fell. The official Party announcement connected them with Noel Field, al­ though it did not actually take the next step of naming them as American agents in the colossal conspiracy the communists pro­ fessed to believe that Washington had succeeded in mounting throughout eastern Europe. That step would doubtless have come at the trial whose preparations were nearing completion. The mo­

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mentum of the Field case had been so great that it continued to roll for a time after the brakes were applied. But the East German trial was never held. Although there were no great trials, friends of Noel were also ar­ rested in Bulgaria and Romania. In France, Herta Tempi and her husband Snowsko-Borowsld were expelled from the Communist Party, for her mentors did not have police powers there. There is no way of knowing exactly how many people wound up as victims of the Field case in the six countries of eastern Europe where Soviet writ held firm. Altogether hundreds of thousands were arrested in the years of purge. Many of them had nothing at all to do with the Fields, even indirectly. Many would doubtless have fallen if the Fields had never existed, but the Field name was used as an extra tick to strengthen an accusation already determined. Some might or might not have fallen victim, and the Field case may have tipped the balance. In Rajks case, for example, there had been a long quar­ rel over the eventual succession to Matyas Rakosi at the head of the Hungarian Party. Rajk was one of the candidates. The fight had to end in someone’s defeat, but there are indications that the scales were finally tipped only shortly before Rajks arrest, when Noels ar­ rest and use in justifying purges was also planned. Had the victim not been Rajk, it would probably have been his rival Emo Gero, who did in fact succeed Rakosi a few months before the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Had Rajk rather than Gero been the leader of Hungary when the outbreak started, would history have been radi­ cally different? Possibly. And some of the victims of the Field case were personal friends, people in unimportant positions who might have been passed over in the purges or ignored but for this ill-starred acquaintanceship. The immensity of the fatal net and the numbers of people it trapped began to show only later when prisons were being emptied and notices of rehabilitation were appearing as almost daily items in communist papers. Not everyone was rehabilitated though; not all of those who did survive ever surfaced again as Field victims. So there can be no substantial estimate of the total number involved. What can be said is that the Fields were the instrument used to ruin

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probably as many people as they had managed to succor in die years of their arduous relief work. Shortly after the Slansky trial, the Washington Post commented editorially on the perversity of their hapless contribution. “Only the Russians/’ it said, “are ingenious enough to use an American spy within the United States Government and then turn around and use him as a horrible example that the United States is itself spying and engaged in 'wrecking* operations against communist satellite governments. There is litde reason to doubt that the Russians long since shot Field and tossed him among the refuse as no longer serv­ iceable to the world communist conspiracy. But his ghost comes in handy to haunt the solemn judicial charades in Iron Curtain court­ rooms.** Though no one in the West could know, Noel and Herta and Hermann were not ghosts. They were never brought into court nor was anything ever said about their whereabouts. But they were in fact still languishing in their cells. Noel was in solitary confinement for the whole of his imprisonment, with no human communication. He devised a trick to remember the days, but lost track of the years as they stretched out bleakly in the darkness. He knew nothing of what was happening in the world outside. To nourish his mind against the emptiness that kills sanity, he had a few books from the prison library—Shakespeare and the tomes of communism, his pen­ chant for philosophical musing on the grand, gloomy scale devel­ oped during his childhood studies in German, and his memories. He searched his memories carefully for dues to the incomprehensible thing that had happened to him. They brought him no enlighten­ ment, but they gave consolation. Noel wrote later of his thoughts at that time: “It is August 22, that I know. A strange emotion seizes me. Let me see, yes, this is the third summer. August 512, 1952. 1 have it: It was at this time twenty-five years ago that my wife and I sat beside the radio in our tiny Washington apartment and with waning hope followed the last-minute efforts to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. From that midnight of two martyrs in a Boston jail there is a chain of events leading in an almost straight line to the present mid­ night in a Budapest jail. No, I am no Sacco, no Vanzetti. And I am

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no prisoner of the enemies of that freedom for which they fought and died. But in my own smaller, much smaller way I have re­ mained true to the beliefs that began to take shape, oh, how vague and how slowly, during the ghastly wake, when hope changed to despair. It took a decade for those views to ripen into conviction and further years for them to result in consistent action. Many an inner conflict had to be fought out and overcome before the pacifist ideal­ ist—a typical middle-class intellectual and son of a middle-class in­ tellectual—could become the militant communist of later years and of the present. “Yes, of the present, too, though I am called an im­ perialist spy and treated as a traitor. For whatever my accusers may believe, I know I am innocent, and I know that, perhaps long after my death, the truth will be established and my name cleared. Cleared by the very society that now keeps me in solitary confine­ ment My accusers essentially have the same convictions that I do, they hate the same things and the same people I hate—the con­ scious enemies of socialism, the fascists, the renegades, the traitors. Given their belief in my guilt, I cannot blame them, I cannot but approve their detestation. That is the real horror of it all. Were I a prisoner of fascism—and there were times when I faced this prospect at dose range—I would know how to stand up to the enemy, I would know what to say and, especially, what not to say; my hatred would give me strength, as it gave strength to so many thousands. . . .” During the interrogations he had done all he could to prove his innocence, his devotion to the cause which was punishing him. En­ tire Marton, an intrepid and indefatigable Hungarian newspaper­ man who worked for the Associated Press, learned later from others in the prison how he had conducted himself, and spoke of it during testimony at Senate Committee hearings on internal security in May 1957. “Field first refused to cooperate,” Marton said, “but he was broken in no time in the usual way, and later, when he learned in prison, some months later, that one man [Tibor Szoenyi] . . . was sentenced to death on the grounds of his testimony, he wanted to withdraw his testimony but it was too late. The man was hanged.” In the spring of 1954, when the Hungarian Government was se­ cretly beginning the rehabilitation of purged communists, Noel s in­ terrogation was renewed. He “testified and confessed that he is a

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good communist,” Marton said, recounting a somewhat garbled ver­ sion of Noels services to the German communist underground in Switzerland during the war which he had been told that Noel cited to prove his faith. Noel repeated to himself, and to his interrogators when he had the chance, the long list of humanitarian missions he had undertaken in a barbaric world, and he spoke proudly of the “dozens of fellow communists” whose lives he had saved. “And now,” he reflected and later wrote, “how bitter the knowl­ edge that this friendship is costing some of them their freedom, per­ haps even their lives, as the supposed agents of a super-spy—a ghastly conclusion, supported by reasoning and by evidence I know to be spurious! There is much that I cannot understand in this late summer night of 1952. 1 have given up trying. Time has accustomed me to my present state. But there are moments, especially between waking and sleeping, when despair seizes me by the throat Why has it come to this? Will time ever give me the answer? There is something wrong, dreadfully wrong, somewhere. Did I take the false turn twenty-five years ago? Did I, perchance, enter a fool’s paradise? Before my mental eye pass the wonderful men and women—comrades most of them—who were my friends and with whom I worked for a better world. No, they cannot have been wrong. Steadfast clear-sighted, they were my guides and mentors. I revere them still. And the Marxist works, the Soviet novels I am privileged to read in my cell—are they not even more convincing, more inspiring than when I read them as a free man? . . . “Oh, my dear wife, my closest associate, could I but talk to you! How often in the past did you help me to see things straight! Here in this primitive cell, I ‘celebrated’ our silver wedding, more than two years ago. Where were you then? Where are you now? Do you still live? Have you remained true to me and to our cause? Shall we ever meet again? It must be almost morning. Soon the door will be opened to admit the broom, symbol of a new day.”

CHAPTER XVI

There was a new day coming for Noel. In the darkness of his prison, he could know nothing of the dawn. Though heavy clouds obscured the first feeble rays from the rest of the world for several years more, the beginning was that day in March 1953 when Stalin moaned on the floor of the Kremlin office, frothed at the mouth, and at last shut his eyes forever. Stalin’s heirs did not begin immediately to chip at the vast construction of terror and misery he bequeathed. It would have brought the whole Soviet structure crashing in a chaos of ha­ tred, immolating first those whose ambition it was to take over the powerful machine. To preserve themselves, it was necessary to preserve the machinery, the Party, the state. But, and many felt it as acutely as they felt the chill of fear on their own skins, to preserve themselves it was also necessary to peel off layer by layer that gla­ cial, suffocating weight And camp prisoners began to revolt. The first halt in Stalinism was cancellation of die "doctors’ trial” and the release of the imprisoned physicians who were to have con­ fessed to a huge Trotskyist-Zionist-Bourgeois Nationalist conspiracy to overthrow the state by insidiously mistreating and slowly killing the leaders of the Kremlin. With the cancellation of the trial came the cancellation of the impending campaign of actively rabid antiSemitism. But that merely stopped the advance of the juggernaut; it did not reverse it. The heirs of Stalin had an issue to resolve that was for them an immediate question of life or death: the succession. They pro­ claimed a triumvirate—Nikita Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, Lav­ renti Beria—and said that from now on, there would be no single ruler but a team working trustfully together. They might as well have said they would stoke die fires of hell with the snows of Si­ beria. Mistrust, intrigue and fear had for so long been the sole lubri-

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cant of the power machine that there were no depots of confidence anywhere from which to draw even the small supply needed by three men at the top. The evidence so far available, though com­ ing of course from his survivors, is that Beria made the first move to take over on the strength of his power as boss of the police appa­ ratus. The others combined against him. Beria fell and was killed immediately. Some seven months after his death it was announced that he had been tried, convicted and executed as though that had just happened. The delay doubtless seemed necessary to those who remained, as a precaution against the emergence of another rival in­ heriting the police power intact When this had been done, and Beria had been enthroned in the seat of chief devil, it became possible to broaden insurance against a police coup by a gradual and cautious denunciation of the police organization itself. That served several political purposes: in addi­ tion to giving the leadership more protection against each other, it could attract only support from the great mass of Party members and even the population at large, though their views remained without voice or hearing. The evil was isolated as the work of Beria alone. The terror was given a new, particularized name—Beriovschisna—so that its taint might be concentrated in one set of buried hands. By the rules of the game, the satraps of the dead Beria were exposed to the dangers of revenge. One of them, uneasy about a future whose shifting outlines could at that time be seen only from inside the shrouded core of power, suddenly decided not to face the looming risks. It was Colonel Jozef Swiatlo, of Dqpartment Ten of the Polish secret police, the man who had arrested Wladyslaw Gomulka, Hermann Field and many others. On December 5, 1953, he was visiting East Berlin on police affairs with his superior Colonel Anatol Feygin (now in a Polish prison for his crimes as a servant of the regime). Carefully losing his comrade in a department store crowd, Swiatlo ducked out into West Berlin and presented himself to the Allied authorities as a de­ fector. He was a man with the ineradicable spot of blood on his hands; he personally had been a torture master. His nickname was “Butcher.” When the United States agreed to give him asylum,

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it was in the knowledge that he would have to be protected for the rest of his life because the number of his victims and relatives of victims sworn to exact retribution was so great. But Swiatlo was warmly welcome, for he brought with him the most priceless, most powerful, most zealously guarded treasure of the East—information. Turned against his former comrades, Swiatlos knowledge was a weapon strong enough to shake the founda­ tions of the regime. For many months he was interrogated secredy. But he could contribute more than the enlargement of dossiers at the Central Intelligence Agency, important as that was. His greatest value lay in his ability to spread his sinister secrets in full public view, above all in the view of the Polish public. On September 28, 1954, about nine months after his defection in Berlin, Swiado was unveiled in Washington. He was then thirtynine years old, a bulky, tough-faced man with thick-rimmed glasses and heavy hands. A few hours after announcing his defection, the government presented him to the public at a press conference where he explained his change of sides as disillusionment with commu­ nism and a desire to join its opponents. “As the deputy director of this department [in the Polish po­ lice],” he said, “I was in a position to learn all the facts concerning the falsification of history, the falsification of biographical back­ ground of the leaders, and the innermost secrets concerning the political and private lives of top officials. In my position I also had the opportunity to learn how political trials were staged to serve the political interests of the Polish Party. . . . Knowing the facts behind these trials, I can state categorically that these trials were organized under Soviet supervision and for the interests of Soviet imperialism. . . . ” Swiatlo did indeed know whereof he spoke. The Washington an­ nouncement threw the Warsaw government into a frenzied panic. The regime had of course realized that Swiatlo had flown, but it had not known where he had gone to hide, how much he was tell­ ing, or how it might be used against the Polish rulers. It was used in the most effective possible way, by turning him over to Radio Free Europe, a brilliant tactical decision that brought unforeseeable stra­ tegic gains. In a long series of broadcasts beamed to Poland, Swiatlo

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broke open the secrets of the regime night after night The big secrets were damaging, but not explosive since few in Poland really doubted that Russians were running and exploiting the coun­ try, though none dared say so. It was the little secrets that cracked the basis of the regime and eventually almost destroyed it These little secrets were detailed revelations of the police ap­ paratus. Informers were named by the scores. Prisoners who had “mysteriously disappeared” were identified, their fate explicitly dis­ closed. At first, authority sought to defend itself with denials, but the flood of information was so great that it breached the dam of fear. Some things Swiado said were known to be true. People checked as best they could on others, found it all correct, and be­ lieved. When at last the police spy in an office, in a section of a fac­ tory, an apartment bloc, had been pointed out, the rest of the people knew exactly whom to shun and whom to trust Some of the in­ formers came to their colleagues and confessed, even before Swiado named them, saying they had been obliged to work for the police because of threats and blackmail. Each identification of an informer, each confession, eroded the power of the police to frighten others and keep them in line. It was police bully Jozef Swiado who, with the power of words instead of his usual instruments, ratded the chains so hard they began to break. Swiado had another revelation to make that interested Ameri­ cans as much as Poles. Hermann Field, he disclosed, was in a base­ ment cell at the police estate in Miedzyszyn, just outside Warsaw. Swiado had taken part in some of the interrogation—he had per­ sonally arrested Field—and he knew that all the charges were trumped up. He also revealed that shordy after the arrest of Her­ mann in Warsaw and of Herta in Prague, he had gone to Budapest where he had interrogated both Noel and Herta Field in the A.V.O. jail. He did not know what had become of Noel and Herta. They were probably dead, he said. The State Department fired off notes to Poland and to Hungary. Each note summarized the record revealed by Swiado of the Fields’ arrest and imprisonment. Each note concluded with the words, “the United States government requests immediate consular access to

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these American citizens and the conclusion of arrangements for their repatriation at the earliest possible date.” The answers did not come immediately. But to his amazement, at the end of September, Hermann was taken from his cell in Miedzyszyn to the Security Ministry in Warsaw and then to the suburban village of Otwock. There he was placed in a luxurious new villa and told he could roam it at will and take walks in the spacious gardens. Stacks of newspapers and a radio were provided for his use. He was not free. Special locks were placed on the doors, the windows were barred, and two guards followed his every move. But the change was so overwhelming that he could not digest it. He did not leave the room assigned to him. Instead he sat there, as he had sat in his cell all those years, and wondered what was hap­ pening to him. After about a week, a woman named Markowska came to see him. Her questions were startlingly different from those he had come to know so well. She was, she said, assigned by the Party to a com­ mission that was investigating abuses of the law. She wanted to know what he would like the Polish Government to do so as to close his case, and asked him to identify from photographs the jailers who had beaten and mistreated him. Hermann identified Swiatlo and one other, asked for $60,000 compensation, reimbursement of all costs for a cure and convalescence, publication of a communiqué in the East and in the West that he was innocent and had been unjustly imprisoned, and, of course, release. Markowska came to visit several times. Between visits, Hermann was invited by the guards to listen to the radio with them. It was Swiatlo speaking on Radio Free Europe. “The man who tormented you,” they jeered. That was the first he learned of Swiatlo’s defection and what had caused the Sudden change in his own treatment At last, on October 25, 1954, Markowska told him that the govern­ ment would pay him $50,000 in addition to the costs of medical treatment and convalescence and that he was free. The locks were taken off the doors, the bars off the windows, the guards out of the house. But the Poles insisted that if they were to pay for his cure, it must be done in Poland. While the argument continued, he traveled

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each day to Warsaw to the clinic on Emilia Plater Street, across from the residence of the American Ambassador, for thorough medi­ cal examinations. On October 25, the day of Hermann s official re­ lease, the Polish radio announced that he was freed after investi­ gations showed that the “American agent Swiatlo” had concocted the case to embarrass the communist regime. The whole case, the radio said, had been a Swiatlo fabrication. But experience had long since dulled the impact of that kind of boomerang charge. Shifting the label of “American agent” from prisoner to ex-jailer was a minor diversion that impressed no one and changed nothing. United States Ambassador Joseph B. Flack was taken to see Hermann that day in the Otwock villa, surrounded by a pine woods. Flack brought him some food from the diplomatic stores and some American news­ papers. It was, Hermann said later, a joyous day. He stayed on in Poland for another three weeks, seeing Ambassa­ dor Flack almost every day and making the rounds of Warsaw to find out what had become of his friends. Each night he spoke to his wife Kate on the telephone. On November 6, after one of her phone conversations, Kate issued a statement in London on his be­ half emphasizing at once his gratitude to the United States for getting him released and his concern “lest injustice done to me" heighten East-West tensions. “On my emergence from these five years in the vacuum of incarceration, I find myself lacking essential data as to the circumstances leading up to and surrounding this un­ fortunate incident,” the statement said. “Re-entry into the stream of life after this sort of interlude is a slow, difficult process in any case and the more so when it happens in a cold war atmosphere supercharged with such excitement and sensation." Finally, on November 19, 1954, Hermann went back to the War­ saw airport where he had failed to catch his plane in 1949 and flew to Zurich. With careful help from the American consular authorities and her friend Lord Layton, Kate and her sister-in-law Elsie Field Doob managed to pick Hermann up from the Zurich hardstand before the normal passage through immigration and customs, and thus to elude the press. One reporter, Michael Goldsmith of the Associated Press, noticed the black consular car driving out from the back entrance of the airport He took after it, hoping to find

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where Hermann was going. There was a high-speed chase through Zurich which brought indignant complaints in the local papers next day about American tourists playing Hollywood cops and rob­ bers through the otherwise well-regulated streets of the Swiss city. The local papers had not realized who was involved. The consul's driver managed to shake off the newspaperman and deposit the Fields in secret at a small hotel. Later they went to a resort near St. Moritz, remaining incognito thanks to an arrangement with the Swiss Government which excused them from the normal require­ ment of police registration. Their two sons were spirited out of Eng­ land to join them for the Christmas holidays. Then Hermann and Kate returned to London, and eventually to the United States. Hermann went back to his architecture, with time out for attention to his new side career as novelist in collaboration with his cellmate MierzenskL Thanks to Hermanns demands on the Polish Government when it was settling up with him, Mierzenski was released by Christmas of 1954. The two got back the stacks of notebooks they had filled with stories, and later had a reunion in America to prepare the publication of their first book, Angry Harvest.

The book was a story about Polish peasants under the Nazi oc­ cupation, drawn from Mierzensld's experiences. Hermann preferred never to go back in detail over his own harrowing time. He has never seen Noel and Herta again. The Hungarians reacted more slowly to the Swiatlo disclosures than did the Poles. On November 7, 1954, however, the State De­ partment disclosed that the Budapest government had promised some word about Noel and Herta in the near future. Already on October 14 Istvan Kovacs, who headed the local Budapest com­ munist organization, had acßnitted that “many comrades” falsely imprisoned were being released and rehabilitated. There was no mention of the Fields. Kovacs simply said “the leaders of the former State Security office arrested many comrades, using criminally improper methods, and they were convicted by the court on the grounds of invented and forged charges and testimony. This was a great mistake. Moreover, it was a sin toward our party and the com­ rades who suffered imprisonment innocently.” Since the Rajk trial, based on the Field case, was the most spec-

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tacular conviction involved, it followed that Herta and Noel if they still lived should be appearing soon. Finally, on November 17, the Budapest radio announced that in a review of their case “it was not possible to justify the charge made in the past” and that therefore they had been freed. After the announcement the Hungarian Gov­ ernment informed U. S. Ambassador Christian Ravndal, who was taken to see the Fields next day. They asked him not to reveal where they were staying, to avoid a barrage of questions from the press, and the ambassador complied. The day of Noel's release of which he wrote later was perhaps the greatest emotional trial of his ordeal. As usual, he was told nothing and had his first hints that something extraordinary was in store through inexplicable minor variations of the inflexible prison routine. It was the middle of the week, but the barber who always came on Saturdays arrived in the morning to shave him. Then he was allowed an out-of-turn shower, and fresh underwear, and given a new suit and shoes. He was taken from his cell into an unfamiliar room» where there were a decent bed, a table and chair, and a chess set— almost forgotten luxuries. The meaning of this suddenly improved treatment was not explained. Noel could not help hoping and yet dared not hope, for he had learned the prisoners only defense against despair, which is stoic pessimism. 1 The most startling revelation of his new surroundings was the chance to look at himself. There was a mirror, the first in five years to show him his own face. It was a frightening shock. He saw white hair, a strange pallor not quite of the living, and eyes with a look too terrible to fathom. He felt obliged to avoid his own eyes. “They frighten me beyond words," was his description. Later Noel was taken into an office to hear the pronouncement of his release. That too bounced off the protective shell of the inmate at first, but gradually the words penetrated belief. His first response was to ask for his wife. When he was promised that she too would be brought in shortly, the tremendous meaning of the strange day broke full upon him and he burst into tears. Herta too had been given new clothes, and her hair had turned to white. Otherwise, Noel felt when he saw her, she had not changed. His account of their first meeting stresses the way their

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minds ran parallel during the five fearful years when neither knew if the other still lived. “*Do they know we are innocent?* she whispers in my arms. ‘Yes/ I say, and then ask, ‘Have you remained true?* *Yes,* she an­ swers, never for one moment have I doubted.* ‘Nor 1/ And now, as the sobs well up, I know this is the most memorable moment in my life, bigger than happiness, bigg«: than sorrow. Through years of separation, we have remained one. . . .** The prison officials offered them food, and liquor, in celebration. But their thoughts leaped to the future. It was not easy to speak at first, it had been so long since either one had known human com­ pany. Still, the question had to be faced. They had freedom to go where they chose; what should they choose? “Again our thoughts are one,* Noel wrote. “Our first spontaneous reaction is: Let us stay herel At least for the time being, till we get our bearings, till we learn what has gone on in the world these past five years. We are told we can go where we wish, or remain in Hun­ gary, if we so desire; we should not make any hasty decisions but take our time.” For the first time the prison officials were willing to answer questions, as well as ask them. Noel and Herta wept when they heard of Stalin's death, all unaware still that their own release was only one small part of the great gathering move to undo the divin­ ity of the vanished communist demigod. TTiey heard of communism’s triumph in China, of the Korean War, of Eisenhowers presidency. Their questions about friends brought new realization of the scope of the purges, but not all of those questions were answered. And finally, when it was dark, the questions were dropped and they went out together to ride through Budapest. It was their first glimpse of the world and it seemed unreal. H ie reality of prison walls was still too strong to free their senses. The car took them across the Danube and up into the Buda hills above the city. There they were shown into a newly decorated house and told it was theirs. Someone pushed the key into Noel’s hand and then they were left alone. Noel and Herta talked through the night, their words tumbling out in a flood of communication that swept up everything—the trivia

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of prison routine, the discovery of similar experience, the medita­ tions on life, the self-criticisms, the resolves. “As morning arrives,” Noel wrote, “we begin to realize our mar­ riage was never interrupted. We were, we are, we shall remain one. A new life is about to begin for us, right here in a land we have been in, these many years, but not seen. At least we hope it shall be here. Our first task is to regain health and strength. Meantime we shall study and revalue the past, seek out old friends, make new ones, discuss with them, learn from them, try to understand. We shall be wiser than we were, discard beliefs that have proved to be fallible, replace them by knowledge more solidly founded. But fundamen­ tally we shall find our convictions justified, strengthened, unchal­ lengeable. . . . And once more we shall contribute our mite, however small, towards a happier future for all mankind. . . .” Noels account of his release and developing determination to re­ main in Hungary left out any reference to his first contacts with his own country. He saw the American Ambassador twice, asking for a file of back newspapers covering all the years of his imprisonment, and explaining that he needed time to shake the cobwebs out of his mind. He did not ask for passports for himself and Herta. The day after their release, they entered the hospital for a checkup. Both were thin, haggard, and much older-looking than their years. Noel was suffering severely from his old stomach trouble. On De­ cember 24, a little over a month after their release, the Budapest government announced that Noel and Herta Field had requested and received political asylum in Hungary. Again the announce­ ment was made without informing the U. S. Embassy. It was only at the end of January that Ambassador Ravndal was able to assure himself at a private meeting with the Fields that they really did want to stay in Budapest and had not once again been submitted to pressure. On February 23,1955, the State Department announced that it was canceling U.S. protection of the Fields, a diplomatic way of saying that the American Government washed its hands of the couple and no longer accepted any responsibility for them. They no longer had valid American passports. No move was made to revoke their citizenship, which they had never renounced, but all official U.S. contact with the Fields was ended.

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The decision by Noel and Herta to stay in Hungary came as a shock to America. Newspapers demanded that the U. S. Govern­ ment reveal at last all that it knew of their story, since there were no longer any grounds for discretion in the protection of U.S. citizens in distress. “No official, who has the whole story, ought to be per­ mitted to keep it secret lest it embarrass him and his colleagues,” said the Detroit Times, without making it quite explicit that the ad­ monition was addressed to CIA chief Allen Dulles. The Boston Post was somewhat more direct “There isn't the slightest reason now why the case of the missing Fields . . . should not be aired by the Central Intelligence Agency and by the Federal Bureau of Investi­ gation” it said. “As a practical matter, Noel Field would no longer be alive if the communists had any suspicion that he was a double agent. The only terms on which he could survive would be that of further usefulness to the Soviet Union.” The insinuation went too far; Noel had no further usefulness. But the call to open Washing­ ton's dossiers was never answered, nor was there an explanation of why it was not And not until some years later did Noel himself decide to shed a little more light on his position in an article in the American magazine Mainstream in 1961. He and Herta settled into the villa on Sashegy Hill, overlooking the battered but beautiful city, which the government had given them on their release. It was a pleasant house, tucked against the hillside, of the angular modem style in which well-off Central European film producers and writers liked to build in the early thirties. Like the other villas in the quiet suburb, it had been emp­ tied of its previous occupants in anti-bourgeois purges. The main difference between the living conditions of the Fields and those of their neighbors was that they had the whole house to themselves, instead of having to share it' with several other families. After a time Noel was given a job making and editing translations for a government publishing house. He was isolated but, it seemed, as­ sured of tranquillity from the adventurous excitement he had so long sought and then achieved to surfeit. His clouded foresight failed him again. Three of the four missing members of the family had reappeared.

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Noel and Herta were told about Hermanns release when they were freed. That left Erika. Noel tried and failed to find out what had be­ come of her, getting the familiar fruitless promise that “inquiries will be made.” But release and reunion was becoming a new pat­ tern. Thousands of people were trickling out of jails and labor camps from Berlin to Vladivostok. Even the huge Siberian camps were thinning out in the winter of 1954. Few in the West realized that the direction had at last been re­ versed. Only rarely in unavoidable cases such as that of the Fields, three American citizens, were there announcements of the return of the damned. The communist governments were not yet pre­ pared to admit the immense proportions of the terror, which would have been immediately and staggeringly obvious had they dis­ closed how many people they were releasing. The official line in all the countries at that time was that for personal nefarious purposes, or as hostile imperialist agents, particular police officials had “falsi­ fied justice.” With its usual vigilance and concern for socialist le­ gality, the explanation continued, the Party in each country was “correcting mistakes” as it found them. The atmosphere of fear was somewhat diluted, particularly inside the Communist Parties, but it was still thick enough to hide what was going on from the outside and to dissuade the population from loose talk, even of improve­ ments. Besides, the habit of fear is not quickly broken when it has been deeply and painfully instilled. The populations at large tended not to believe that there had been a brake put on the greedy police, for they were convinced that change was impossible. The returning prisoners were the most silent of all, like animals so long trained to cages that they could only go on pacing when the bars suddenly disappeared. They began filtering back as they had been siphoned off, in hushed and furtive secrecy, with only an occasional rustle to hint of movement. Now and then, someone made it all the way to the West. In the winter of 1953, refugees who had been in Vorkuta and managed to flee through Berlin to West Germany when they returned disclosed that Erika Wallach was among the prisoners building roads in the Siberian tundra. In December of 1953 and then in February of 1954, Erika was allowed for the first time to write Red Cross mes-

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sages to her husband, by then back in Washington with the chil­ dren. He received the cards that spring. They explained nothing, but they did at least show she was alive and where she was. The United States sent a note to Moscow, though Erika was not an American citizen. It produced no results. Toward the end of the year, probably in connection with Noel's release though she had no idea of it, Erika was shipped back from Siberia to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. She was questioned for a few days about a Latvian involved in the Field case—without be­ ing told that it had been reversed—and then shipped east again to the Abes prison camp, where she fell ill and spent most of the spring and summer in hospital. In September of 1955, again without ex­ planation, she was returned once more to the Moscow prison. This time there was good news. Her fifteen-year sentence had been an­ nulled, she was told, and her case would have to be reviewed. If new interrogation showed her innocent, she would be released. If it showed her partially guilty, she would be retried. The questioners went meticulously through point by point of the dossier, asking Erika if it was true. Each time she said no, she had to go over the story again and give the real version. It was startling. They actually wrote down just what she said, had her sign each sheet of paper after careful reading, and signed it themselves. After ten days she was told she would be released, and an hour later, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon of October 1955, she was freed. Erika, no less than the others, found it hard to trust her freedom at first. She was taken to a Moscow hotel, escorted on sight-seeing tours of the city and to theaters at night, but she was afraid to tell anyone the good news. She had asked the Russians immediately for papers to leave the country, and until she had them and was on her way, she felt the danger Was not over. To her distress, British and American newspaper correspondents stumbled upon her name in the hotel and remembered what it signified. They sought her out, and reported her reappearance. “Thin and chain-smoking nerv­ ously,” read one dispatch, “she wore the same green sweater and black skirt she wore when arrested in East Berlin in 195°* • • • For obvious reasons, she said, she could not talk while still in Moscow but has a lot to say when she gets to the West.”

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Telling of it later, Erika said she “nearly fainted" when the re­ porters showed her the story in the papers a few days later. She had begged them to be careful in mentioning her reappearance be­ cause she still thought her chances of getting to the West were slight. She had not even cabled her husband about her release, waiting to be sure that she really could get out But now the news had broken, the telegrams were sent, and she lived on tenterhooks a few more days. On October 27, 1955, the Russians let her go. She was put aboard a Soviet plane for Berlin, back where she had started five years before, and hurried across to the West where her mother came to meet her. The last of the “four little Indians" was accounted for. Erika's problems were not over, however. She wanted to join her husband and her children in the United States. Bob flew to see her in West Germany, and there were long talks at the U.S. consulate, long depositions to special FBI agents flown to interview her. The trouble was that as an avowed former communist, Erika was not eligible for an American visa under the McCarran-Walter Immigra­ tion Act. The wrangling went on endlessly. The State Department said there was nothing it could do. But die late Representative Francis Walter, a man who could be harsh, could also show mercy. He intervened, sending a personal assistant to see Erika in Frank­ furt and arranging to satisfy the visa requirements through the loop­ hole for defectors. It was a bit tricky—Walter was sharply criticized for defying the extremely stem law that he had sponsored—but it worked. In 1957, over two years after her release, Erika was brought to Washington and a new life in the rambling colonial house on her mother-in-law's Warrenton, Virginia, farm. She testified at length before Walter's subcommittee on just what had happened to her, how she was tortured in prison and driven to collapse in Siberia until she was toughened to the work. She did not reveal much about Noel—she said she simply did not know the details of his involvements—and she stayed off politics. At one point in the long questioning about her eligibility for a visa, Erika stated her attitude to the Fields: “I know nothing about any espionage activities of Noel Field. I refused to believe he was an American spy although there seemed to be a lot of evidence to that effect. I have no proof whatever for his being a Russian spy. I have no right to

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judge him for whatever he did or did not do, or for what he is doing now. Personally, I have every reason to be grateful to the Fields.” And at another point, on politics: “I have deliberately refrained from violent attacks on the Soviet Union and the Communist Party via the press and radio because that would inevitably lead to a most serious political analysis and discussion, which would again involve me in politics, something I want to avoid at all costs. I am not a politician and do not want to be one, and am incapable of giving an objective, purely scientific analysis. On the other hand, the subjective ‘they did me wrong* approach would not satisfy me. Furthermore in taking that line I would expect it to be believed that I did it solely for the purpose of getting into the good graces of the authorities and ‘buying* my entry into the U.S.A. I have always de­ clared that should I decide to write or say anything fundamental, I would do it only at a time when there would be no suspicion of opportunism.” Erika had always had stubborn spirit Despite her ordeal it was not broken, though after her experience it shifted to a quiet de­ termination, like Candide’s, to “cultivate her own garden.” Her strength, her will, her temperament could have made her a woman of prominence able to contribute much of value—as a doctor per­ haps, or a sociologist—had she had the chance of a normal life. The times gave her no such chance: Nazi Germany, the war in Spain, postwar chaos, communist prisons and labor camps. She was thirtyone years old when she was freed from Russia, but she had had to spend all her extraordinary vitality in sheer endurance. Now she lives quietly, a suburban wife and mother, and she does not like to talk about the past. In 1955 the pace at which*the prisons were disgorging quickened. In 1956 the flow became a flood. Khrushchev made his secret speech denouncing Stalin as the one really responsible for what had hap­ pened, and gradually the conclusions were drawn. Even the door of the grave was opened. The Hungarian Government exhumed Laszlo Rajk and Tibor Szoenyi and reburied them again with full honors. Leo Bauer was sent home from Siberia to West Germany. Marthe Kreikemeyer, who despite the notification had never be­

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lieved her Willi was dead and had waited long for his return, at last went west as well. She wrote from Strasbourg, which had been her original home, to Noel and Herta in Budapest begging them for any dues they might give her of Willi’s fate. There was a syrupy sweet­ ness to the reply which in no way accorded with Marthe’s bitter desperation. “Our Dear Marthe,” it read, “We are deeply moved by your latest letter which just arrived. When we opened it, we were very happy to get a sign of life from you. But then came the shock at the news that Willi was still missing. We had not heard anything concrete about him nor about any other German acquaintances, but we thought that no news did not necessarily mean bad news. . . .” Noel said he had no idea of whether he could find any informa­ tion about Willi but promised “to give it a try. You know how much we loved you both,” he went on, “and I think I needn’t tell you that this hasn’t changed even in the darkest days. May we hope that you also never lost in your heart the feelings of friendship and confi­ dence for us? “The belief in a better future has remained with us. . . . “I don’t know how much you know about our present life. We have a charming house on a suburban hill with a garden and a splendid view. There is no lack of work. Herta is busy in the house and I am reading proofs of English translations from the Hungarian. . . . Our health is not quite satisfactory and will probably never be again. We are both suffering from premature symptoms of old-age. Herta’s old back trouble has become worse and I’ve got vertebral calcification which is frequently accompanied by heavy pains and can only be eased by much lying down and occasional water cures. . . . One year ago we would hardly have dreamt of ever being able again to take roots as it has happened with us. We have never had any reason to repent our decision to remain here and build up a new existence. Oh, how wonderful it would be if you were to visit us here! Gosh, that would be a feast! . . .” The letter ended, “Let yourself be embraced most cordially by your Noel and your Herta.” Far from being soothed, Marthe Kreikemeyer became increas­ ingly irritated at this bland acceptance of a past that had engulfed

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her husband. She avidly followed the East German Party papers which reported, from time to time, the annulment of various resolu­ tions passed to justify the purges, the rehabilitation of many of her husband's old comrades, and sometimes names of people appointed to some small new job seemingly mentioned innocuously but ac­ tually the only announcement that they were alive and released from limbo. But there was no word of Willi Kreikemeyer, and she could reach no one who knew about him. She decided to send an open letter to Western newspapers, pointing out that Willi had vanished in the purges now revoked and was still missing when it seemed to her that everyone else had reappeared. She begged for anyone who knew anything about him after that day in August, 1950, to get in touch with her. That provoked another letter from Budapest, this time from Herta. It was at once a plea and a reprimand, and was dated Octo­ ber 19, 1956—the day upheaval began in Poland, triggering revolu­ tion in Hungaiy four days later. It read: "Dear Marthe, Please excuse our long silence and please, please do not believe any reasons responsible for it, except for the fact that we still do not know what has happened to Willi. . . Referring to Marthe’s open letter in the press, it continued, "Our hearts do well understand that the tormenting worries over Willi’s fate drove you to make the attempt to obtain some news about him this way. But we are asking ourselves whether it was wise. Also others, among them friends of yours, are putting themselves the same question. . . . "But, Marthe, this doesn’t help any and can even do harm. We think that temporarily [Herta’s underlining] you ought not to do anything. We, and not only we, believe that you should have pa­ tience for a while. We mean that in earnest . . . As far as we know him [Willi] we can say with certainty that also to him rehabilitation is more important than freedom. And, therefore, Marthe, I’d like to ask you most urgently not to do anything rash. . . . Don’t let your­ self be abused and watch out what you do, so that nothing and no­ body can make use of it for their own and perhaps even unclean purposes.”

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Marthe Kreikemeyer had no further correspondence with the Fields, and she never learned anything more about Willi. Hertas letter also mentioned that Noel was “in hospital again. He had a stomach bleeding last week and still feels rather tired and weak. Hes recovering slowly.” Noel was still in the hospital on Oc­ tober 23 when a group of Budapest students, excited at news that Poland had defied the threat of Soviet tanks and installed Wladyslaw Gomulka to lead it against Moscow’s flat demands, began a march to the statue of Jozef Bern. Bern was a Pole who had been a hero of the 1848 Budapest uprising. As the students marched, the population streamed into the streets to join them. Soon there was a crowd of 300,000. The demonstrations began peacefully and spontaneously, but the authorities lost con­ trol. There was shooting. Soon the whole city, the whole country was in revolt It almost seemed to succeed. The Soviet occupation troops withdrew, but then they returned with tanks and armor. Children not yet in their teens fought street by street against the crushing engines of modem war. Peasants, who had never thought much of the dty folk, brought all the produce they could into town and left it on street comers for free distribution to the fighters, their way of nourishing the struggle for liberty. The whole world caught its breath as the Hungarians fought to free themselves and, unaided, lost. Budapest was consumed with the battle; no one at the center of the eruption could fail to be shaken. Noel and Herta lived through it, silent and unobserved. When it was over, when the flames were doused to smoke and ruins, then Noel spoke. Endre Marton, the Hungarian newspaperman, had learned Noel’s address. At the end of the year, Marton and his wife, who worked for the United Press, went up the Buda hill to seek an interview from the Fields. Neither Noel nor Herta was pleased, but they courteously agreed to discuss their attitude to the revolution with the Hungarian couple. Janos Kadar, the new communist leader installed by the Russians, Noel said, had saved Hungary from a “white terror” and he de­ nounced the “counterrevolutionaries.” Now, more than ever, the Fields said, they had no desire to return to the United States, for they found life in Hungary after the rebellion “so exciting.”

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The Hungarians were surprised. What had happened had hap­ pened in plain view. Noel and Herta explained that they had not seen much; Noel was in the hospital, a modern clinic reserved for high Party officials, and Herta had been caught there by the fighting and remained until it was over. Still, a year later, when the United Nations issued a report on the bloody suppression of the revolt and the ruthless immediate aftermath, Noel wrote a goo-word statement which was read on the Budapest radio denouncing the “slanderous falsehood interspersed at best with misleading half truths” issued by the U.N. “Neither 400 nor 4000 pages of dubious testimony by a hundred or ten times that number of defectors can 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 and their own good time,” his statement said. The revolution was a time when dossiers, doors and borders were forced ajar. Lazar Brankov, the Yugoslav in the Rajk trial, had been released from prison the year before but not quite freed, as guards accompanied him wherever he went. In the days of chaos he es­ caped to the West. From inside the prisons, it was learned that Noel had been treated brutally, had finally broken down and made a full confession, and then repudiated it Before his release, he had been re-examined for another eight months. Meanwhile, all through the lands behind the Iron Curtain, the lost were tim ing up again. Alexander Rado, the Soviet agent in Switzerland who had jumped the plane in Cairo at the end of the war when Moscow was bringing him home to report, suddenly turned up in his native Budapest The Russians had found him somewhere in the Middle East, kidnaped him, and eventually dumped him in a Siberian camp. His wife Helene, who had worked in the Unitarian office in Paris, went back to Budapest to join the husband she had thought dead. Both died within a few years, but at least they had a reunion. In Poland, during the hectic days at the end of 1956» the once powerful Jakub Berman sought to explain in a piteous whine to his

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Party's Central Committee why he should not be blamed for die terror that raged when he was responsible for the police. “Evidently,” he said in answer to angry reproaches, “many com­ rades still do not fully understand the whole complexity and omi­ nousness of the situation at that time [the years under Stalin]. . . . The meaning of the events of that period, its lofty flights, heroism and self-sacrifice, and its abyss of degradation, is far more tragic, complex and painful than the facile simplifications and hasty judge­ ments that are frequently put forward about this period . . .” He cited several of the most notorious police purge cases, claim­ ing that “the facts of the employment of impermissible methods were concealed from the leadership. The Field case was conducted in an atmosphere which accompanied the whole period between the Rajk trial in September, 1949, and the Slansky trial in Novem­ ber, 1952, and later events. . . .” This atmosphere Berman described a little more specifically. “In 1949, Field, who in the trial of Rajk had been treated as an American head spy, gave evidence in Budapest mentioning his let­ ter to me and his acquaintance with comrade Anna Duracz. These matters came to the ears of Beria and Stalin, and from that time there began a great campaign against me, and accusations began to pour in charging me with espionage and treason. “In the case of Anna Duracz [Bermans secretary], there was direct intervention on Stalin s part. I was against the arrest until the very end. I was deeply convinced of her innocence, not knowing at the time how much truth there was in the charges made against Field. Comrade (President Boleslaw) Bierut defended me from the slanderous charges of espionage for a number of years; he did it with complete dedication and self-sacrifice, and the accusations were always renewed. . . . We know very well what the fate was of those who in 1949 and in the years after were under the charge of having been in contact with Field. There is no doubt that had com­ rade Bierut not defended my case so well, I could, at the most, be exhumed today. “It is obvious how this reflected on my work. . . .” His work was to run the police and propaganda. In 1956 he was stripped of all offices and lives now, a sick and broken old man, in

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retirement and disgrace. He had a long way to fall, but in 1956 there were cushions for the fallen which never existed when Ber­ man was at the top pushing down. Berman’s disclosure of Stalins direct hand on the strings of the Field case was not surprising, since the case had been used to ar­ ticulate Kremlin policy in so many countries. Stalin never saw the Fields, and yet it was he who plucked them from relative obscurity and made their name one of the plagues of history. It is curious to wonder what he really thought about them, for until long after his death they had thought well of him and tried to serve him faith­ fully, although they never quite managed. As the thaw progressed, and the de-Stalinization campaign de­ veloped openly, Noel along with the great bulk of European com­ munists, probably changed his mind about Stalin. He wrote of the "growing humanitarian advances” and told friends that he regretted the progress was not at an equal pace in the various communist countries. But well after the campaign had reached its height he wrote too, "What awful mistakes, what openings for the poison of a skillful enemy! And at the same time, the world-shaking, history­ making achievements. For a short time—a mere instant of history— the eyes of many had become riveted to what was evil and lost sight of the good. The former was sick excrescence, tragic but cur­ able. The latter is intrinsic. Of this I am sure . . .” The decision not to go home when they were released from prison, Noel said, came when he and Herta realized the "involun­ tary notoriety of our ‘case’ abroad.” Because of that, he felt, "the other America would tolerate us only if we were willing to sell our souls for its Un-American purposes.” Endre Marion told the Senate Committee he felt from his inter­ view with Noel that the Fields’ connection with the Hiss case had been an important factor in their refusal to go home. "I don’t think that there is any doubt why he didn’t come back,” Marion testified. "He knew perfectly well that he was involved in the Hiss case. . . .” Senator Hruska asked Marion, "In what way was he interested in the Hiss case?”

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“He was involved in the Hiss case,** Marton answered. “That is what he said. It wasn’t apparent to me what he meant” Noel admitted to Marton that he was a communist, which he had not said to non-communists before, but this time, at the end of 1956, he attached reservations to his credo. As Marton recounted it Noel described himself as a communist who “accepts the Marxist doc­ trine with the exception of the theory of violence, the theory that the workers’ class has to seize power by force, using force. This he does not—this theory he does not accept Now, how can a man be a Marxist without accepting the theory in full, I do not know, but he is certainly one of them. My impression was that Mr. Field is a rather weak man. The strong character is Herta, his wife. That was my impression.” Although he never specifically said that he would not go home because of his communist background, Noel made clear on more than one occasion that his deepest wish was to see his own country support his faith and join the communist camp. He was convinced, he wrote, that “the American people will some day choose [com­ munism] for itself, in its own manner, with its own institutions, and consistent with its best traditions.” Shortly before the Hungarian revolution, Noel had written to Szabad N ep , the Hungarian Communist Party organ, of his feelings toward his country. “I am not sorry for my decision to stay and work in this country where I suffered so much and where I got such sincere and generous amends,” the published letter said. “But I did not turn my back on my own country. I am and always will be an American watching with passionate sympathy increasing evidence that America grad­ ually is awakening from a nightmare of reactionary internal politics and of foreign policy of cold war. “I hope and believe that the day will come when I also will have my place in the rank and file of American progressive forces. But I am also grateful to enjoy the advantages of witnessing and ex­ periencing in practice the building of socialism in Hungary. I was dreaming of that in prison and the dream now has been realized.” The lesson of Hungary’s revolution, he wrote later, was that the Soviet troops come to put down the uprising against communism

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were “the real freedom-fighters.” This view, Noel felt, was con­ sistent with loyalty to America since the allegiance he acknowl­ edged was to what he called “our America,” those in the country who sympathized or might come to sympathize with his beliefs. So far as is known, Noel and Herta have never left the communist bloc since their release, though they have traveled from Hungary to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Herta’s aged mother, who lives in West Germany, finally went to Budapest to see them as they would not go to her or meet her in the West. The German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in The Measures Taken a summary of the credo: “He who fights for com­ munism must be able to fight and to renounce fighting, to say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and unhelpful, to keep a promise and break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid dan­ ger, to be known and to be unknown. He who fights for communism has of all the virtues only one: that he fights for communism.” Noel did not have the strength for such a total austerity of mind and heart He had sentiment and compassion. It hint him to see others suffering. His generosity and his wish to be good and helpful were real. He felt and he showed genuine warmth for his friends. But he tried to stick to the fierce standards. Their inhuman narrow­ ness not only victimized him but marked thousands victim. He thought he acted from conviction. He was only used.

EPILOGUE

By the summer of i960, the special ruins and scars of Hungary's revolution had been cleared away or blurred by time and dust to outlines indistinguishable from the scars of World War II. Time, which can be so cruel to beauty, is kinder to ugliness, softening jagged edges and mellowing charred remnants until the stark pain of disaster eases to a bittersweet ache. It was a bright, leafy summer, which Budapest used for gentle respite and pleasure where it could be found, in the gaudily umbrellaed cafés beside the Danube, the silent woods upon the hills. There was still fear in the city, but it was a dull undertone and no longer a sharp throb. The prisons were emptying again; the midnight knock was probably a neighbor. Taking the necessary precautions of political discretion that were easy enough because they had become almost a reflex, people bus­ ied themselves in getting on with normal life. That was not so easy. And yet things were already so much better than they had been before the flaming October and November of 1956 that it was pos­ sible to look back upon the revolution as a partial success. The fury had consumed the ferocity of the rulers as well as the passion­ ate courage of the ruled. Both were beginning to work toward a truce, though it was an undeclared truce that had to be approached with caution. So long as the special proprieties against risky involve­ ment with a Westerner were observed, it was possible for a for­ eigner to talk fairly freely with people in Budapest. On a brilliant summer day in early July, I hailed a taxi on the street and rode across the Danube up the hill to call on Noel and Herta Field at their villa. It was a winding road, with a dazzling panorama of the city's domes and avenues at every turn, the more breath-taking in the empty quiet of the suburban noon. I had not sent word ahead that I was coming. Noel, I had been told at the

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publishing house where he worked, was confined to his home wait­ ing for the last of twelve fractures in his leg to mend. He had gone skiing in the rugged Polish Tatra early in the spring, taken a bad spill, and been half encased in plaster since. Herta came down to the office on Budapest’s fashionable Vaci Utca from time to time to collect his pay and bring in work that he had finished; but Noel could barely hobble and was unable to go out. The villa was on a steep hillside, with a long flight of steps lead­ ing up through a modest flower garden from the street An iron fence with a locked gate guarded the approach to the steps. I rang. Someone stirred a lace curtain at a porthole window on the upper floor. Eventually a Hungarian maid opened the door, surveyed the sleepy scene, and finally shuffled down the steps in carpet slippers. She spoke only Hungarian, and did not unlock the gate. So 1 handed her a visiting card through the railing, which she took, trudging up the steps into the house, carefully shutting the front door behind her. The time passed slowly. It was perhaps a quarter of an hour later that she reappeared, made her way down to the gate again and silently handed back the card on which Noel had written that he did not choose to see journalists. Doubtless someone among his relatives or friends in the West whom I had seen had written telling of my interest in his story, for there was nothing on the card except my name to identify me or the purpose of my visit I wrote a note then, explaining it was not for a journalistic interview that I had come but because of the obvious obligation to hear what he might wish to say and in response to the often repeated insistence of peo­ ple once close to him that 1 must "ask Noel about that point It is up to him to say.” There was another long, silent w ait When the maid came back again, she brought an envelope addressed to me. Inside was a card, inscribed with the date and a formal salutation. The message read, "If any friend or relative of mine wished me to talk to you, they would have informed me in writing. I have had previous experience with persons from the West making unsub­ stantiated claims, and I am afraid you will have to take no’ for an answer.

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“Sincerely, Noel H. Field" The taxi driver, knowing better than I how difficult it would be to find transportation back to the center of the city, had thoughtfully waited down the road. There was no one else anywhere in sight. In neighboring villas, laundry hung limp on ropes strung across every little balcony, a sign that in those houses which had not received the upkeep and paint of the Fields’ trim home, living space per capita was much closer to the low national average than what the expatriates enjoyed. But there was no sign of anyone about at mid­ day in the neighborhood, so I climbed back into the taxi and went away without ever talking to Noel or Herta Field. Acquaintances of theirs in Budapest spoke of them uneasily, as incomprehensible creatures whom it was better not to know too well or try too hard to figure out They were both white-haired and sickly when they came out of prison, a reserved couple who now live quietly and very seldom show themselves at the theaters and dubs frequented by the communist intellectuals who know them. Their ordeal at the center of die great net of terror did not draw them closer to their fellow victims but set them apart, leaving them almost alone. An aura of mystery and danger, though the venom had all been drawn, still clung to the Fields unreasonably but ineradicably. The scent of fear, no longer acrid but never quite aired out, lingered in the atmosphere where they had moved. A Czech woman now living securely in Geneva, one of those who had been touched by the Field case a decade earlier in Prague, started in fright when he was mentioned and begged not to be con­ nected again to the name of Noel Field in any way. The U. S. Cen­ tral Intelligence Agency under Allen Dulles politely but abruptly refused to reveal any facts in its possession on the case but the most obvious and well known, long after everyone involved was dead or out of jail; all the related secrets were exposed or harmlessly obsolete; all the dossiers closed for lack of further current relevance. Only once has Noel himself spoken out publicly on the harrowing sequence of events that composed his strange life, a sequence whose meaning still torments and eludes him, he has told acquaintances. That was the article for Mainstream, where for the first time he publicly avowed his faith in communism. He entitled the article

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“Hitching our Wagon to a Star,” and made it dear that the star he meant was a red one. In that article, tracing the evolution of his thoughts, Noel comes to “A summer day in i960” It was a time of international crisis, shortly after the East-West summit meeting which crashed in the shadow of the American U-2 plane shot down over Russia. Noel wrote that he could sense the “decay” of the West and the coming prevalence of “socialism realized and of communism in the making. To some perhaps this may sound like the idle fantasy of denizens of an ivory tower.” But he argued that he had lived in both worlds, and so could speak with the hard knowledge of experi­ ence on the sagging deterioration of one side and the “constant ad­ vance” of the other. Hungary, four years after the revolution, was to him a marvelous display of “promises held, of plans fulfilled, of doubts converted into confidence all around us. • . It was a time when an entrenched communist official, walking through the streets of Budapest with a Western correspondent, could point to small refrigerators and television sets at last coming on sale in poorly stocked shops, speak proudly of progress, and then turn to me with eager eyes and ask in a quite different, beseeching tone, “Tell me, is it true that in East Germany things are even much worse than they are here?” Noel wrote glowingly of the improvements in Budapest, of “years of rising living standards and spreading joie de v iv r e ” It was true in comparison with what had been. “Perhaps, most important of all,” he wrote, is that “the sense of insecurity, so characteristic of the lives of millions in America, has been converted into a priceless sense of security for the individual and his family.” For himself, it may well have been true, for he also wrote angrily refuting sug­ gestions that he and Herta had been obliged to stay in the country of their torture or might come to regret their decision. There was no explanation offered of why he suddenly chose to declare himself in January 1961. From remarks that reached me in­ directly, I would guess it was because he supposed that after my visit to Budapest the previous summer this book would appear at approximately the same time. If so, he underestimated the length of the task of piecing together from many hundreds of people and

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archives in a dozen countries the story of the turbulent and tragic forces in his life. For, when the threads have been gathered and rewoven into place, the pattern of the Field story emerges quite differently from the suspenseful tale of intrigue and adventure which might have been expected, though it contains all the elements of mystery, con­ spiracy, torture, murder, sex and politics. It is instead the pattern of a world in agony and of the bewildering pitfalls for men of good will who tried to walk a hopeful road through it all. Noels generation in many distant parts of the world went through a succession of agonies that seemed in the intensity of the moment to be peculiar to each time and place, unrelated to what had hap­ pened earlier somewhere else. So much separated the depression and the New Deal in America, the French camps for bitter and ragged refugees from Spain, the Nazi concentration camps, the logistical plans for moving armies through the Italian and Bavarian Alps, the devious political struggles for mastery of the embers left among the ashes of world war, the courtroom nightmares of revolu­ tion feeding on itself, the panicky reaction of the self-righteous awakening to danger. Yet all were linked through Noels life, and his life shows that the far-flung upheavals were truly intermeshed and interacting, shoving and tugging at a stumbling world. It was sheer arbitrary chance that made an obscure American and his family the focus of it all, and yet, as Noel said, the chain of events that led him pulled “in an almost straight line.” The inevita­ bility arose from the fusion of his times and the human weaknesses and strengths of his particular personality. He was not an unusual or special person, though he started off with more advantages than most. His family enjoyed the material comfort to give him an excellent education and the opportunity of a rewarding and satisfying career. By nature and background he was highly endowed with intellect, sensitivity, compassion, and an ar­ dent desire to serve his fellow man and reinforce the goodness in humanity that ever struggles for ascendancy. His visions were gen­ tle, so serene that he always abhorred all violence and pain, but that is what his life was made of, and that is what he was made to serve. He sought adventure for what he believed was a good cause, and

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he was willing to offer himself for the furtive chores of espionage. But he never really performed as a spy or an agent; he was used otherwise. He sought to rule himself by the precepts of loyalty and decency, yet he lived a secret double life, hurt most those whom he most admired, and rejected the friends who most sincerely wished him well. “Personal affections,” Noel wrote in Mainstream, “cannot be determinant in times when, throughout the world, family ties and bonds of friendship often fail to stand the strain of basic po­ litical divergencies.” Noel’s life and aspirations were an endless series of bitter ironies, the reflection of an essential irony in himself that goes far to explain why he was one who succumbed to the forces and pressures which other contemporaries felt and overcame. It is the irony of arrogant humility. With true humility, he placed himself at the disposal of generous urges and convictions which, with true arrogance, he de­ termined to impose on others regardless of the consequences. With humility, he accepted a credo and a sense of obligation to it, and with arrogance he refused to examine its effects. With the courage of humility, he performed the tasks which intellect and conscience set for him, and with the cowardice of arrogance, he rejected the demands of common sense and simple human feeling. A once dose friend, reflecting on the inner dictates that moved Noel, concluded that he was driven by the urge to martyrdom, the yearning for glory through self-sacrifice. Perhaps he was, but he hadn’t the stamina, the strength of character, or the clarity of vision to achieve ennoblement of this kind through self-immolation. 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 the circumstances were out­ rageously extraordinary, and he had the proud ambition to be an extraordinary person. It was beyond his capacity. He never man­ aged 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 peo­ ple used him, that offers special insights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barton, Paul. Prague à THeure de Moscou. Paris: Editions Pierre Horay, 1954Bauer, Leo. “Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte.” Die Partei hat immer Recht, (July 4» 1956).

Boveri, Margaret. Verrat im XX Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag GMBH, 1956. Brankov, Lazar. “Prisoner in Budapest.” Unpublished. Brooks, Howard. Prisoners of Hope: Report on a Mission, New York: L. B. Fischer Publishing Corporation, 1942. Browder, Earl. “How Stalin Ruined the American Communist Party,” Harpers Magazine (March i960), pp. 45-51. Cary, William. Poland Struggles Forward, New York: Greenberg, 1949. Childs, Marquis, and James Reston, eds. Walter Lippman and His Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace &Company, 1959. Dallin, David. Soviet Espionage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955De Toledano, Ralph. Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1952. ----- and Victor Lasky. Seeds of Treason. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1950. Dewar, Hugo. The Modem Inquisition. London: Allan Wingate Ltd., 1953Ehrmann, Herbert B. The Untried Case: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the MoreUi Gang. New York: The Vanguard Press, i960. Field, Hermann, and Stanislaw Mierzensld. Angry Harvest. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1958. See also publisher s note. Field, Noel Banishing War Through Arbitrationr-A Brief Sketch of PostWar Arbitration Treaties. Washington, D.C.: National Council for Prevention of War, 1926. — . “Hitching Our Wagon to a Star.” Mainstream (New York, January 1961). Field, Kate (Mrs.). Boston Sunday Globe, October 17,1954. Fischer, Louis. Men and Politics: An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan &Pearce, 1941.

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Flicke, W. F. Agenten Funken nach Moskau. Switzerland: Kreuzlinger, Foote, Alexander. Handbook for Spies. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949* Fry, Varian. Surrender on Demand. New York: Random House, Inc.,

Griffith, William E. “Thaw and Frost in Eastern Europe.” Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Manuscript. Halperin, Ernst. The Triumphant Heretic: TUo’s Struggle Against Stalin. Translated from the German by Usa Barea. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1958. Harvard College. Alu m n i reports on Dr. H. H. Field, Noel H. Field, and Hermann Field. Hiss, Alger. In the Court of Public Opinion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1957. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Testimony of Whittaker

Chambers, August 27, 1948. ----- . Testimony of J. B. Matthews, November 7,1938. ----- . Testimony of Herbert A. Philbrick, July 23,1951. ----- . Testimony of Erika Wallach, March 1958. Humbert-Droz, Jules. “Le Procès de Budapest” Le Travail (Fribourg et Sion, September 30, 1949). Hyde, Douglas. I Believed: An Autobiography of a Former British Com­ munist. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1951. Kempton, Murray. Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties. New York: Simon &Schuster, Inc., 1955. Krivitsky, Walter G. In Stalins Secret Service: An Exposé of Russkfs Secret Policies by the Former Chief of the Soviet Intelligence in Western Europe. New York: Harper &Brothers, 1939. Lazio Rajk and his Accomplices Before the People’s Court: A Transcript of the Rajk Trial. Budapest: Budapest Printing Press, 1949. League of Nations Reports. Repatriation of Foreigners with the Spanish Loyalists. C. 34, M. 18, 1939, IX. Leonhard, Wolfgang. ChÜd of the Revolution. Translated by C. M.

Woodhouse. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1958. Levine, Isaac Don. "The Strange Case of Laurence Duggan.” Plain Talk (February, 1949). Marton, Endre. “The Story of Noel Field.” Unpublished manuscript Massing, Hede. This Deception. New York: Duell, Sloan &Pearce, 1951. Matern, Hermann. “Agents of American Imperialism Exposed.” For Last­ ing Peace, For a People’s Democracy [the Cominform journal] (October 27, 1950).

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Nollau, Guenther. Die Internationale. Cologne: Verlag fuer Politik und Wirtschaft, 1959. Polish Central Committee. “Report on the Eighth Plenum.“ Nowe Drogi (Warsaw, October 1956). Reinhardt, Guenther. Crime without Punishment: The Secret Soviet Terror Against America. New York: Hermitage House, Inc., 1952. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt. Four volumes. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957,1959, 1962. ----- . “Sources of the New Deal: Reflections on the Temper of a Time.” Columbia University Forum (Fall 1959). Senate Committee on Judiciary. Testimony of Endre Marton, May 13, 1957----- . Institute of Pacific Relations Hearings, Part 2. Testimony of Whit­ taker Chambeis, August 9-23, 1951* ----- . Institute of Pacific Relations Hearings, Part 1. Testimony of Hede Massing, August 7, 1951. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., i960. Thompson, Craig. “What has Stalin done with Noel Field?“ Saturday Evening Post (December 15, 1961). “The Trial of Nikola D. Petkov.” Record of the Judicial Proceedings. Sofia, 1947. “The Trial of Rudolf Slansky.” Transcript of Prague radio broadcasts during the trial. From the files of Radio Free Europe, Munich, 1953. T he Trial of Traicho Kostov.“ Transcript Sofia, October 1949. Unitarian Service Committee in World War II. Pamphlet published by the Unitarian Service Committee (January 1946). See also other USC bulletins. “Ueber die Hintergruende der Affaere Noel Field.“ Einheit, Sonderaus­ gabe (East Bureau, German Social Democratic Party, Bonn).

INDEX

( F . m ea ns N o e l F i e l d )

Ackermann, Anton, 232 Adam, Mr., 152 Agents, recruitment, 61-63 Aghnides, Theo, 81, 87, 120 Allied Control Commission, 169, 183, 187 Allies: Paris liberation, 165-66. See World War II America First, 75 American Civil Liberties Union, 65 American Relief for France, 167 Angry Harvest, 243 Anschluss, 104 Anti-Semitism, 237; Slansky trial, 229; Soviet Union, 229 Arnold, Thurman, 52 Associated Press, 228, 235, 242 Austria: Hitler, 104; Mauthausen camp» 137> USC, 167, 169 Baldwin, Roger, 65 Baltic States, 119 Bankov, Lazar, 211 Barbusse, Henri, 38 Bauer, Leo, 138, 139, 140, 150-51, 182, 183-87, 189, 196, 218, 226, 251; arrest, 219, 221, 222; Dexter, 143; F., 143, 227; Glaser, Erika, 140, 144, 218-19, 220; imprisonment, 223-25; oss, 143-44

Baumann. See Bauer, Leo

Belgium, 153 Bern, Jozef, 254 Benedite, Daniel, 144-45 BeneS, Eduard, 231 Bergamo, Italy, Architects’ Con­ gress, 6 Beria, Lavrenti, 12, 237-38, 256; murder, 238 “Beriovschisna,” 12 Berle, Adolf, 123 Berlin: blockade, 9, 189, 198; Deutsches Theater, 1615 fall of, 163; Hilton Hotel, 19; Tempelhof airport, 9 Berman, Jakub, 11-12, 14, 195, 201, 255-57; F-» 11» 12 Bertz, Paul, 138-39, 151, 182, 225 Beveridge, Sir William, 54 Bierut, Boleslaw, 11, 201, 256 Bill (Walter Grinke), 69-70 Bonus March, 45-46, 69 Boston: post-World War I, 28-29; School for Social Work, 30 Bragg, Rev. Mr. Ray, 176-78 Brandt, Heinz, 20 Brankov, Lazar, 205, 223, 255 Bratislava, 4 Bratsk Dam, 19 Brecht, Bertolt, The Measures Taken, 259 British Trust, 116-17

272

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Brooks, Howard, 130, 137; Prison­ Comité pour les Réfugiés AntiFascistes, 120 ers of Hope, 128-29 Browder, Earl, 42, 43, 57, 62, 66- Communism: Brecht on, 259; intel­ lectuals, 89-90; Russia, 41, 67, 121, 212; F., 67, 192; Sta­ 61; U.S., 42. See under name lin* 191- 9* of country Budapest: F., 199, 204 ff; post-re­ volt, 261 ff; trials, 205-6. See Communist party: agents, 62, re­ cruitment, 65; dues, 155; Ger­ also Hungary man, 150; Hitler, 68-69; his­ Bukharin, Nikolai, 153, 154; execu­ tory, 19-20; terror, 248 tion, 153 Communists: European post-war Bulgaria, 136, 169, 200, 233; com­ governments, 170-71; free munists in Switzerland, 140 love, 132; Nazis, 117, 171; re­ Bullitt, William C., 56 cruitment program, 61-62; re­ Burlac, Anne, 38 sistance in occupied countries, 121; U.S. post-World War I, CALPO (Comité de TAllemagne 30. See also under name of Libre Pour TOuest), 172, 173 country Canaris, Admirai Wilhelm, 182 Coolidge, Calvin, 31, 38 Capone, Al, 39 Corcoran, Thomas, 52 Carnegie Foundation, 90, 190 Coughlin, Father Charles E., 39 Central Intelligence Agency Cripps, Sir Stafford, 54 (CIA), 141,239, 247; F. case, Cseresnyes, Sandor, 213, 214 263 Cyrkus, Helena, 7, 201 Chamberlain, Neville, 116 Cyrkus, Simon, 7, 201 Chambers, Whittaker, 123, 193-94 Czechoslovakia, 136; communists, Charles University, 2 1, 108, 117-18, 162, 229; F. Chicherin, 94 case, 9; Germany in, 115, 116; Nazis, 117; purges, 227, 228; China: communism, 11, 245; Ja­ refugees, 117-19, 128; relief pan, 56, 59, 76, 98 work, 127; Rude Pravo, 118, Churchill, Winston S., Yalta, 163 227, 232; Soviet Union, 231; Clark, Fred, 184 Clark, Jean Ainslee, 78 Trust Fund, 230; USC, 167 Clementis, Vladimir, 227-28, 231— 32; trial, 228-29 Dahlem, Franz, 137, 182, 186-87, Clementis, Mrs. Vladimir, 227 225-26, 232 Colby, Bainbridge, 42 Daily Worker, 40, 42, 43, 60, 62 Cold War, 173, 192, 196, 198, 242 Dallin, David, 97 Collins, Henry H., 57 Davidson, General, 52 Comintern, 68, 132; GPU, 154-55; Davis, Norman, 39, 76, 77 original Secretaries, 152-53; De Gaulle, Charles, 166 Russia First policies (Stalin's), Deschamps, Monsieur, 147 Dexter, Mrs. Elizabeth, 127 153

RED PAWN Dexter, Nancy, 134 Dexter, Dr. Robert, 127, 133-34, 141, 143 Dies, Martin, 122 Dies Committee on Un-American Activities, 121, 122 Disarmament, 79; conferences, 3940; F-» 37» 39- 40; Litvinov formula, 99; London Naval Conference, 76-77 Djilas, Milovan, 206 Dmitrov, Georgi, 153-54, 157, 158 Dolivet, Louis, 132 Donovan, William, 172 Doob, Dr. Elsie Field. See Field, Elsie Duclos, Jacques, 160, 192 Duggan, Laurence, 44, 57, 58,1905 death, 194; F., 194; Hiss case, 194

Dulles, Allen, 15, 40, 160, 163, 185, 206, 212, 230, 247, 263; communists, 14&-44; F., 1414*. M3* 150, 151» 160-61, 170, 172, 173, 181, 224, 227; OSS, 141 Dunn, James Clement, 81 Duracz, Anna, 12, 194-95, 201, 256 Eastern Europe, 6, 13, 194-99; purges, 200

East Germany, 20, 224; communist hierarchy, 137, 155; Commu­ nist Party, 182, 218; F., i82r83; purges, 225, 232, 2535 Soviet Union, 182-84 East-West Summit Meeting (i960), 264 Economist, 116 Eicheldorfer, 185 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 32, 245 Eisler, Gerhard, 60, 123, 178, 225

273

Emergency Relief Committee, 126 Emergency Rescue Committee,

144-45

Ende, Gertrud, 225-26 Ende, Lex, 225-26 Engels, Friedrich, 40 Eschwege, Nina, 21-22. See Field, Nina Ethiopia, 76, 82, 87 Europe, 26, 181. See Eastern Eu­ rope and under name of country Existentialism, 181 Fascism, 41, 53 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 42,175,194,197,247, 250; Eisler, 225; F., 180, 196; Hiss, 74 Fellowship of Youth for Peace, 37 Ferguson, Ma, 39 Feygin, Anatol, 238 Field case: communist police, 13; ramifications, 16, 17; secrecy, 16-17 Field, Dr. Herbert Haviland (fa­ ther), 21-22, 24; American Peace Commission, 24-25; death, 25, 26 Field, Elsie (sister), 2, 3, 6, 27, 44, 79» 197» 216, 317, 3i8, 342; birth, 22; education, 48 Field, Hermann (brother), 6, 7-8, 27, 116, 123, 138, 230; Angry Harvest, 243; appearance, 7; arrest, 201, 202-3, 238; birth, 22; communists, 118; disap­ pearance, 8-9, 199; educa­ tion, 48; Herta, 243; imprison­ ment, 13, 15, 202-4, 240-41, release, 13, 16, 241-43; mar­ riage, 78, 116, 119; Noel, 120, 243; Poland, 117-19, 200-1

m

RED PAWN

field, Herta (wife), 2, 3, 4, 6-9, 38, 47, 48, 180, 197; appearance, 49; background, 4, 60; characteristics, 4-5, 33, 34, 64, 69, 258; childhood, 88, 89; children, 90; Communist Party, 69, 70-71, 108, 146; disappearance, 9, 199; family, 116, 259; Geneva, 87, 88 ff, 98, 99, 104, 106; health, 252; Hiss, 58; Hungary, 246-47, 252, 254, 257, 259, 262, 264; husband, 4-5, 35, 71“7^> 245; imprisonment, 13, 15, 204, 205, 240, release, 13, 16, 244-46; interests, 48-50; marriage, 48-50, 90, 106, 128, 129 (see husband); ref­ ugee work, ii2r-i3, 127-34, 135, 148- 47, 149®, 15«» 167-69; Soviet Union, 95, 100-4; Spain, 107 ff; unpopu­ larity, 72; U.S., 81 Field, Jean, 116 Field, Kate Thomeycroft, 7, 216, 217, 242-43 Field, Letitia (sister), 22, 27, 48 Field, Nina Foote (mother), 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 91, 123-24; characteristics, 47-48; death, 124; health, 48; Noel, 47, 48; Soviet courier, 78-79 Field, Noel Haviland, 1, 3, 25, 3032, 38, 75, 87, 88, 92,121-24, 177-78, 190, 196, 209-10, 216, 226, 230; appearance, 1; arrest, 199, 214-15; birth, 22; Bonus March, 46, 69; Buda­ pest trials, 205, 206; charac­ teristics, 4, 18, 20, 33, 35, 36, 41, 43, 47, 58, 59, 64, 65, 69, 70-71, 75, 76, 77, 84, 85, 87, 94, 99, 127, 168, 174- 75, 181,

258, 259, 265-66; childhood, 22-24, 88» 89; communism, 42- 43, 44, 89, 103, 105, 108, 109, 122, 130-31, 148, 180, 168, 177-78, 194- 95» 235-38, 245, 255» 257, 258, 259, 26364; communist agent, 88, 91, 92- 93, 97- 98, 104, 107-8, 131, 138-42, 146, 151, 156, 158, 160-62, 182 ff, 216, 224; Communist Party, 30, 37, 42, 65, 66-67, 90, 154, 155, 156; daughter (see Glaser, Erika); disappearance, 3-4, 197; du­ ality, 13-14, 55, 58, 66-68, 70, 85, 90, 99-100, 131, 134» 156, 181, 191, 216, 266; editlog, 247, 262; education, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37; father, 25-26; friends, 3, 27, 44, 55, 57, 58, 91, 99, 103, 123» 148, 190, 191, 194, 233; Geneva, 87, 88 ff, 98, 99, 104, 106; health, 3, 37, 48, 128, 190, 246, 252, 254, 255, 262; Hun­ gary, 245- 47, 252, 254- 55, 257» 258-59, 262, 264; ideal­ ism, 28, 29-30, 35, 37» 88; imprisonment, 13, 15, 36, 204-5, 228, 234-36, 240, 255, release, 13, 16, 244-46; influ­ ences on, 37, 75; in-laws, 116; interests, 25, 27, 39, 48-50, 52, 55, 89; languages, 31, 9394, 100; Mainstream article, 247, 263-64, 266; marriage, 31, 48-49» 90-91, 106, 128, 246; mother, 47, 48; Nazism, 60, 84; purges connected with, 225, 226, 227 ff, 232-34, 256; recruitment as spy, 62-67, 7075, 77-82, 85-86; refugee work, 127-34, 135®, 144-47»

RED PAWN Field, Noel Haviland (confd) 149 ff» 167; religion, 27, 37, 127, 168; search for, 6, 7, 216 ff; self-delusion, 97; sex, 49* 89, 91* 1*9- 31* 133» 17576; Soviet Union, 56, 84-85, 95, 100-45 Spain, 93, 100, 105, 107-14; U.S., 180, 19091, 258-59, loyalty to, 71, 75, 79, 86, State Department, 33, 35-36* 38, 39-40, 42-43, 44, 48, 77* 83-84, 85; Washing­ ton, 33- 35* 39; wife* 71- 7** *36, 245. See also Dulles, Allen; Hiss, Alger; League of Nations; Unitarian Service Committee Fields (family), 41, 48, 78-79 Fischer, Dr. Hans von, 156 Fischer, Louis, 109 Fischl, Otto, 232 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 36 Flack, Joseph B., 242 Foldi, Ivan, 213 Foote, Alexander, 157-60, 173; Handbook for Spies, 158 France, 153; communists, 108, 130, 136-37; fall of, 124, 132; fas­ cists, 98; F., 120 ff, 135; Hit­ ler, 82; liberation, 159, 160; post-war, 166; refugees, 106, 112-14, 124-28, 167; resist­ ance, 130, 136, 139; Soviet Union, 94; Spanish Civil'War, 93; Vichy, 124, 128,144, 145, 146 Franco, Francisco, 93, 98, 104, 108, 112 Frank, Joseph, 231 Frankfurt University, 187 Fred, 70, 73, 74» 80, 102-3, 143 Free French, 128, 166

275

Free German Committee, 161-62, 172 Frejka, Ludvik, 230, 231 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 67, 71 Fry, Varian, 126 Fuhrmann, Bruno, 225 Fullerton, Hugh, 144 Gandhi, Mahatma, 37 Geminder, Bedrich, 231 Geneva, 2, 3, 4, 79, 80, 87, 140,

149

Germany: Allied Control Commis­ sion, 183, 187; American Mili­ tary Government, 184; Army, 161; Bendlerstrasse (War Ministry), 156; Bund Deut­ scher Mädchen, 110; commu­ nists, 68, 131, 132, 137-38, 139» 161-62, 163, 170-71» 178, 188-89, F-» 140-41, in France, 136, OSS, 224, in Spain, 136; currency restric­ tions, 110; Gestapo, 149, 159, 207; Hitler Youth, 110; Italy, pact, 93; rearmament, 42; ref­ ugees, 128; Reichswehr, 132, 139; Soviet Union, 172, 173; Spanish Civil War, 104; sur­ render, 163; Wehrmacht, 104; Weimar Republic, 68, 131-32. See Hitler; Nazis Gero, Emo, 233 Gibson, Hugh, 51 Gilbert, Prentiss, 39 Glaser, Dr., 110-12, 114, 136, 187; death, 189 Glaser, Erika (foster daughter), 116, 158, 161, 162-63, 182, 187, 188, 189, 250-51; ap­ pearance, 150; characteristics, 188, 189; children, 190, 219; communism, 135-36, 140*

276

RED PAWN

Glaser, Erika (cont’d) 150-51» 187-89; education, 187; Fields, 110-15, 151» Ge*" many, 184 ff; marriage, 18990; OSS, 184-87. See Wal­ lach, Erika Glaser Glaser, Kurt, 110, 115 Glaser, Mrs., 110-13, 136, 187, 189, 219, *50 Goldhammer, Bruno, 136, 138, 150, 221, 225 Goldhammer, Esther, 221 Goldsmith, Michael, 242 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 11, 12, 207, *38, 254; purge, 200, 204 Gomulka, Mrs., 203, 204 Gonda, Eugene, 151-52 Gottwald, Element, 227, 229 Granowska, Mela, 201 Great Britain: communists, 11718; Czech refugees, 116-17; fascists, 98; Free German Committee, 172; Hitler, 82; Munich Pact, 116; naval power, 39, 5-5-3 formula, 77; RAF, 115; Spanish Civil War, 93; Tito, 170; U.S., 75-76 Grinke, Walter, 69-70 Guisan, General, 159

77- 7®, 194, 257-58; FBI, 74; Hede Massing, 73, 74 Hiss, Donald, 57 Hiss, Priscilla, 58, 73 Hitler, Adolf, 42, 59,61,65,68,79, 98, 110, 118; Austria, 104; Bavarian redoubt, 163; com­ munists, 68, 188; conscription, 76; F., 84-85; Festung Eu­ ropa, 146; July 20, 1944 at­ tempt, 157; Locarno treaties, 82; Paris, 165; Rhineland, 82; Soviet Union, 96, 137; Spanish Civil War, 93; Stalin, 207; Sudetenland, 116; suicide, 163; U.S., 75-78; World War H, 95. See Germany; Nazis Hodinova, Anezka, 118 Hoffmann-Szoenyi, Tibor, 136. See Szoenyi, Tibor Hofmeier, Carl, 158 Holdos, 230 Holland, 167 Holstein, Hans, 183, 224 Hoover, Herbert, 38, 45, 50 Horthy, Mildôs, 152 Hudson, Manley O., 28, 34 Hughes, Charles Evans, 42 Humbert-Droz, Jules, 19-20, 94, 95, 15^-54, 159; F., 152,

Hajdu, Vavro, 232 Harding, Warren G., 28 154-58 Harrington, Donald, 176 Hungary, 4; Budapest trials, 205Harvard University, 21, 27, 30, 34, 6; communists, 108, 140, 162, 171, 233, 258; patriotism, 207; 48, 57, 78; Sacco-Vanzetti case, 29 police, 223; Rajk trial, 208-15 Haskovec, Dr., 229 (see Rajk trial); Red Army, Haus, Elsie, 169 169; refugees, 151-52; revolt Heine, Fritz, 125, 126 (October, 1956), 11, 168, Helen (Russian agent), 101 233, 453, 254-55, 258-59, Hiss, Alger, 57-58, 121, 190; case, 261; Spanish Civil War, 209; Swiatlo disclosures, 243 ff; 73, 74- 75, 192- 94, 196- 97, 216; F., 57, 58, 73, 74-75, 76, Szabad Nep, 258; U.S., 240-

RED PAWN

277

Hungary (confd) Kimmel, René, 4 41; USC, 167, 169. See Buda­ Kleinova, Dora, 195-96 pest Klinger, Evzen, 227 Hurley, Patrick, 45-46 Kopecky, Vaclav, 228 Kopriva, Ladislav, 228 International Consultative Group, Korean War, 10, 198, 245 Korondy, Bela, 205 90 “International Friendship Club,” 37 Kostov, Traicho, 215 International Institute for Educa­ Kotykov, General, 183 tion, 190 Kovacs, Istvan, 243 Iron Curtain, 75, 216, 217, 231, Kreikemeyer, Marthe, 146, 147, 226, 251-54 «34» «55 Italy, 153; communists, 162; Ethi­ Kreikemeyer, Willi, 139, 146, 147, opia, 82, 87; fall of, 163; 225, 252, 253-54 fascism, 41; League, 76.. 82; Krivitsky, Walter, 92-93; defec­ Spanish Civil War, 93, 104; tion, 123; F., 92, 95, 108; Spanish Civil War, 93 USC, 167 Japan: China, 56, 59, 76, 98; “Manchurian incident,” 56; na­ val power, 39, 5-5-3 for­ mula, 77 Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Com­ mittee (JARC), 120, 134, 167 Jolis, Bert, 172 Jones, Dorothea, 8 Joy, Charles, 127 Jurr, Werner, 131-32 Justus, Pal, 205 Kadar, Janos, 254 Kägi-Fuchsmann, Regina, 167-68 Kamenev, Lev, 94 Kardelj, 206 Katovis, Steve, 40 Katz, Otto. See Simone, André Katz, Rudolf. See Bauer, Leo Kelley, Robert, 56 Kellogg, Frank, 34 Kerensky, Aleksandr, 53, 55 Khrushchev, Nikita, 160, 237-38; Gomulka, 11; Stalin, 15, 251; Zhukov, 183

La Chaux-de-Fonds, 19 Langhoff, Wolfgang, 161, 226 Latin America, 153 Lautner, John, 214-15 Layton, Lord, 116, 230, 242 League of Nations, 28, 32, 34, 37, 39; enthusiasm, 87; F., 35, 79, 80, 81-83, 85, 87-88, 99-100, 105-7, !i«» 116, 120-21; in­ ternational groups with, 90; Italy, 76, 82; misconceptions about, 79-80; secretariat, 95; setting, 87; Spain, 93, 104-8, 112; Soviet Union, 95; U. S. Senate, 35 Lechmann, Tonja, 151, 194“95 Lenin, Nikolai, 19, 37, 40, 55, 95,

153

Levine, Isaac Don, 92 Libby, Frederick, 34 Lieberman, Sali, 116 Liechtenstein, 159 Lindbergh, Charles, 75 Lippmann, Walter, 39 Litvinov, Maxim, 99, 118

278

RED PAWN

77, 78, 84, 86, 97, *16; break with Moscow, 1*3; F., 91, 102-3; in Soviet Union, 100-3 Matem, Hermann, 218-19 Matthews, J. B., 37, 121-22, 123 Merker, Paul, 136, 137-38, 139, 182, 225 Mierzenski, Stanislaw, 203, 204, 243- Angry Harvest, 243 Mihailovié, Draia, 161 Moffat, J. Pierrepont, 83 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 19, 118; Ribbentrop pact, 207 Morgan, Laura Puffer, 34, 106-7 Moscow: Hotel Lux, 153; Hotel Metropole, 101, 102; Lubyanka prison, 249; Moskva Hotel, 102; purges, 95-96, 97-98, 101, 104, 132, 153 Muenzenberg, Willi, 132 Munich Pact, 116 MacArthur, Douglas, 32, 46 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, Murphy, Raymond, 122 Mussolini, Benito, 55-56, 65, 153; 250 Ethiopia, 76, 98 McCarthy, Joseph, 194 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 39 Namek-Karpeles, 230 Mainstream, 247, 263-64, 266 Malenkov, Georgi, 237-38 National Conference for the Pre­ vention of War, 34 “Manchurian incident,” 56 Nationalist Chinese Government, Margolius, Rudolf, 232 Markin, Valentin, 61 159 Markowska, Mrs., 241 National War Fund, 127 Nazis (nazism), 7, 41, 59-60, 68; Marseilles, 124, 127, 139 Marshall Plan, 181, 198 anti-Semitism, 110-11; com­ Marton, Endre, 235, 254, 257-58 munists, 117, 171; F., 78-79, Marx, Karl, 37, 40, 55 84-85; German-American Marxism, F. and, 64, 68 Bund, 76; Roosevelt, F. D., Maslovsky, 130 84; -Soviet Non-Aggression Massing, Hede, 60-67, 69-70, 71Pact, 118-19, 136-37, 156 75» 78, 79, 80-82, 85-86, 91, Negroes, 37-38 216, 225; break with Moscow, Nevins, Allan, 39 101-3, 123; FBI, 197; in So­ New Deal, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59 New Masses, 60 viet Union, 100-3 Massing, Paul, 59-61, 64, 67-71, New Republic, 53-54

Locarno treaties, 82 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 28 Loebl, Evzen, 227, 230, 232 Lombardo-Toledano, Vincente, 153 Lompar, Miso, 161 London: Naval Disarmament Con­ ference, 39-40, 76-77; U. S. Embassy, 9 London, Arthur, 230, 232 Long, Huey, 39 Lothian, Lord, 82 Lovestone, Jay, 37 Lowrie, Donald, 127, 130-31, 144 “Lucy.” See Roessler, Mr. Ludwig, 60, 70, 86, 91, 95-96; as­ sassination, 96-97, 101, 102, 154; defection, 96, 100-1, 123; F-> 92, 95» 97- 98; Stalin, 96; widow, 97

RED PAWN

279

News Chronicle, Ltd., 116 Nicole, Leon, 140,152 Nicole, Pierre, 140, 152 Nixon, Richard, 193 North Atlantic Alliance, 198 Norway, 163 Nosek, Vaclav, 118 Novy, Vilem, 118, 119, 227, 230 Nye, Senator, 75

ugees, 128, 151; Soviet Un­ ion, 11, 119, 201, 239-40; Tenth Department, 201, 238, 239» U.S., 240— 41; USC, 167; Warsaw, 6, 7, 16 Popular Front, 156 Portugal, 124, 153, 167 Prague, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9; F., 199; Palace Hotel, 1, 3-4, 6, 197,

Oatis, William, 228 O'Casey, Sean, 38 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 134, 141, 142-44, 150, 152, 206, 224; CALPO, 172-73; F., 142, 143, 162-63, 181, 191, 2 ii, 212, 227; objectives, 162-63; post-war govern­ ments, 170-73, 184 ff Ogyenovics, Milan, 205 Oren, Mordecai, 229 Orenstein, Simon, 229

Princeton University, 57

Palffy, Gyorgy, 205, 211 Panin, 183, 224 Paris, 2; liberation of, 162, 165, 173; USC office, 172-77 Partisans for Peace, 132; Congress, 2, 218 Pavlik-Pollitzer, 230 Peoples’ Democracy, individualism in, 3 Perpignan, 106-7, 112, 114 Pestalozzi School, 23 Petkov, Nikola, 200, 210 Philippines, 121 Pieck, Wilhelm, 155-56, 186 Poland, 136, 169, 253, 254; com­ munists, 11-12,140, 171,195; fall of, 12O; Field, Hermann, 6, 117-19, 240-42; purges, 200, 201-2, 203-4, 255-56; Reconstruction Board, 7; ref­

199

Quakers, 127, 146-47 Radek, Karl, 153 Radio Free Europe, 239,5241 Rado, Alexander, 140, 158, 15980, 173, 255; death, 160 Rado, Helene, 140, 174, 177, 255 Rado, Imre, 174 Raedel, Siegfried, 137 Rajk, Laszlo, 108, 191, 200, 251; execution, 213; trial, 200, 205, 206, 207, 219, 227, 228, 231, 233» 243, 256, F. and, 20815, 216, 225 Rakosi, Matyas, 209, 233 Rankovich, Alexander, 206, 212 Rassemblement Universel de la Paix. See RUP

Rau, Heinrich, 137 Ravndal, Christian, 244, 246 Red Army, 171, 198; communist governments, 181; execution of officers, 96; Hungary, 169; intelligence, 92; Poland, 11; purges, 208 Refugees, 124-28; Czech, 117-19; F., 112, 116, 120-21, 124, 127-30, 133- 35* 144- 47» 149 ff, 167ff Reicin, Bedrich, 232 Reiss, Ignatz. See Ludwig

280

RED' PAWN

(see Red Army); Bolshevik Revolution, 28-29, 42, 53, 94; Bratsk slave labor camp, 225; Cominform, 191; Comintern, 42, 68, 94, 13a, i 5a- 55>Ä09> Czar, 53; de-Stalinization, 1516, 257; “doctors’ trial,” 229, 237; East-West confrontation, 198; GPU, 92, 96- 97» 101, 102, 153, 179, Comintern, 154-55; Hi6er attack, 137; Hungarian revolt, 254; intelli­ gence, 140, 158 (see GPU); Intourist, 100, 101; Italy, 153; Kremlin, 94; League, 95; “Manchurian incident,” 56; Moscow purges, 95-96, 97“ Sacco, Nicola, 29 98, 101, 104, 132, 153; -Nazi Sacco-Vanzetti case, 29, 38-37, 56, Non-Aggression Pact, 118-19, 234 Satellites, 198-99, 207-8; anti136-37» 156; post-war, 208; power position, 42; prisoners, Semitism, 229; purges, revoca­ release of, 251 ff; propaganda, tion of, 255 ff 96; purges, 12, 13, 15, 248 Sayre, Francis B., 121, 122 (see Moscow purges); Radio Schildbach, Gertrud, 98-97 Moscow, 94; revolution, 109; Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 36, 172, satellites (see Satellites); Si­ 173 beria, 248, 250; “Spaniards,” Scout movement, 127 109, 208-9; Spanish Civil Silver Shirts, 76 War, 93; Stalingrad, 159; Simone, André, 230, 232 Sino-Soviet dispute, 209 TASS, 52; U.S., 42, 55, 56, Slansky, Rudolf, 117-18, 227; trial, 142, 208; Vorkuta camp, 13, 227, 228-32, 234, 256 222, 248; World War H party Sling, Otto, 232 line, 119 Snowsko-Borowsld, 166, 233 Spain, 153; Civil War, 93, 104-5, Socialism, 53 108-14, 208-9; communists, Sokolin, Vladimir, 94-95 108-9,111, 209; F., 105,107Sommerfeld, Herta. See Tempi, 14» 139; “fifth column,” 98; Herta International Brigade, 107, Sorn, Maria. See Tempi, Herta 111, 112, 209; League, 104Soviet Union: agents, 72-73, 915; Loyalists, 104-5, 107; ref­ 92, 101, 224 (see under ugees, 128; Soviet Union, 109 name); Allies, 158, 159, 160; Sperling, Fritz, 225 anti-Semitism, 229, 237; army Spiegelglass, Mr., 96, 97

Ribbentrop, Joachim, 118 Richard (Soviet agent), 150-51 Rockefeller Foundation, 90 Roessler, Mr., 158-59 Romania, 11,169, 171, 233 Rompe, Robert, 182-83, 195, 224 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 75, 123; F » 76; Soviet Union, 56; Yalta, 163 Rosenberg, Marcel, 94, 109 Ross, Mike, 52 Rote Kapelle (Red Chapel), 15657, 158 RUP, 132 Russia. See Soviet Union

RED PAWN Stalin, Joseph, 10, 12, 15, 40, 41, 68» 153» 256; anti-American line, 192; Bolsheviks, 156; Browder, 191-92; death, 16, 222, 225, 229, 232, 237, 245; F., 14, 105, 130, 257; hatred of, 96-97; he“«» 237-38; Hit­ ler, 207; Humbert-Droz, 153, 154; Hungary, 169; industrial­ ization campaign, 95; intelli­ gence cooperation, 158, 159, 160; Khrushchev, 15; Krivitsky, 93; Nazi Non-Ag­ gression Pact, cost of, 119; postwar efforts, 198; power, 41; principle, 207; purges, 204, 227; Russia First line, 69, 153; Tito, 191,194, 206; Trot­ sky, 95, 207; Yalta, 163; Zhu­ kov, 183 Stalingrad, 161 Standley, Admiral, 78 Stockholm Appeal, 2 Sudetenland, 115 Sullivan, Mark, 53 Svab, Karel, 232 Sverma, Jan, 232 Svermova, Maria, 232 Sweetser, Arthur, 99-100 Swiatlo, Jozef, 201, 204, 238-40, 241, 242, 243; defection, 23839, 241; Field, Hermann, 240 Switzerland, 20, 21, 78, 89, 98; ArbeiterhUfwerke, 167; Army, 159; communists, 94, 140-41, 142, 143, 150, 151, 152, 162, cells, 156; escape route to, 147; espionage, 140, 149 ff; F., 60, 138, 139-41» 147- 48; Free German Committee, 172, 227; neutrality, 23-24; OSS (see Office of Strategic Serv­

281

ices); Schweizerdeutsch, 23; World War I, 23-25 Szalai, Andres, 205, 213 Szçenyi, Dr. Tibor, 152, 171, 205, 206, 212, 235, 251; execution, 213

TASS (Soviet news agency), 52 Tempi, Herta “Jo,” 18-19, 131-34, 136, 137» 138, 140, 166-67, 172- 73, 174, 233; F., 177, 178, 179; “1 U.S., 174,175-76 Tempi, Raoul, 132 Teubner, Hans, 225 Thaelmann, Ernst, 20 Thayer, Judge Webster, 29 This Deception, 60, 69, 73 Thomas, Mr., 219-20 Thompson, Big Bill, 39 Thomeycroft, Kate, 116, 117, 119. See Field, Kate Thomeycroft Tito, 108, 170-71, 206, 208; Amer­ ican military support, 161; partisans, 160-61; Stalin, 191, 194, 206, 207 Todd, Larry, 52-53 Togliatti, Palmiro, 153 Trotsky, Leon, 95, 207 Troyanovsky, 56 Tukhachevsky, General, 96, 109 Ulbricht, Walter, 20,155,172,186, 225 Unitarian Service Committee (USC) 127,133-34» 141» 144» 145, 194- 95» 212; Bulletin, 147-48; communist use of, 173- 80; F., 167-69, 180, 182, 190; Geneva office, 149, 152; Paris office, 166-67, 172-77 Unitarians, 127-28, 130, 137, 144-

45

United Front, 65

282

RED PAWN

United Nations, 80, 227, 255; UNRRA, 230 United Press, 254 United States, 26, 30, 38-39, 4042, 47, 55; aid programs, 126, 129, 166 ff; Bonus March, 4546; Bulgaria, 200; commu­ nism, 37, 42, 43, 55, 56-57. 59, 62, 192, 193, 214, F., 6567; Depression, 39, 40, 43, 45, 54, 265; Hitler supporters, 75-76; isolationism, 34, 75, 98, 100, 193; League, 99100; naval power, 39, 5-5-3 formula, 77; New Deal, 265; Soviet Union, 42, 55, 56, 142, 171, 192; Tito, 170; World War H, 141. See also Wash­ ington, D.C. U. S. Agriculture Department, 52, 56- 57. 56; Ware cell, 56-57 U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, 141, 239, 247, 263 U. S. Navy Department, 32, 78 U. S. State Department, 31-32, 42, 56, 87; F.: opinion of, 47, 66, 81-82, 83, 121, 122, 123, 142, disappearance, 199, 216, 24041, 243, 246; Hitler, 83-84; League, 81, 83; officers, 44; Soviet Union, 42, 56; Wallach, Erika, 249, 250 U. S. Supreme Court, 57 U. S. War Department, 32 University of Geneva, 149 University of Leipzig, 196 University of Prague, 196 USC. See Unitarian Service Com­ mittee Vandenberg, Arthur, 75 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 29 Versailles Treaty, 42

Vieser, Herta, 25, 28. See Field, Herta Vltava Riva-, 6 Vogeler, Robert, 214 Von Pauhis, General, 161 Waldrop, Frank, 40 Walker, James, 39 Wallace, Henry A., 56 Wallach, Erika Glaser (foster daughter), 9, 216-22; appear­ ance, 9; arrest, 249; Bauer, 140, 144, 218-19, 220; char­ acteristics, 222-23, 251; de­ fection, 250; disappearance, 10; imprisonment, 13, 15, 222-23, 225, 248-49, and re­ lease, 13, 16, 249-51. See Glaser, Erika Wallach, Robert, 10, 189, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 249, 250 Walter, Francis, 250 Ware, Harold, 56-57 Washington, D.C.: Bonus March, 45-46, 69; color prejudice, 37-38; "cross-fertilization,” 57; "Little Red House on R Street,” 52; reformers, 59; Roosevelt, F. D., administra­ tion, 51-57 Washington Post, 234 Webb, Beatrice, 89 Webb, Sidney, 89 Weiterer, Maria, 136, 225 West Germany, independence, 187 Whalen, Grover, 41 Wilson, Hugh, 83 Wilson, Woodrow, 24, 28, 34, 42 Wirt, Dr. William, 52-53 World Peace Congresses, 196-97 World War I, outbreak, 23 World War II, 2, 146,158-60, 163, 208, 209, 265; aftermath,

RED PAWN World War H ( confd)

283

Young, Marguerite, 43, 44, 60, 62, 164-65; Normandy invasion, 67 170; occupied countries, com­ Yugoslavia, 108, 136, 140, 160-61, 170-71; Soviet Union, 191, munist resistance organiza­ 206-7; U.S., 213 tions, 121; outbreak, 120; Paris liberation, 165-66; ref­ Zhukov, Marshal, 183 ugees, 124 ff Zilliacus, Konni, 230 Zurich, Switzerland, 21-26, 88, 89; Yale University, 57 Concilium Bibliographicum, Yalta Agreement, 163 22, 26; Pestalozzi School, 23 YMCA, 90, 127, 144

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against the others; assortment of responsibilities, so that each might mark out a different direction for the purge to spread; specific back­ grounds, so that each might blacken a whole area of experience, automatically casting guilt on all who shared it; and importance, so that no head should feel secure when the mightiest were seen to roll Noel Field was named in the indictment in connection with the case against Tibor Szoenyi. He was identified as “one of the leaders of the American espionage service” working under “his chief, Allen Dulles, who was the European head of the United States espionage service called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).” The indict­ ment went on to say that “Field specialized in recruiting spies from among so-called ‘left-wing* elements, and the various émigré espio­ nage groups of different nationalities in Switzerland were subordi­ nate to him” xhe indictment connected Rajk to Dulles through Szoenyi The scope of the trial was made dear in this initial document It was to prove that “Rajk and his accomplices” conspired with the “aim of tearing Hungary out of the camp of the defenders of peace, which is the only guarantee of the freedom and happiness of our people, of chaining our country to the imperialist war front and thus lowering it to be a satellite and toy of the imperialists. They hoped to realize this aim with the armed help of the present leaders of the Yugoslav state, Tito, Rankovich, Kardelj and Djilas.” The defendants were charged with seeking to give the land distributed to peasants back to the great estate owners, the nationalized industries back to the capitalists, and to make Hungary, which once with Austria had ruled all of central Europe induding the Serbs and Croats, into “a Yugoslav colony.” And all the defendants were communists. In effect, their major role was to substitute for Tito, who had de­ fied Stalin and could not be brought directly to book. The first aim of the trial was to justify the excommunication of the Yugoslavs from the Kremlin’s favor and to make their disgrace effective by demon­ strating that any contact with the Yugoslavs, any sympathy, or in­ deed anything less than active hostility by all other communists, was nothing less than treason to the cause and was punishable as such. There was, once, a method of defining “enemy” so that treason

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could be pointed out and judged. It was the declaration of war. Sta­ lin used show trials instead, a more devious and flexible technique which reduced the risks. But Tito's real crime in Moscow's eyes was never listed in the accusations and the propaganda blasts. It was a confusion of priorities, putting what he considered the interests of his own Communist Party and country above the decreed interests of Moscow. The Rajk trial was, then, also required to show that sid­ ing with Moscow against Yugoslavia was not enough. It was also necessary to side with Moscow against one’s own country. This is the one point where there was some element of truth in the charges, though it was not made overtly, because Rajk had been stirred by feelings of Hungarian patriotism and had sought, like Tito in Yugo­ slavia and Gomulka in Poland, to restrain the greedy demands of the Soviet Union in the exploitation of its satellites. The sin was listed in the lexicon as “bourgeois nationalism.” The straightforward meaning was failure to redefine patriotism as Moscow first, last and always. The redefinition was not mere Soviet chauvinism; it too had its inner logic. In Stalin's first serious fight for power, against Leon Trotsky, the issue was whether the concerted aim and effort of com­ munism should be to build the might of the Soviet Union or to create a worldwide system of alliances by upsetting governments elsewhere and replacing them with cobelievers in the Bolshevik faith. Stalin won and never deviated from his principle, even to the point of cooperating with the fiercest enemies of communism abroad against the less violent, the sympathizers and the cobelievers. The story of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of truce between Stalin and Hitler was not only a matter of state affairs; under it foreign communists were sacrificed and even handed to the Gestapo when necessary. After the war, having acquired a whole new empire unschooled in the full requirements of Stalin's principle, it was necessary for Moscow to complete the incorporation of alien peoples into its single system. It is a mistake to speak of Russian colonialism. The Russians have never really run a colony, which implies a permanent distinction between dependencies and the motherland. Rather, in a tradition unchanged by the revolution that replaced the Czars with the So­ viets, the attempted technique was conquest and incorporation that

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would, in the end, erase the distinction in favor of expanding Rus­ sia’s national boundaries. Presumably, the development was meant to be gradual. Tito destroyed the process and provoked a test by proclaiming his “own road to socialism.” That made it necessary to speed up the effort in undigested areas still under direct Moscow control. This was the great issue of the Rajk trial. There were other sub­ sidiary ones that followed in the circumstances of the reasoning. The drawing of lines against the West had internal as well as external implications. Inside the Soviet Union, there was the problem of mil­ lions of returned soldiers who had for the first time seen something of the rest of the world they had been taught to despise and disdain. They had seen it in the horrible march of war, but still they had seen things to contradict what was proclaimed as absolute truth. They had to be disabused of any nascent doubts. The problem was even greater, of course, in the newly acquired countries where so many had personal memories of life outside the Soviet sphere. To begin with, at least the leadership in the satellites needed to be cleared of those who might be subconsciously tainted. So the Rajk trial and others that followed elsewhere were used to demonstrate the unreliability of those who had spent the war in the West, who had come into contact with the foreign and particularly the Ameri­ can devil and might doubt the story about the horns. There was one further theme of wide importance, as virulent but more difficult to explain. That was Spain. In America at the time, preoccupied with its own frightened reaction to the drawing of lines, the irony was scarcely noticed that while Americans who had par­ ticipated in the Spanish Civil War were being hounded as com­ munists, eastern communists who were veterans of Spain were being arrested and killed as capitalist agents. The extraordinarily broad effects of the Spanish Civil War have scarcely been tabulated. They reached far and lasted long, well after the cruelties on the peninsula had been drowned in memory by the vast cruelties of World War II. The Russians who had been in the Spanish war were virtually all automatically liquidated on their return to their home­ land, as the follow-up to the great army purges. The Rajk trial pro­ claimed that Spain was also an ineradicable stigma on satellite com­

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munists. The reason was partly the aftermath of the bitter jumble of violent feuding that went on among the communists in Spain, as well as between them and the anarchists, the various brands of so­ cialists, and the plain patriots and idealists on the Loyalist side. It had left old scores to settle. There had been in the International Brigade in Spain a Hungarian battalion named for Matyas Rakosi, who was then in Moscow working for the Comintern. Rajk was the head of the battalion, but Moscow sent out a political commissar who had once been a trader in Vienna and who was intensely dis­ liked by the other Hungarians. There were angry quarrels, and many names were ticked off to be punished in future for their in­ subordination to Moscow’s delegate. Another part of the reason for persecuting the veterans of Spain was probably the fact that never outside of the strictly controlled machinery of the Comintern had communists from different coun­ tries and different backgrounds been so mingled together. It made possible a comparison of notes that revealed the intricate contra­ dictions of Moscow's line as propounded simultaneously in different places. They were not to be left to infect others with their knowl­ edge. Still, these obvious reasons do not seem adequate to explain the special fury of persecution against the "Spaniards,” as those who had been in the Spanish war came to be called. Possibly it was simply an extension to those newly enclosed in Moscow’s domain of the Russian purge of "Spaniards” just before World War II, a way of demon­ strating that the old purges could not be cheated by accidents of ge­ ography. At any rate, much was made in the trial of Rajk’s service in the Spanish war, and from then on the other Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and German communists who had been in Spain were marked. These vast political motives, involving the fate of continents and cementing the lines for unforeseen future struggles of such colossal impact as the Sino-Soviet dispute, swirled far above the head of Noel Field. They would have existed and wreaked their work if Noel, his wife and his brother had never existed, for none of the Fields was vital at any point in the development. But through ex­ traordinary convolutions of chance, Noel embodied perfectly the

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point of contact of the several strands. His own motives ware ir­ relevant. It was ironic that he was an idealist, that he had truly given much to relieve human suffering, that his deepest sympathies were with the communist cause. But it was beside the point. The point was that a huge machine of violence was to be set in motion and it needed a linchpin. The measurements of Noels life fitted the needs precisely. He was chosen, and used. There was a subtle, terrifying cleverness in the technique of dis­ torting myriad little facts, all true, and by a slight twist here and a sliver there producing a huge lie. Rajk, unlike Petkov, was success­ fully trained to play his appointed part. At one point in his tes­ timony, for example, when he had explained that he had been working with the United States to liquidate the communist regime in Hungary, the president of the court prodded him to a fitting detail. President: "Dont you remember something in connection with what happened in the French camps [internment camps] which is directly related to the things you have just said now?" Rajk: "Yes, I do. Before I got in touch with Kovach [a lieutenant colonel of the American Military Mission in Budapest under rights solemnly agreed to in the Hungarian peace treaty], there was al­ ready an earlier attempt by die Americans to organize me as a mem­ ber of the American intelligence agency. It was in the Vemet internment camp that an American citizen called Field, who was as far as I know the head of the American intelligence agency for cen­ tral and eastern Europe, visited me in the internment camp after the end of the [Spanish] Civil War. He referred to an instruction he had received from Washington that he should speak with me and help me to get out of the camp and return home to Hungary. He even told me that they would like to send me home because as an agent who had not been exposed I would, working in the Party according to the instructions received from the Americans, disorganize and dissolve the Party and possibly even get the Party leadership into my hands. But my contact with the Americans ended after my meet­ ing with Field, for he arrived in the camp when I had already agreed with the Gestapo major that I should return home through Germany as I have already said."

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(Noel did help Rajk get out of Le Vemet but in defiance of the Gestapo, on instructions from Hungarian communists in Switzer­ land.) The next defendant to testify, Gyorgy Palffy, had no connection with Noel, but it was his job to show that through Rajk, recruited by Noel, the Americans had subverted the army. Lazar Brankov, the Yugoslav, had also never met Noel Field, but he knew some of the Yugoslavs and Hungarians for whom Noel had arranged OSS help in Switzerland. It was Brankovs job to show that Yugoslavia was a subdivision of American intelligence and provided spy rings in Hungary for the Americans. Noels success in persuad­ ing the OSS to provide transport for the Hungarian communists in Switzerland at the end of the war, so that they could hurry back to Budapest through Yugoslavia to establish a communist regime be­ fore the United States could intervene, was a telling point in con­ demning them all. Brankov, like the others, confessed to everything and supplied the required details. That made him a traitor in Yugoslav eyes, for though Belgrade was well aware of the niceties of extracting false confessions, it had no tolerance for the victims of the technique. Eventually, years later, Brankov was released. Feeling unable to go home, he made his way to the West and wrote the only book on what it was like to be on the wrong side of the Rajk trial He an­ swered the perplexing puzzle of why the defendants, broken to ab­ ject confession in the period of preparation, failed to rally even a moment’s strength in the glare of public trial that might, in one blinding flash, have saved truth and honor. They did not suppose compliance could save their lives. They were, of course, men broken by months of evil treatment and harangue designed to convince them of their own guilt. Rajks resistance finally broke when his wife and child were arrested and he was told he might bargain confession and his own full compliance to save them from torture, according to Brankov. But there was an additional, brilliant precaution which doused the spark of remaining defiance. The sessions of the trial, Brankov later disclosed, were held four times each. Four times in a row the defendants were brought into the dock of a crowded court­ room, put through the same questions and answers by the lawyers

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and the Judge, stared upon In the same way by foreign-looking ob­ servers busy making notes. The prisoners never knew which one of the four sessions was really public, which three dress rehearsals where an outburst of honesty would be muffled without the slight­ est echo. It was in the testimony of Tibor Szoenyi, whom Noel knew best, that the great mass of circumstantial evidence meant to clinch the case of treason was produced. Much that was true was eminently usable: all the details of contacts with the OSS and money and help passed along by them through Noel. The facts were simply dis­ torted from a pattern of American determination to fight Nazi Ger­ many with communists as allies, to a pattern of American wartime determination to fight and subvert the Soviet Union. The numerous cases where the communists had hoodwinked the Americans and used OSS money for their own ends were, with a flick of the mind, reversed to appear as though the United States had really gotten its money's worth. But there ware also points where, for the purpose of perfecting the closed propaganda circle of villainy, the facts as well as their context were reversed. If he ever got around to reading the text of the Rajk trial when at last he could, it must have astonished Noel to find Szoenyi describing him as an ardent follower of the de­ posed American communist Earl Browder. “Printed copies of Brow­ der s books in French and German were distributed in great number by Lompar (a Yugoslav representative of Tito in Switzerland during the war) and Field, both in Switzerland and France, on behalf of the American secret service,” Szoenyi told the court Noel's photograph, along with that of Allen Dulles and Yugosla­ via's police chief Alexander Rankovich, were shown to the defend­ ants at the trial for identification. Szoenyi recited the sums of money Noel had given him, from OSS and from Unitarian Service Com­ mittee funds, and he identified the USC as a “cover organization of the American secret service.” Links ware drawn to .similar “plots” in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, although few people in those countries were directly named. The other satellites were to produce their own shows. Other witnesses, not in the prisoners’ dock, were called to testify and fill in details. All of them were prisoners themselves, although

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this was not always brought out at the time. Sandor Cseresnyes, who had been press chief in Rajk’s ministry, was one witness used to draw links from Rajk to the British and French secret services, as well as to the Americans and Yugoslavs. Cseresnyes had in fact worked at the American radio and monitoring station established in Bari, Italy, toward the end of the war as a major contact point with eastern Europe. According to American communists who worked there at the time and later turned against the Party, the Hungarian communists had made good use of Bari for their own purposes of preparing for a communist take-over of Hungary after the war. But again it was one of those wartime collaborations between allies later turned enemies that was virtually impossible to measure in terms of who got the best of i t Nothing much, however, was made of the Bari operations in the Rajk trial, perhaps because more detail would in fact have shown that the Americans had been faithful and co­ operative allies. Another witness, Ivan Foldi, gave a rather general report on how he "transmitted spy reports” to the Americans through Noel Field in Geneva in 1946 and 1947, bringing the story into the postwar years. Foldi did know Noel and described some meetings with him. Later, he said, all espionage communications between his Hungarian ring and the Americans went through the Yugoslav diplomatic pouch— at a time, it should be remembered, when the temper of hostility between the United States and Yugoslavia was at the boiling point following the incident in which the Yugoslavs shot down two Ameri­ can planes. The long parade of witnesses gave variations on the same points. In his summation the prosecutor said plainly that the trial was to pass judgment “not only on Rajk and his associates here in the dock, but their foreign masters, t&eir imperialist instigators of Belgrade and Washington as well.” And Noel Field had been the key to a presentation that was credible if only its first upside-down premise was accepted. Rajk, Szoenyi and Szalai were sentenced to death and executed. The others were given long terms of imprisonment. It was, from the officials’ point of view, a satisfactory trial. All had gone smoothly, many details had been produced for an astonished world, the firm basis had been laid for the arrest of masses of people

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who had ever had anything to do with Noel Field, with the Uni­ tarians, with the Spanish Civil War, or with the Yugoslavs. Fair warning had been given to all the population to stay away from the few Westerners allowed to remain in the country. The police proceeded to draw correctly the intended conse­ quences of the confessions and convictions. The wave of persecu­ tions pulsed far beyond the borders of Hungary. It reached even to Cleveland, Ohio. In a cellar there, an American communist of Hun­ garian origin named John Lautner was stripped naked, beaten and interrogated about Noel and Hermann Field. Then he was made to sign a statement that he had received a fair hearing and was ex­ pelled from the party. Lautner had been one of the communists working at Bari and knew Cseresnyes and many others who had spent the war in the West and had used that route back home. After the war he returned to America. The Hungarian section of the American Communist Party had been cooperating with other Hungarian-American organizations to send relief goods to the old coun­ try. But in 1947 the others refused to continue working with the communists, who then were faced with the problem of getting the supplies they collected shipped and delivered. Another man told Lautner, then security officer and head of the New York state com­ mission of the American Party, that he could find a solution: through communist connections of which the headquarters of the Unitarian Service Committee were unaware, it was arranged that the Uni­ tarians would handle the movement of the communists’ relief sup­ plies. According to Lautner, the Party’s collection centers through­ out the country produced large quantities of goods and, in addition, a million dollars of United States Government money for aid to Hungary. He had no idea how they wangled the government money, but they did. After the Rajk trial, Lautner was told to go to Budapest for talks with Party officials there, but he failed to get a passport. The reason was not, he felt sure, that United States officials knew him to be a communist, but that disappearances of the Fields and the arrest of Robert Vogeler, another American in Budapest, had determined the State Department to curtail travel there. It probably saved his life. When Lautner reported to his comrades that

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he could not get abroad, the summons to Cleveland came instead, and the purge was effected there. With the conclusion of the Rajk trial, Noel had no further special role to play in its reverberations. But it made things no easier for him. His usefulness was far from ended. The Rajk trial was only the start of a saies. The next was the trial of Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria where Noel Field’s new Moscow-fabricated reputation was again used as a sup­ posed proof that lifelong communists had turned traitor to the cause. Kostov revoked his confession on his first day in court, but it made no difference. The purge machine was rolling.

CHAPTER XV

The shadowy existence of Noel as a name in the trials was the only sign of what had become of the three missing Fields. Her­ mann s wife Kate and Noels sister Elsie made regular pilgrimages to demand that the State Department do something about finding them. The State Department fired off protest after protest, but never produced so much as an acknowledgment from the communist gov­ ernments that the Fields were anywhere in their part of the world. In the second trial of Alger Hiss, which took place after Noels arrest, Hede Massing had told her story about recruiting Noel for her spy ring in the mid-thirties. It was bewildering, to say the least, to hear Noel Field named at about the same time as a Soviet agent in Amer­ ica and as “an American master spy0 behind die Iron Curtain. It was a time of sensational revelations, of scandalous accusations coming one after another, all so wild that it seemed impossible to choose among them. The general reaction was to believe all or none. Highly respectable, thoroughly patriotic Americans who had known Noel in Washington and Geneva rushed to defend him against the monstrous idea that he had ever been anything but an honest, hard­ working humanitarian. His sister Elsie indignantly denied that he had ever been involved with communists at all. Desperately pursu­ ing help wherever she could find it, Elsie approached Paul Massing, but they quarreled when she insisted to Paul that it was no use try­ ing to trace Noel through the obvious lines of the communist net­ work because that had nothing to do with her brother. And Noel had told so many people that he was not a communist or a sympathizer, he had seemed so sincere and gentle and yet righteously independ­ ent, that those brought up to believe in innocence until guilt is proved felt impelled to share Elsie’s anger. Still, as time passed and nothing more came to light, excitement about the Fields subsided,

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and it became just another case in the files, living only in the hearts of friend and family. Kate Field later wrote for a Boston newspaper what it felt like. “Your husband is off to the continent on a short business trip,” she wrote. “It’s a lovely sunny day and you're all at the airport to see him off. He has given you a final hug and told the children to look after mother.’ Then his plane climbs into the sky and out of sight. And that is the last you see or hear of him. . . . There is silencecomplete, uncanny and frightening. He is trapped behind the Iron Curtain and he might be alive or dead. You are never told. ‘Cloak and dagger stuff you might say. I t couldn't happen to ordinary peo­ ple.' But it happened to me and I'm an ordinary woman . . . the loneliness of those years. When I told people my story they just gasped. It was like something out of a book, not real life. Gradually, I gave up telling people. I was a misfit In a bustling, happy coun­ try at peace, I was caught up in a private war of my own.” She sent a letter to the Kremlin, begging, “Please do something about my husband. My two little boys and I need him desperately.” The answers were always the same, “we are making inquiries.” She sent thousands of letters and telegrams to embassies, Stalin, the Red Cross, governments. Her children, she said, would sometimes break in on her and say, “Now let's go and do something to get Daddy out.” When they ate chicken, the children would break the wishbone to­ gether and, she wrote, “whichever won the wish would turn his eyes on me, full of love, and say comfortingly, ‘You know what I'm wish­ ing, Mummy, but I'm not telling because then it wouldn't come true.' I could get along all right on humdrum, unsentimental days of the year—they were filled with cooking, housework, darning socks, the usual daily round. I began to hate Christmas, birthdays, all those anniversaries when families should be united and content. . . .” Elsie went to Geneva, hoping to pick up some threads that might lead to Noel, Herta and Hermann. She wisely ventured no further east. Panic-stricken, she left her baby with a friend while she plod­ ded to various offices, warning that the child must never be left alone for a moment because there might be a danger of kidnaping. It did seem that any connection with the Field family was a guaran­ tee of disaster.

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One woman in the family took a different attitude. It was Erika. She knew a good deal more of the real story than Elsie, and finally decided to do something about it. Inexplicably, she made her im­ pulsive decision in the summer of 1950, a whole year after the three disappearances. But then she acted rapidly and recklessly. Although she had left the Party, Erika kept in touch with Leo Bauer from time to time. Leo had helped her get a job as interpreter at the Partisans for Peace Congress in Paris which Noel had at­ tended just before his last trip to Prague. But the correspondence was not frequent. She had, Erika said later, lost the address of Leos relatives in West Berlin. Because Erika had been refused admission to the United States, she and her husband Bob had remained in France. One day she telephoned Leo at the communist radio sta­ tion in Berlin where he worked. She did not give her name but made sure he recognized her voice. It was urgent for her to see him im­ mediately, she said, begging him to meet her in Frankfurt Bauer told her that it was impossible for him to make a trip to Western Germany, and to get her off the phone, he promised to write her a letter. When he put down the receiver he was in a cold sweat. Nor had he long to wait for confirmation of his worst fears. The Russian who worked in the radio station of which Leo ostensibly was boss called him five minutes later and demanded to know just what the conversation was all about. Telephone conversations be­ tween even ranking communists and the West did not go unmoni­ tored. Leo put the best light on it that he could, explaining that he had not heard from Erika for a long time and had no idea what she expected from him. In any case, he said, he would not go. He was in trouble, and he knew it. Three days later he was called in again. Hermann Matem, head of the control commission of the East German Party—a kind of Party vigilance office—was there as well as the Russians. Bauer was asked what he had decided. He said he would write to Erika that he would not go to meet her, and that if she insisted on seeing him, she would have to come to Berlin. Bauer’s office was in West Berlin, at the Deutschlandsender, an anomaly later corrected. He supposed that if Erika did come, she would either appear there or send word to him through his West Berlin relatives. He did not mention that to Matern, with whom he

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had worked closely for many years. Nor did Matem insist that he ask Erika to meet him in East Berlin. But he typed the letter, instead of writing Erika by hand as usual, making it utterly impersonal in the hope that coldness of tone would serve as a warning. He gave it to Matem to mail. Matem told Bauer that was correct behavior, proving to the Party that Leo was not seeking to hide anything. Leo was already under Party observation as part of the aftermath of the Rajk trial. There were no restrictions on his movements, but a chauf­ feur was assigned to him, and Bauer knew reports were being made on all of his activities, day and night. He was in trouble. The letter to Erika was sent in June. When the month ended, and then another, and Bauer heard nothing further from Erika, he supposed she had understood the warning and sensibly decided against coming even to West Berlin. On August 23, 1950, Bauer was arrested. The communists, of course, said nothing. But because he worked in the Western sectors, his disappearance was noted and reported in a West Berlin newspaper on August 24. Erika, to her misfortune, missed that report. According to her, Leo’s letter reached the address of a friend she had named in Swit­ zerland when she had gone off to the Mediterranean on holiday. She found it when she returned. It occurred to her that there might be some kind of trap, but she thought Leo would in that case have sent some additional warning. Not long before, Bob Wallach had been to the U.S. consulate in Geneva to get a passport for their new­ born son, whom Erika wanted to take on a trip to visit her mother in England. The consul pricked up his ears and said he was inter­ ested in Erika’s travel plans in view of the disappearance of three members of her foster family. Although she had sworn in peevish temper never to go into an American consulate again because of her troubles trying to get an immigration visa at the Paris embassy, Erika did decide to have a talk with the Americans after receiving Leo’s letter. Without mentioning the letter, she said she had changed her mind about England and was planning a trip to Berlin to see a high com­ munist official who might have some information about the Fields. She asked the American official, a Mr. Thomas, if he could help her with papers.

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That was not his department, he answered, but he urged her per­ sonally not to go because she would be arrested. This is Erika’s recol­ lection of the incident She answered, in what she described as her “quite highbrow” manner, “Who wants to arrest me? I’m not that important, what do you think?” Again he repeated his warning. Erika waved it aside, saying she owed a great deal to the Fields and wanted to do anything she could for them, even if it involved a risk. She went on with an impassioned speech of loyalty and duty, and then another idea occurred to her. Wouldn’t it be helpful to the State Department in trying to track down the Fields if they could find out, even unofficially, exactly where they were? Yes, indeed, said Mr. Thomas. Then, Erika responded triumphantly, why not let her try? The American considered. There was a possibility, he thought, but he had no authority to make the decision. He suggested that Erika wait until he asked Washington for permission, and then the State Department might even be willing to pay her way and send someone with her to look out for her security. Erika turned the proposition over rapidly in her mind. She thought to herself, she said later, “Dont send me as an American agent, because then I am licked from the beginning. If I ever do get caught by the other side, my head will come off at once.” But she only told Mr. Thomas that she would think it over and let him know before doing anything. But she had already decided what to do. That was August 25. She hurried home and convinced her husband that she must go imme­ diately, before the American authorities had a chance to stop her. They took off for Augsburg, where Bob Wallachs brother was sta­ tioned. The next day Erika went on to Frankfurt to catch a plane to Berlin. At the Frankfurt airport she put through a call to Leo’s office and was told that he was out. It was noon when her plane landed at Tempelhof airport in West Berlin. Again she called Leo from the airport, only to be told that the office was about to close as it was Saturday. It was suggested that she call again on Monday. She hurried to the Deutschlandsender building. No one but the doorman was there. Suddenly she was in a frenzy of frustration. She

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took a room in a small hotel and plunked down her things, thinking desperately of where she might find Leo’s home address. At that time, though it is so no longer, it was possible to make telephone calls from West to East Berlin. Erika remembered the Goldhammers) who knew Leo. Bruno Goldhammer was also an important Party functionary. He was not in, but his wife Esther answered Erika’s call. Esther was strangely cool and abrupt to an old friend. She said she did not know where Leo lived and that the only place Erika could find out would be at communist headquarters in East Berlin. No doubt Esther Goldhammer knew of Leo’s arrest. Her own husband was also arrested, and it could have finished off her too if she had told Erika that on the phone. But Erika was apparently too self-absorbed to detect the nervous hostility in the other woman’s voice. She hung up and wrestled with decision. As she retold it later, this was her inner dialogue. “Well, this seemed to be, after all I had tried, the only possibility, the only little chance of finding Leo Bauer, at Party headquarters. Now, of course, that sounds absolutely ridiculous, when I say that I actually considered going to Party headquarters, having been the archenemy. But I was already so desperate, I was so sick at my stomach, I hadn’t eaten since last night, and I couldn’t even put down a piece of bread. I was so sick from fear I was shaking. “And I just saw my bed standing in that room, and I had just one desire, to crawl into that bed, and pull the blanket over me, and go to sleep and never wake up. But I decided, No, I can’t do that. What am I going to tell Bob when I come home—come home and say I just went to sleep. I was too scared to go to the East? I can't do that. So what is going to happenPNothing is going to happen. Why should anything happen to you? Nothing ever happened to you before. You will pull yourself through. You will manage. You go.” Erika changed her clothes, locked her valuables and documents in a cupboard, and took the subway to East Berlin. The things in the hotel room, found later by Allied authorities, were the last trace of her. Erika went straight to the Communist Party Headquarters build­ ing but could not get beyond the doormen once again. They proba­

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bly knew what had happened to Leo Bauer; it was just as he was emerging from the same building that he had been arrested three days before. But they told her only that there was no one inside who could help her. There was a political conference going on, they said, attended by all the top officials, and all the people of Bauer s rank were there. She might inquire at the conference hall. Erika went there on a streetcar. It took some arguing to get past the police lines surrounding the building, but she insisted she must go inside to find Leo Bauer. Eventually she was escorted to a radio office. There she was told that Leo had gone to Thuringia for the weekend to fetch his wife, who had been ill, and that she should try to call him in a day or so at his office. She went out, bought a lemonade, and was preparing to go back to West Berlin, half dejected at the failure of her mission, half overjoyed at what seemed her own im­ munity. “My God, I made it I made it,” she said to herself. T m going to get out, and I'm going to get back to the hotel, and I’m going to write a card to Bob, because we had arranged that I was going to send him a card right away, how long I intended to stay and whether everything was all right. I am going to write him that unfortunately, it didn't work, and I will just have to stay until Monday. I was just figuring that out in my mind,” she said later, “when I heard steps be­ hind me. And then I knew that was the end. I didn’t even turn around. And after a second, somebody just put a hand on my shoul­ der, and said, ‘Criminal Police. Would you please come around the comer with me?'” She was taken back into the building, and then driven to the se­ curity police prison on Schumannstrasse. Altogether, Erika was in two German and two Russian prisons in East Germany. After two and a half years she was tried in secret, sentenced to death, and shipped to Russia for execution. After six months in a death cell in Moscow, during which time Stalin died, the sentence was commuted to fifteen years in a slave labor camp, and she was sent off to the infamous Vorkuta camp above the Arctic Circle. Her ordeal was fairly typical, though no more bearable for that. It was only her extraordinary stamina, her robust and resilient na­

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ture, that brought her through. Three times she was kept sixteen days in the Karzer, a special punishment cell. Small, freezing cold, flooded, it was the dread of prisoners. Erika was stripped when she was put in, and given only a pair of much too large men’s under­ pants to wear. She had to jump up and down for hours to keep her­ self from freezing. Her hands were bound behind her in heavy iron handcuffs and it was hard trying to hold up the wretched pants. The interrogations, as usual, were conducted through most of the night. The prisoners were allowed no sleep in the daytime. Some­ times she was badly beaten. For weeks at a time she was not al­ lowed to wash. Her only clothes were the summer outfit she had been wearing when she was arrested. The interrogations switched between periods of brutality and periods of wheedling kindness, when the questioners would be changed and men with soft voices would offer cigarettes, vodka, gentle words of reminder about children, family, loved ones, and the promise of an easy future if she would “cooperate.” The purpose of the questioning was not merely to extract a confession of spying for the Americans. The interrogators wanted incriminating material on other current or potential prisoners. Erika was asked who sent her to Berlin, details of her spying, of Noels spying, his associates. It went on for months. Her insistence that she could give no answers because she was not a spy only angered the officials, who were sometimes German, sometimes Russian. At one point, because of the turn the questioning was taking, she was shaken with fears that she would be turned over to the Hungarian police for further ques­ tioning. They had earned a reputation for barbarous brutality far exceeding that of other guardians of communist law and order. Similar things were happening to Leo Bauer. He realized even­ tually that Erika had been arrested when questioners brought him up on some small fact or date, saying that Erika’s version conflicted and how did he account for that? Because of his status and background, however, Leo’s questioning was much more political, at times more sophisticated. Like Brankov, the Yugoslav in the Rajk trial, he was asked incriminating questions about many leading communists in all the satellite countries and about Russians serving in those countries, hints of sensational ar­

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rests yet to come. He was questioned at length about Erika, who was represented as a sort of queen of spies, and for months on end about Robert Rompe, the German who had so long been a Soviet agent, and Panin, the Soviet political adviser in East Berlin. Leo supposed that Rompe must have been arrested too,* from the questions about his meetings with Hans Holstein and other Ameri­ cans implying that Rompe had been an American spy. It was Bauer who first brought up the name of Panin during the interrogations, however, mentioning to defend himself that he had always kept the important Russian informed of his own connections with the Ameri­ cans. For the next five weeks the interrogators sought to establish that Panin was also an American spy and Erika’s lover—it was stand­ ard procedure to insist that the two must go together. Later, at his secret trial in a Soviet prison in East Germany, Bauer was severely dressed down by the judge for the pains the questioner had taken. “You told us stories about Panin,” the Russian judge said. “He is one of our greatest patriots. He is ready to shoot you himself for saying he was an American spy.” Bauer could only conclude that he had stumbled on one of the cases of rivalry between Soviet counterintelligence and the Soviet espionage organization, and that Panin’s espionage branch had won. So far as is known, Panin never got into trouble. Nor did Rompe. He sailed untouched through the purges and is now a chief scientific adviser to the East German Government, living handsomely in a twenty-two-room villa. One of the recurrent charges in the investigations was that the wartime cooperation of the German communists with Noel Field, and through him with the OSS, had been kept secret from Moscow. In effect, the Russians were not informed of all the details at the time because the émigrés in Switzerland did not have communica­ tions with Moscow or with the secret Soviet agents operating in Switzerland. But as soon as they could, in 1945, they made full re­ ports to the Russians, including the smallest details of what had gone on all dining the war. The intricacy of the questions showed that the interrogators had indeed been supplied with plentiful dossiers. Nonetheless, the com­ munists’ inability to report everything at the time it happened was

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cited as proof that they were working against Moscow under U.S. orders. Finally, at the end of 1952, Leo and Erika were brought together and tried jointly. They were even shipped to Russia on the same prison train, although they never managed to speak. Leo had a glimpse of Erika on the platform at Brest, just beyond the Polish border, where the prisoners were unloaded and jailed for a few weeks before being sent on to their destination. Bauers was the slave labor camp at Bratsk, in Siberia, where the prisoners built a great dam. He had been sentenced to death and reprieved.

There never was a show trial in East Germany. Nobody quite knows why. Some suppose that not enough of the prisoners broke down and made the proper confessions. Others thought that it kept being postponed because there had always been hidden opposition inside the Party to its leader, Walter Ulbricht, and the dear lines of precisely what the trial was to disclose about treason among the East German communists could never be agreed upon. Quite pos­ sibly the reason was simply that preparations were still going on when Stalin died in March, 1953, and a halt was called to the madness. The lack of a spectacular public trial in no way crimped the purge focused on the Field case, however. There was a long list of arrests and purges, virtually all the Germans Noel had met or sought to help in France and Switzerland. The prominent names included Hans Teubner, Fritz Sperling, Bruno Fuhrmann, Lex Ende, Willi Kreikemeyer, Paul Merker, Bruno Goldhammer, Maria Weiterer. Paul Bertz killed himself. Gerhard Eisler, Hede Massing’s exhusband who had made a spectacular escape from the FBI by smuggling himself aboard the Polish liner Batory in New York, lost his high-ranking job in East Berlin and was in trouble. But he man­ aged to stay out of prison. Lex Ende’s widow Gertrud said later that as soon as Noel was named in the Rajk trial, her husband realized what was coming and told her, “Thank God I had practically nothing to do with Field.” They had met only once, for half an hour in Marseilles, when Franz Dahlem s wife asked Ende to arrange a meeting with the American in the hope of getting her husband out of the internment

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camp. (Noel failed; Dahlem was sent to a concentration camp in Germany.) But that half hour was enough to mark Ende. He too was charged with being an American agent, working for Field. As proof, it was said that he had failed to get false documents and ra­ tion cards for German comrades interned in the French camps. But Ende himself was living illegally in France at the time, and could not have managed it. He was not jailed but was expelled from the Party and forced to go to work in a foundry in a small East German town. He died six months later, brokenhearted, still believing in the Party and insisting that it had simply made a mistake. Gertrud lived on for a time in East Germany as a pariah, shunned by all their former friends and unable to find work. Finally, in 1952, she fled to West Germany. Marthe Kreikemeyer heard nothing of what happened to her hus­ band after his arrest in 1950 until, many years afterward, her per­ sistent questions brought a terse official reply that he had died five days after being arrested. Like Bauer and the others, he had been questioned and observed by the Party for a long period before ar­ rest Kreikemeyer explained everything and pointed out that he had made a full report immediately upon returning to Germany in 1945. When the Party interrogations were ended and he thought he had at last cleared himself, the police came and took him away. Years later, when the Field case was closed, a small announce­ ment in the East German papers disclosed that some 300 commu­ nists jailed and disgraced because of direct involvement with Field had been rehabilitated. For a number of them, it was too late to save anything but a posthumous reputation. The case had been pursued so vigorously, so many human conse­ quences had been drawn from the slogan that Noel Field was “an American master spy,” the story had been built up with so many circumstantial shreds and on so many prostrate bodies that even some of the victims came to believe it Wolfgang Langhoff, the brilliant theatrical director who had headed the Free German Com­ mittee in Switzerland, had a relatively easy time of the purge, presumably because of his international artistic reputation, but nonetheless was penalized. Afterward he said that the trials and re­ ports had convinced him. “I saw how terribly stupid I had been, I

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should have known better. I knew Field was in touch with Dulles, I knew about the OSS connection and so on. I thought the Party was right, I had been unforgivably careless and deserved reprimand.” Leo Bauer felt that the responsible officers among the long pro­ cession of his interrogators did not believe it, but were determined nonetheless to do their duty of proving it. The threads all led back to Moscow, to Stalin himself, and no one can say whether the pock­ marked old tyrant really believed in the gigantic conspiracy he had unraveled step by careful step. Many who know the ways of the Kremlin think he probably did believe the nightmares of his own dreaming. That may well have been so, for the “plots” and “plans” and “rings” that were “unmasked” in the purges did follow the pat­ tern of Stalin’s own devious mode of operation. And there is always a tendency to believe that one’s own mirror image is a real face. The other side of the looking glass, however, seems to have in­ finite depth. There is no limit when you start to probe there; each step leads to another. The next big eruption of the purge was in Czechoslovakia, with the Slansky trial in 1952. Arrests had been going on in Czechoslovakia at a quick pace ever since the Rajk trial; the people involved with Noel were all in jail. But the Slansky trial was to weave a new element into the coarse tissue provided by the Field case, completing as it were the set of purges begun in 1949 at the same time that it opened what was to have been a new and yet more terrible series. By October of 1949, several important Czech communists con­ nected with the Fields in one way or another had been arrested. Among them were Evzen Klinger, chief of the Foreign Office press department, Evzen Loebl, deputy chief of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and Vilem Novy, the editor of Rude Pravo. Late in 1949, when Czech Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis was representing his country at the United Nations in New York, rumors spread from Prague that Party chief Rudolf Slansky was planning to purge Clementis on his return. There was speculation that Clementis would take heed and seek asylum in the United States. But President Klement Gottwald, not a friend of Slansky’s, sent Mrs. Clementis to New York to persuade her husband that he should go home and would be safe. Clementis was arrested shortly

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after his return. No more was heard of him for some two years. An American newspaperman, the Associated Press correspondent Wil­ liam Oatis, tried too hard to find out just what happened to all the officials who were disappearing, and disappeared himself. But Oatis was an indirect victim, who had no links in the Field case. The only reference made to it by his interrogators in the Prague prison was once when they told him, “You know, we’ve had an American in here before, Noel Field.” Presumably, it was a reference to the period when Noel was brought back to Prague for interrogation in connection with the Czech cases, after the Rajk trial. He was, according to reports from other prisoners, also taken to Berlin and Moscow at various times for questioning. In March 1950 the big purge was rolling in Czechoslovakia. Ladislav Kopriva, a member of the Central Committee, made a published speech announcing that the Czech Party, trade unions and na­ tionalized enterprises had been found teeming with Western and Titoist spies and saboteurs. By the beginning of the following year it was disclosed that 169,544 communists, over a tenth of the Czech Party s total membership, had been purged. Information Minister Vaclav Kopecky said ominously, “Let us remember how the whole international network of Anglo-American espionage was unmasked in connection with the well-known Noel Field. . . .” But still the affair proceeded slowly, as slowly as in Poland and East Germany, as preparations for the great Prague trial were made in secret It seems clear that there must have been a number of switches in the planning as it developed. Suddenly Rudolf Slansky himself, the master of the Czech purge, disappeared. On November 20, 1952, he reappeared in the prisoners’ dock of a Prague court­ room, on trial for treason and espionage, alongside his own victim Clementis and twelve other ranking Party officials. A new twist in the technique of assuring full propaganda value without risk of slip-ups was used in the Slansky trial. No Westerners were admitted to the courtroom, but the proceedings were broadcast in extenso from edited recordings. Unlike previous trials, the Slansky trial was an amalgam of con­ flicting strains. The complex reasoning that brought the unusual

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assortment of prisoners into a single dock remains mysterious to this day. Slansky and Clementis were enemies of opposing tendencies. No one in Czechoslovakia had been more demonstrably devoted to Moscow, less inclined to Tito-type concerns of national interest than Slansky. Clementis, on the other hand, was a Slovak yearning for ethnic self-assertion. He had shown nationalist feelings. In addition to everything else, the trial reflected what must have been bitter behind-scenes feuding in the top regions of the Czechoslovak Party, and Moscow’s verdict appears to have been, a plague on both your houses. The important new element in the Slansky trial was anti-Semi­ tism. It was stressed heavily. The foundations were laid for the “doctors’ trial*’ foreshadowed in Moscow at the beginning of 1953, a plan that gave every evidence of being prepared to trigger a vast campaign of persecution against the 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union and those in the satellite countries who had somehow man­ aged to survive the Nazis. Stalin died before the “doctors’ trial” could be held, and the whole plan was called off. The frame on which the anti-Semitic campaign was to be built appeared, how­ ever, in stark outline in the Slansky trial. It was set down pady at the very start of the indictment, which accused the fourteen de­ fendants as “Trotskyist-Titoist-Zionist-Bourgeois-Nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czech people and of socialism.” Ten of the fourteen defendants, including Slansky, were Jewish. Two Israelis, Mordecai Oren and Simon Orenstein, had been ar­ rested in Czechoslovakia and were made either to testify or to pro­ vide depositions to show that “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” was the servant of “American capitalist imperialism” and one of its major arms for subverting and then conquering the world. The prosecutor, in his summation, ominously concluded that the trial “warns not only our own Communist Party, but also the other Communist and workers’ Parties against this dangerous agency (Zionism) of the U.S. imperialists.” There was even the germ of the “doctors’ plot” idea in the proceedings. Slansky testified that he had arranged for a doctor named Haskovec to care for President Gottwald with the aim of “shortening our beloved President’s life” and killing him when the

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plot matured to turn Czechoslovakia into a "fascist-imperialist capi­ talist” country. Slansky, who had spent most of the war in Russia and returned from the East with partisan brigades, knew few if any Westerners. The obstacle was easily turned. He headed what was alternatively called "the anti-state center” or “the Slansky gang,” many of whose members did have extensive Western contacts. A tremendous hodgepodge of “agents” was named, including many Western news­ papermen, diplomats, politicians, businessmen and representatives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which had done much to help Czechoslovakia after the war. But the main links in the case were Hermann and Noel Field and Konni Zilliacus, a left-wing British socialist MP who at home had been consid­ ered unwarrantably warm in his sympathy for Eastern European communists. Few details were given about the alleged espionage and recruit­ ment of spies performed by Noel and Hermann, but their names were repeated again and again in connection with the defendants or witnesses they had known and befriended—Vilem Novy, Arthur London, André Simone, Evzen Loebl, Ludvik Frejka, and others identified as Goldmann, Namek-Karpeles, Holdos and Pavlik-Pollitzer. The Czechoslovak Trust Fund, set up under Lord Layton to make some amends for Munich by helping Czechs flee the Gestapo after their country fell to the Nazis, was mentioned many times as a tool of British intelligence. Hermann, who had worked for it in Cracow, was the agent who recruited spies for the fund, the prose­ cutor said with “confirmation” from the defendants. “Meanwhile, a similar organization was set up in Switzerland by Noel Field, the closest collaborator of agent Allen Dulles, who was in charge of American espionage in Central and Eastern Europe.” With the links to Zilliacus, this was supposed to establish the existence of a vast spy ring headed by Rudolf Slansky to sabotage and overthrow the com­ munist regime in Czechoslovakia. Hardly any conceivable aspect of life in the country was omitted from the trial. The transcript of the broadcast provides a bewildering tangle of accusations in so many directions that it can scarcely be summarized. The trial’s role as one of a planned series was made

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dear by repeated references to Rajk, to the "imperialist agent Gomulka” who had by then been arrested in Poland, and to iinlw between the Czech defendants and officials in the other satellites. It was performed to fulfill all the purposes of the Rajk trial, includ­ ing proclamations of Moscow’s righteous dominance, attacks on Tito, disruption of contacts between Czechs and Westerners, condedination of the Spanish war veterans, and then several more. The conspirators were said to have penetrated and sabotaged the state direction of agriculture, trade, finance, diplomacy, the army, the secret police, and the bureaucracy in general. Everything that went wrong in the country when the communists took over in 1948 and made a brutal, slapdash effort to catch up with the other satellites in communization was laid at the defendants’ door—a welcome ex­ planation, for a great deal had gone visibly wrong. The prosecutor made the point, stating, "It has become clear that many obstacles and difficulties which one thought were just ac­ companying the development toward socialism were, in fact, the outcome of the deliberate disrupting activities of the accused.” They purposely, on British and American orders conveyed by the Fields and others, had made bad economic plans, ruined agricul­ ture, diverted trade and turned profits into losses, it was claimed. Another dividend of the trial was to discredit the Czechs abroad and to make the dead President Bend* a "fascist-imperialist agent.” Bend» had been loved. Even his memory could not be allowed to live after him. It was ironic, because it was the determined, insistent effort by BeneS to compromise with Moscow and the communists at home that, in the end, enabled them to succeed in taking over the whole state with the coup of February 1948. Had he been more alert, more resistant, more prepared to explain to his people what was happening and call on them to protest, there is at least a good chance that Czechoslovakia would have remained on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The defendants in the Slansky trial were, of course, but an im­ perceptible fraction of those caught in the purge. After Slansky, they were Bedrich Geminder, a ranking member of the Party’s powerful secretariat; Ludvik Frejka, in charge of economic affairs in Gottwald’s office; Joseph Frank, deputy of Slansky; Vladimir Clementis,

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Foreign Minister; Bedrich Reicin, Deputy Defense Minister; Karel Svab, Deputy Minister of National Security; Arthur London, a Dep­ uty Foreign Minister; Vavro Hajdu, another Deputy Foreign Minis­ ter; Evzen Loebl, Deputy Foreign Trade Minister; Rudolf Margolius, another Deputy Foreign Trade Minister; Otto Fischl, Deputy Finance Minister; Otto Sling, another Deputy Finance Minister and secretary of the Moravian branch of the Party; and André Simone (né Otto Katz), once editor of the Party's main newspaper Rude Pravo.

They all made the requisite confessions. The only moment when the trial seemed near to getting out of hand was during the testi­ mony of Maria Svennova, widow of a partisan leader killed during the war who had been proclaimed a martyr. Slansky was accused of murdering Jan Svennova, and his widow Maria had been arrested as a member of Slansky s ring of conspirators. Her “confession” brought her almost to a tearful breakdown in the dock. Arguments about the true significance of the machinations be­ hind the Slansky trial still persist. Slansky and ten of his codefend­ ants were executed. But later, when the pendulum had reversed and the time come for release of the living and rehabilitation of the dead, the Czech Party leadership still stubbornly refused to take back its vilification of the ruthless Slansky. Year after year, the re­ verberations of the case have brought renewed quarrels among Czech communists. They cannot lay his ghost. Finally, under restive pressure from the Party ranks, Slansky*s conviction was posthu­ mously reversed in August 1963, but still he was only partially re­ habilitated. After the Slansky trial, and even after die death of Stalin, the list of victims in the Field case continued to grow. The scene of sensa­ tional purges shifted again to East Germany, where along with many others unnamed, Franz Dahlem and Anton Ackermann fell. The official Party announcement connected them with Noel Field, al­ though it did not actually take the next step of naming them as American agents in the colossal conspiracy the communists pro­ fessed to believe that Washington had succeeded in mounting throughout eastern Europe. That step would doubtless have come at the trial whose preparations were nearing completion. The mo­

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mentum of the Field case had been so great that it continued to roll for a time after the brakes were applied. But the East German trial was never held. Although there were no great trials, friends of Noel were also ar­ rested in Bulgaria and Romania. In France, Herta Tempi and her husband Snowsko-Borowsld were expelled from the Communist Party, for her mentors did not have police powers there. There is no way of knowing exactly how many people wound up as victims of the Field case in the six countries of eastern Europe where Soviet writ held firm. Altogether hundreds of thousands were arrested in the years of purge. Many of them had nothing at all to do with the Fields, even indirectly. Many would doubtless have fallen if the Fields had never existed, but the Field name was used as an extra tick to strengthen an accusation already determined. Some might or might not have fallen victim, and the Field case may have tipped the balance. In Rajks case, for example, there had been a long quar­ rel over the eventual succession to Matyas Rakosi at the head of the Hungarian Party. Rajk was one of the candidates. The fight had to end in someone’s defeat, but there are indications that the scales were finally tipped only shortly before Rajks arrest, when Noels ar­ rest and use in justifying purges was also planned. Had the victim not been Rajk, it would probably have been his rival Emo Gero, who did in fact succeed Rakosi a few months before the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Had Rajk rather than Gero been the leader of Hungary when the outbreak started, would history have been radi­ cally different? Possibly. And some of the victims of the Field case were personal friends, people in unimportant positions who might have been passed over in the purges or ignored but for this ill-starred acquaintanceship. The immensity of the fatal net and the numbers of people it trapped began to show only later when prisons were being emptied and notices of rehabilitation were appearing as almost daily items in communist papers. Not everyone was rehabilitated though; not all of those who did survive ever surfaced again as Field victims. So there can be no substantial estimate of the total number involved. What can be said is that the Fields were the instrument used to ruin

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probably as many people as they had managed to succor in die years of their arduous relief work. Shortly after the Slansky trial, the Washington Post commented editorially on the perversity of their hapless contribution. “Only the Russians/’ it said, “are ingenious enough to use an American spy within the United States Government and then turn around and use him as a horrible example that the United States is itself spying and engaged in 'wrecking* operations against communist satellite governments. There is litde reason to doubt that the Russians long since shot Field and tossed him among the refuse as no longer serv­ iceable to the world communist conspiracy. But his ghost comes in handy to haunt the solemn judicial charades in Iron Curtain court­ rooms.** Though no one in the West could know, Noel and Herta and Hermann were not ghosts. They were never brought into court nor was anything ever said about their whereabouts. But they were in fact still languishing in their cells. Noel was in solitary confinement for the whole of his imprisonment, with no human communication. He devised a trick to remember the days, but lost track of the years as they stretched out bleakly in the darkness. He knew nothing of what was happening in the world outside. To nourish his mind against the emptiness that kills sanity, he had a few books from the prison library—Shakespeare and the tomes of communism, his pen­ chant for philosophical musing on the grand, gloomy scale devel­ oped during his childhood studies in German, and his memories. He searched his memories carefully for dues to the incomprehensible thing that had happened to him. They brought him no enlighten­ ment, but they gave consolation. Noel wrote later of his thoughts at that time: “It is August 22, that I know. A strange emotion seizes me. Let me see, yes, this is the third summer. August 512, 1952. 1 have it: It was at this time twenty-five years ago that my wife and I sat beside the radio in our tiny Washington apartment and with waning hope followed the last-minute efforts to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. From that midnight of two martyrs in a Boston jail there is a chain of events leading in an almost straight line to the present mid­ night in a Budapest jail. No, I am no Sacco, no Vanzetti. And I am

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no prisoner of the enemies of that freedom for which they fought and died. But in my own smaller, much smaller way I have re­ mained true to the beliefs that began to take shape, oh, how vague and how slowly, during the ghastly wake, when hope changed to despair. It took a decade for those views to ripen into conviction and further years for them to result in consistent action. Many an inner conflict had to be fought out and overcome before the pacifist ideal­ ist—a typical middle-class intellectual and son of a middle-class in­ tellectual—could become the militant communist of later years and of the present. “Yes, of the present, too, though I am called an im­ perialist spy and treated as a traitor. For whatever my accusers may believe, I know I am innocent, and I know that, perhaps long after my death, the truth will be established and my name cleared. Cleared by the very society that now keeps me in solitary confine­ ment My accusers essentially have the same convictions that I do, they hate the same things and the same people I hate—the con­ scious enemies of socialism, the fascists, the renegades, the traitors. Given their belief in my guilt, I cannot blame them, I cannot but approve their detestation. That is the real horror of it all. Were I a prisoner of fascism—and there were times when I faced this prospect at dose range—I would know how to stand up to the enemy, I would know what to say and, especially, what not to say; my hatred would give me strength, as it gave strength to so many thousands. . . .” During the interrogations he had done all he could to prove his innocence, his devotion to the cause which was punishing him. En­ tire Marton, an intrepid and indefatigable Hungarian newspaper­ man who worked for the Associated Press, learned later from others in the prison how he had conducted himself, and spoke of it during testimony at Senate Committee hearings on internal security in May 1957. “Field first refused to cooperate,” Marton said, “but he was broken in no time in the usual way, and later, when he learned in prison, some months later, that one man [Tibor Szoenyi] . . . was sentenced to death on the grounds of his testimony, he wanted to withdraw his testimony but it was too late. The man was hanged.” In the spring of 1954, when the Hungarian Government was se­ cretly beginning the rehabilitation of purged communists, Noel s in­ terrogation was renewed. He “testified and confessed that he is a

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good communist,” Marton said, recounting a somewhat garbled ver­ sion of Noels services to the German communist underground in Switzerland during the war which he had been told that Noel cited to prove his faith. Noel repeated to himself, and to his interrogators when he had the chance, the long list of humanitarian missions he had undertaken in a barbaric world, and he spoke proudly of the “dozens of fellow communists” whose lives he had saved. “And now,” he reflected and later wrote, “how bitter the knowl­ edge that this friendship is costing some of them their freedom, per­ haps even their lives, as the supposed agents of a super-spy—a ghastly conclusion, supported by reasoning and by evidence I know to be spurious! There is much that I cannot understand in this late summer night of 1952. 1 have given up trying. Time has accustomed me to my present state. But there are moments, especially between waking and sleeping, when despair seizes me by the throat Why has it come to this? Will time ever give me the answer? There is something wrong, dreadfully wrong, somewhere. Did I take the false turn twenty-five years ago? Did I, perchance, enter a fool’s paradise? Before my mental eye pass the wonderful men and women—comrades most of them—who were my friends and with whom I worked for a better world. No, they cannot have been wrong. Steadfast clear-sighted, they were my guides and mentors. I revere them still. And the Marxist works, the Soviet novels I am privileged to read in my cell—are they not even more convincing, more inspiring than when I read them as a free man? . . . “Oh, my dear wife, my closest associate, could I but talk to you! How often in the past did you help me to see things straight! Here in this primitive cell, I ‘celebrated’ our silver wedding, more than two years ago. Where were you then? Where are you now? Do you still live? Have you remained true to me and to our cause? Shall we ever meet again? It must be almost morning. Soon the door will be opened to admit the broom, symbol of a new day.”

CHAPTER XVI

There was a new day coming for Noel. In the darkness of his prison, he could know nothing of the dawn. Though heavy clouds obscured the first feeble rays from the rest of the world for several years more, the beginning was that day in March 1953 when Stalin moaned on the floor of the Kremlin office, frothed at the mouth, and at last shut his eyes forever. Stalin’s heirs did not begin immediately to chip at the vast construction of terror and misery he bequeathed. It would have brought the whole Soviet structure crashing in a chaos of ha­ tred, immolating first those whose ambition it was to take over the powerful machine. To preserve themselves, it was necessary to preserve the machinery, the Party, the state. But, and many felt it as acutely as they felt the chill of fear on their own skins, to preserve themselves it was also necessary to peel off layer by layer that gla­ cial, suffocating weight And camp prisoners began to revolt. The first halt in Stalinism was cancellation of die "doctors’ trial” and the release of the imprisoned physicians who were to have con­ fessed to a huge Trotskyist-Zionist-Bourgeois Nationalist conspiracy to overthrow the state by insidiously mistreating and slowly killing the leaders of the Kremlin. With the cancellation of the trial came the cancellation of the impending campaign of actively rabid antiSemitism. But that merely stopped the advance of the juggernaut; it did not reverse it. The heirs of Stalin had an issue to resolve that was for them an immediate question of life or death: the succession. They pro­ claimed a triumvirate—Nikita Khrushchev, Georgi Malenkov, Lav­ renti Beria—and said that from now on, there would be no single ruler but a team working trustfully together. They might as well have said they would stoke die fires of hell with the snows of Si­ beria. Mistrust, intrigue and fear had for so long been the sole lubri-

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cant of the power machine that there were no depots of confidence anywhere from which to draw even the small supply needed by three men at the top. The evidence so far available, though com­ ing of course from his survivors, is that Beria made the first move to take over on the strength of his power as boss of the police appa­ ratus. The others combined against him. Beria fell and was killed immediately. Some seven months after his death it was announced that he had been tried, convicted and executed as though that had just happened. The delay doubtless seemed necessary to those who remained, as a precaution against the emergence of another rival in­ heriting the police power intact When this had been done, and Beria had been enthroned in the seat of chief devil, it became possible to broaden insurance against a police coup by a gradual and cautious denunciation of the police organization itself. That served several political purposes: in addi­ tion to giving the leadership more protection against each other, it could attract only support from the great mass of Party members and even the population at large, though their views remained without voice or hearing. The evil was isolated as the work of Beria alone. The terror was given a new, particularized name—Beriovschisna—so that its taint might be concentrated in one set of buried hands. By the rules of the game, the satraps of the dead Beria were exposed to the dangers of revenge. One of them, uneasy about a future whose shifting outlines could at that time be seen only from inside the shrouded core of power, suddenly decided not to face the looming risks. It was Colonel Jozef Swiatlo, of Dqpartment Ten of the Polish secret police, the man who had arrested Wladyslaw Gomulka, Hermann Field and many others. On December 5, 1953, he was visiting East Berlin on police affairs with his superior Colonel Anatol Feygin (now in a Polish prison for his crimes as a servant of the regime). Carefully losing his comrade in a department store crowd, Swiatlo ducked out into West Berlin and presented himself to the Allied authorities as a de­ fector. He was a man with the ineradicable spot of blood on his hands; he personally had been a torture master. His nickname was “Butcher.” When the United States agreed to give him asylum,

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it was in the knowledge that he would have to be protected for the rest of his life because the number of his victims and relatives of victims sworn to exact retribution was so great. But Swiatlo was warmly welcome, for he brought with him the most priceless, most powerful, most zealously guarded treasure of the East—information. Turned against his former comrades, Swiatlos knowledge was a weapon strong enough to shake the founda­ tions of the regime. For many months he was interrogated secredy. But he could contribute more than the enlargement of dossiers at the Central Intelligence Agency, important as that was. His greatest value lay in his ability to spread his sinister secrets in full public view, above all in the view of the Polish public. On September 28, 1954, about nine months after his defection in Berlin, Swiado was unveiled in Washington. He was then thirtynine years old, a bulky, tough-faced man with thick-rimmed glasses and heavy hands. A few hours after announcing his defection, the government presented him to the public at a press conference where he explained his change of sides as disillusionment with commu­ nism and a desire to join its opponents. “As the deputy director of this department [in the Polish po­ lice],” he said, “I was in a position to learn all the facts concerning the falsification of history, the falsification of biographical back­ ground of the leaders, and the innermost secrets concerning the political and private lives of top officials. In my position I also had the opportunity to learn how political trials were staged to serve the political interests of the Polish Party. . . . Knowing the facts behind these trials, I can state categorically that these trials were organized under Soviet supervision and for the interests of Soviet imperialism. . . . ” Swiatlo did indeed know whereof he spoke. The Washington an­ nouncement threw the Warsaw government into a frenzied panic. The regime had of course realized that Swiatlo had flown, but it had not known where he had gone to hide, how much he was tell­ ing, or how it might be used against the Polish rulers. It was used in the most effective possible way, by turning him over to Radio Free Europe, a brilliant tactical decision that brought unforeseeable stra­ tegic gains. In a long series of broadcasts beamed to Poland, Swiatlo

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broke open the secrets of the regime night after night The big secrets were damaging, but not explosive since few in Poland really doubted that Russians were running and exploiting the coun­ try, though none dared say so. It was the little secrets that cracked the basis of the regime and eventually almost destroyed it These little secrets were detailed revelations of the police ap­ paratus. Informers were named by the scores. Prisoners who had “mysteriously disappeared” were identified, their fate explicitly dis­ closed. At first, authority sought to defend itself with denials, but the flood of information was so great that it breached the dam of fear. Some things Swiado said were known to be true. People checked as best they could on others, found it all correct, and be­ lieved. When at last the police spy in an office, in a section of a fac­ tory, an apartment bloc, had been pointed out, the rest of the people knew exactly whom to shun and whom to trust Some of the in­ formers came to their colleagues and confessed, even before Swiado named them, saying they had been obliged to work for the police because of threats and blackmail. Each identification of an informer, each confession, eroded the power of the police to frighten others and keep them in line. It was police bully Jozef Swiado who, with the power of words instead of his usual instruments, ratded the chains so hard they began to break. Swiado had another revelation to make that interested Ameri­ cans as much as Poles. Hermann Field, he disclosed, was in a base­ ment cell at the police estate in Miedzyszyn, just outside Warsaw. Swiado had taken part in some of the interrogation—he had per­ sonally arrested Field—and he knew that all the charges were trumped up. He also revealed that shordy after the arrest of Her­ mann in Warsaw and of Herta in Prague, he had gone to Budapest where he had interrogated both Noel and Herta Field in the A.V.O. jail. He did not know what had become of Noel and Herta. They were probably dead, he said. The State Department fired off notes to Poland and to Hungary. Each note summarized the record revealed by Swiado of the Fields’ arrest and imprisonment. Each note concluded with the words, “the United States government requests immediate consular access to

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these American citizens and the conclusion of arrangements for their repatriation at the earliest possible date.” The answers did not come immediately. But to his amazement, at the end of September, Hermann was taken from his cell in Miedzyszyn to the Security Ministry in Warsaw and then to the suburban village of Otwock. There he was placed in a luxurious new villa and told he could roam it at will and take walks in the spacious gardens. Stacks of newspapers and a radio were provided for his use. He was not free. Special locks were placed on the doors, the windows were barred, and two guards followed his every move. But the change was so overwhelming that he could not digest it. He did not leave the room assigned to him. Instead he sat there, as he had sat in his cell all those years, and wondered what was hap­ pening to him. After about a week, a woman named Markowska came to see him. Her questions were startlingly different from those he had come to know so well. She was, she said, assigned by the Party to a com­ mission that was investigating abuses of the law. She wanted to know what he would like the Polish Government to do so as to close his case, and asked him to identify from photographs the jailers who had beaten and mistreated him. Hermann identified Swiatlo and one other, asked for $60,000 compensation, reimbursement of all costs for a cure and convalescence, publication of a communiqué in the East and in the West that he was innocent and had been unjustly imprisoned, and, of course, release. Markowska came to visit several times. Between visits, Hermann was invited by the guards to listen to the radio with them. It was Swiatlo speaking on Radio Free Europe. “The man who tormented you,” they jeered. That was the first he learned of Swiatlo’s defection and what had caused the Sudden change in his own treatment At last, on October 25, 1954, Markowska told him that the govern­ ment would pay him $50,000 in addition to the costs of medical treatment and convalescence and that he was free. The locks were taken off the doors, the bars off the windows, the guards out of the house. But the Poles insisted that if they were to pay for his cure, it must be done in Poland. While the argument continued, he traveled

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each day to Warsaw to the clinic on Emilia Plater Street, across from the residence of the American Ambassador, for thorough medi­ cal examinations. On October 25, the day of Hermann s official re­ lease, the Polish radio announced that he was freed after investi­ gations showed that the “American agent Swiatlo” had concocted the case to embarrass the communist regime. The whole case, the radio said, had been a Swiatlo fabrication. But experience had long since dulled the impact of that kind of boomerang charge. Shifting the label of “American agent” from prisoner to ex-jailer was a minor diversion that impressed no one and changed nothing. United States Ambassador Joseph B. Flack was taken to see Hermann that day in the Otwock villa, surrounded by a pine woods. Flack brought him some food from the diplomatic stores and some American news­ papers. It was, Hermann said later, a joyous day. He stayed on in Poland for another three weeks, seeing Ambassa­ dor Flack almost every day and making the rounds of Warsaw to find out what had become of his friends. Each night he spoke to his wife Kate on the telephone. On November 6, after one of her phone conversations, Kate issued a statement in London on his be­ half emphasizing at once his gratitude to the United States for getting him released and his concern “lest injustice done to me" heighten East-West tensions. “On my emergence from these five years in the vacuum of incarceration, I find myself lacking essential data as to the circumstances leading up to and surrounding this un­ fortunate incident,” the statement said. “Re-entry into the stream of life after this sort of interlude is a slow, difficult process in any case and the more so when it happens in a cold war atmosphere supercharged with such excitement and sensation." Finally, on November 19, 1954, Hermann went back to the War­ saw airport where he had failed to catch his plane in 1949 and flew to Zurich. With careful help from the American consular authorities and her friend Lord Layton, Kate and her sister-in-law Elsie Field Doob managed to pick Hermann up from the Zurich hardstand before the normal passage through immigration and customs, and thus to elude the press. One reporter, Michael Goldsmith of the Associated Press, noticed the black consular car driving out from the back entrance of the airport He took after it, hoping to find

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where Hermann was going. There was a high-speed chase through Zurich which brought indignant complaints in the local papers next day about American tourists playing Hollywood cops and rob­ bers through the otherwise well-regulated streets of the Swiss city. The local papers had not realized who was involved. The consul's driver managed to shake off the newspaperman and deposit the Fields in secret at a small hotel. Later they went to a resort near St. Moritz, remaining incognito thanks to an arrangement with the Swiss Government which excused them from the normal require­ ment of police registration. Their two sons were spirited out of Eng­ land to join them for the Christmas holidays. Then Hermann and Kate returned to London, and eventually to the United States. Hermann went back to his architecture, with time out for attention to his new side career as novelist in collaboration with his cellmate MierzenskL Thanks to Hermanns demands on the Polish Government when it was settling up with him, Mierzenski was released by Christmas of 1954. The two got back the stacks of notebooks they had filled with stories, and later had a reunion in America to prepare the publication of their first book, Angry Harvest.

The book was a story about Polish peasants under the Nazi oc­ cupation, drawn from Mierzensld's experiences. Hermann preferred never to go back in detail over his own harrowing time. He has never seen Noel and Herta again. The Hungarians reacted more slowly to the Swiatlo disclosures than did the Poles. On November 7, 1954, however, the State De­ partment disclosed that the Budapest government had promised some word about Noel and Herta in the near future. Already on October 14 Istvan Kovacs, who headed the local Budapest com­ munist organization, had acßnitted that “many comrades” falsely imprisoned were being released and rehabilitated. There was no mention of the Fields. Kovacs simply said “the leaders of the former State Security office arrested many comrades, using criminally improper methods, and they were convicted by the court on the grounds of invented and forged charges and testimony. This was a great mistake. Moreover, it was a sin toward our party and the com­ rades who suffered imprisonment innocently.” Since the Rajk trial, based on the Field case, was the most spec-

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tacular conviction involved, it followed that Herta and Noel if they still lived should be appearing soon. Finally, on November 17, the Budapest radio announced that in a review of their case “it was not possible to justify the charge made in the past” and that therefore they had been freed. After the announcement the Hungarian Gov­ ernment informed U. S. Ambassador Christian Ravndal, who was taken to see the Fields next day. They asked him not to reveal where they were staying, to avoid a barrage of questions from the press, and the ambassador complied. The day of Noel's release of which he wrote later was perhaps the greatest emotional trial of his ordeal. As usual, he was told nothing and had his first hints that something extraordinary was in store through inexplicable minor variations of the inflexible prison routine. It was the middle of the week, but the barber who always came on Saturdays arrived in the morning to shave him. Then he was allowed an out-of-turn shower, and fresh underwear, and given a new suit and shoes. He was taken from his cell into an unfamiliar room» where there were a decent bed, a table and chair, and a chess set— almost forgotten luxuries. The meaning of this suddenly improved treatment was not explained. Noel could not help hoping and yet dared not hope, for he had learned the prisoners only defense against despair, which is stoic pessimism. 1 The most startling revelation of his new surroundings was the chance to look at himself. There was a mirror, the first in five years to show him his own face. It was a frightening shock. He saw white hair, a strange pallor not quite of the living, and eyes with a look too terrible to fathom. He felt obliged to avoid his own eyes. “They frighten me beyond words," was his description. Later Noel was taken into an office to hear the pronouncement of his release. That too bounced off the protective shell of the inmate at first, but gradually the words penetrated belief. His first response was to ask for his wife. When he was promised that she too would be brought in shortly, the tremendous meaning of the strange day broke full upon him and he burst into tears. Herta too had been given new clothes, and her hair had turned to white. Otherwise, Noel felt when he saw her, she had not changed. His account of their first meeting stresses the way their

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minds ran parallel during the five fearful years when neither knew if the other still lived. “*Do they know we are innocent?* she whispers in my arms. ‘Yes/ I say, and then ask, ‘Have you remained true?* *Yes,* she an­ swers, never for one moment have I doubted.* ‘Nor 1/ And now, as the sobs well up, I know this is the most memorable moment in my life, bigger than happiness, bigg«: than sorrow. Through years of separation, we have remained one. . . .** The prison officials offered them food, and liquor, in celebration. But their thoughts leaped to the future. It was not easy to speak at first, it had been so long since either one had known human com­ pany. Still, the question had to be faced. They had freedom to go where they chose; what should they choose? “Again our thoughts are one,* Noel wrote. “Our first spontaneous reaction is: Let us stay herel At least for the time being, till we get our bearings, till we learn what has gone on in the world these past five years. We are told we can go where we wish, or remain in Hun­ gary, if we so desire; we should not make any hasty decisions but take our time.” For the first time the prison officials were willing to answer questions, as well as ask them. Noel and Herta wept when they heard of Stalin's death, all unaware still that their own release was only one small part of the great gathering move to undo the divin­ ity of the vanished communist demigod. TTiey heard of communism’s triumph in China, of the Korean War, of Eisenhowers presidency. Their questions about friends brought new realization of the scope of the purges, but not all of those questions were answered. And finally, when it was dark, the questions were dropped and they went out together to ride through Budapest. It was their first glimpse of the world and it seemed unreal. H ie reality of prison walls was still too strong to free their senses. The car took them across the Danube and up into the Buda hills above the city. There they were shown into a newly decorated house and told it was theirs. Someone pushed the key into Noel’s hand and then they were left alone. Noel and Herta talked through the night, their words tumbling out in a flood of communication that swept up everything—the trivia

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of prison routine, the discovery of similar experience, the medita­ tions on life, the self-criticisms, the resolves. “As morning arrives,” Noel wrote, “we begin to realize our mar­ riage was never interrupted. We were, we are, we shall remain one. A new life is about to begin for us, right here in a land we have been in, these many years, but not seen. At least we hope it shall be here. Our first task is to regain health and strength. Meantime we shall study and revalue the past, seek out old friends, make new ones, discuss with them, learn from them, try to understand. We shall be wiser than we were, discard beliefs that have proved to be fallible, replace them by knowledge more solidly founded. But fundamen­ tally we shall find our convictions justified, strengthened, unchal­ lengeable. . . . And once more we shall contribute our mite, however small, towards a happier future for all mankind. . . .” Noels account of his release and developing determination to re­ main in Hungary left out any reference to his first contacts with his own country. He saw the American Ambassador twice, asking for a file of back newspapers covering all the years of his imprisonment, and explaining that he needed time to shake the cobwebs out of his mind. He did not ask for passports for himself and Herta. The day after their release, they entered the hospital for a checkup. Both were thin, haggard, and much older-looking than their years. Noel was suffering severely from his old stomach trouble. On De­ cember 24, a little over a month after their release, the Budapest government announced that Noel and Herta Field had requested and received political asylum in Hungary. Again the announce­ ment was made without informing the U. S. Embassy. It was only at the end of January that Ambassador Ravndal was able to assure himself at a private meeting with the Fields that they really did want to stay in Budapest and had not once again been submitted to pressure. On February 23,1955, the State Department announced that it was canceling U.S. protection of the Fields, a diplomatic way of saying that the American Government washed its hands of the couple and no longer accepted any responsibility for them. They no longer had valid American passports. No move was made to revoke their citizenship, which they had never renounced, but all official U.S. contact with the Fields was ended.

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The decision by Noel and Herta to stay in Hungary came as a shock to America. Newspapers demanded that the U. S. Govern­ ment reveal at last all that it knew of their story, since there were no longer any grounds for discretion in the protection of U.S. citizens in distress. “No official, who has the whole story, ought to be per­ mitted to keep it secret lest it embarrass him and his colleagues,” said the Detroit Times, without making it quite explicit that the ad­ monition was addressed to CIA chief Allen Dulles. The Boston Post was somewhat more direct “There isn't the slightest reason now why the case of the missing Fields . . . should not be aired by the Central Intelligence Agency and by the Federal Bureau of Investi­ gation” it said. “As a practical matter, Noel Field would no longer be alive if the communists had any suspicion that he was a double agent. The only terms on which he could survive would be that of further usefulness to the Soviet Union.” The insinuation went too far; Noel had no further usefulness. But the call to open Washing­ ton's dossiers was never answered, nor was there an explanation of why it was not And not until some years later did Noel himself decide to shed a little more light on his position in an article in the American magazine Mainstream in 1961. He and Herta settled into the villa on Sashegy Hill, overlooking the battered but beautiful city, which the government had given them on their release. It was a pleasant house, tucked against the hillside, of the angular modem style in which well-off Central European film producers and writers liked to build in the early thirties. Like the other villas in the quiet suburb, it had been emp­ tied of its previous occupants in anti-bourgeois purges. The main difference between the living conditions of the Fields and those of their neighbors was that they had the whole house to themselves, instead of having to share it' with several other families. After a time Noel was given a job making and editing translations for a government publishing house. He was isolated but, it seemed, as­ sured of tranquillity from the adventurous excitement he had so long sought and then achieved to surfeit. His clouded foresight failed him again. Three of the four missing members of the family had reappeared.

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Noel and Herta were told about Hermanns release when they were freed. That left Erika. Noel tried and failed to find out what had be­ come of her, getting the familiar fruitless promise that “inquiries will be made.” But release and reunion was becoming a new pat­ tern. Thousands of people were trickling out of jails and labor camps from Berlin to Vladivostok. Even the huge Siberian camps were thinning out in the winter of 1954. Few in the West realized that the direction had at last been re­ versed. Only rarely in unavoidable cases such as that of the Fields, three American citizens, were there announcements of the return of the damned. The communist governments were not yet pre­ pared to admit the immense proportions of the terror, which would have been immediately and staggeringly obvious had they dis­ closed how many people they were releasing. The official line in all the countries at that time was that for personal nefarious purposes, or as hostile imperialist agents, particular police officials had “falsi­ fied justice.” With its usual vigilance and concern for socialist le­ gality, the explanation continued, the Party in each country was “correcting mistakes” as it found them. The atmosphere of fear was somewhat diluted, particularly inside the Communist Parties, but it was still thick enough to hide what was going on from the outside and to dissuade the population from loose talk, even of improve­ ments. Besides, the habit of fear is not quickly broken when it has been deeply and painfully instilled. The populations at large tended not to believe that there had been a brake put on the greedy police, for they were convinced that change was impossible. The returning prisoners were the most silent of all, like animals so long trained to cages that they could only go on pacing when the bars suddenly disappeared. They began filtering back as they had been siphoned off, in hushed and furtive secrecy, with only an occasional rustle to hint of movement. Now and then, someone made it all the way to the West. In the winter of 1953, refugees who had been in Vorkuta and managed to flee through Berlin to West Germany when they returned disclosed that Erika Wallach was among the prisoners building roads in the Siberian tundra. In December of 1953 and then in February of 1954, Erika was allowed for the first time to write Red Cross mes-

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sages to her husband, by then back in Washington with the chil­ dren. He received the cards that spring. They explained nothing, but they did at least show she was alive and where she was. The United States sent a note to Moscow, though Erika was not an American citizen. It produced no results. Toward the end of the year, probably in connection with Noel's release though she had no idea of it, Erika was shipped back from Siberia to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. She was questioned for a few days about a Latvian involved in the Field case—without be­ ing told that it had been reversed—and then shipped east again to the Abes prison camp, where she fell ill and spent most of the spring and summer in hospital. In September of 1955, again without ex­ planation, she was returned once more to the Moscow prison. This time there was good news. Her fifteen-year sentence had been an­ nulled, she was told, and her case would have to be reviewed. If new interrogation showed her innocent, she would be released. If it showed her partially guilty, she would be retried. The questioners went meticulously through point by point of the dossier, asking Erika if it was true. Each time she said no, she had to go over the story again and give the real version. It was startling. They actually wrote down just what she said, had her sign each sheet of paper after careful reading, and signed it themselves. After ten days she was told she would be released, and an hour later, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon of October 1955, she was freed. Erika, no less than the others, found it hard to trust her freedom at first. She was taken to a Moscow hotel, escorted on sight-seeing tours of the city and to theaters at night, but she was afraid to tell anyone the good news. She had asked the Russians immediately for papers to leave the country, and until she had them and was on her way, she felt the danger Was not over. To her distress, British and American newspaper correspondents stumbled upon her name in the hotel and remembered what it signified. They sought her out, and reported her reappearance. “Thin and chain-smoking nerv­ ously,” read one dispatch, “she wore the same green sweater and black skirt she wore when arrested in East Berlin in 195°* • • • For obvious reasons, she said, she could not talk while still in Moscow but has a lot to say when she gets to the West.”

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Telling of it later, Erika said she “nearly fainted" when the re­ porters showed her the story in the papers a few days later. She had begged them to be careful in mentioning her reappearance be­ cause she still thought her chances of getting to the West were slight. She had not even cabled her husband about her release, waiting to be sure that she really could get out But now the news had broken, the telegrams were sent, and she lived on tenterhooks a few more days. On October 27, 1955, the Russians let her go. She was put aboard a Soviet plane for Berlin, back where she had started five years before, and hurried across to the West where her mother came to meet her. The last of the “four little Indians" was accounted for. Erika's problems were not over, however. She wanted to join her husband and her children in the United States. Bob flew to see her in West Germany, and there were long talks at the U.S. consulate, long depositions to special FBI agents flown to interview her. The trouble was that as an avowed former communist, Erika was not eligible for an American visa under the McCarran-Walter Immigra­ tion Act. The wrangling went on endlessly. The State Department said there was nothing it could do. But die late Representative Francis Walter, a man who could be harsh, could also show mercy. He intervened, sending a personal assistant to see Erika in Frank­ furt and arranging to satisfy the visa requirements through the loop­ hole for defectors. It was a bit tricky—Walter was sharply criticized for defying the extremely stem law that he had sponsored—but it worked. In 1957, over two years after her release, Erika was brought to Washington and a new life in the rambling colonial house on her mother-in-law's Warrenton, Virginia, farm. She testified at length before Walter's subcommittee on just what had happened to her, how she was tortured in prison and driven to collapse in Siberia until she was toughened to the work. She did not reveal much about Noel—she said she simply did not know the details of his involvements—and she stayed off politics. At one point in the long questioning about her eligibility for a visa, Erika stated her attitude to the Fields: “I know nothing about any espionage activities of Noel Field. I refused to believe he was an American spy although there seemed to be a lot of evidence to that effect. I have no proof whatever for his being a Russian spy. I have no right to

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judge him for whatever he did or did not do, or for what he is doing now. Personally, I have every reason to be grateful to the Fields.” And at another point, on politics: “I have deliberately refrained from violent attacks on the Soviet Union and the Communist Party via the press and radio because that would inevitably lead to a most serious political analysis and discussion, which would again involve me in politics, something I want to avoid at all costs. I am not a politician and do not want to be one, and am incapable of giving an objective, purely scientific analysis. On the other hand, the subjective ‘they did me wrong* approach would not satisfy me. Furthermore in taking that line I would expect it to be believed that I did it solely for the purpose of getting into the good graces of the authorities and ‘buying* my entry into the U.S.A. I have always de­ clared that should I decide to write or say anything fundamental, I would do it only at a time when there would be no suspicion of opportunism.” Erika had always had stubborn spirit Despite her ordeal it was not broken, though after her experience it shifted to a quiet de­ termination, like Candide’s, to “cultivate her own garden.” Her strength, her will, her temperament could have made her a woman of prominence able to contribute much of value—as a doctor per­ haps, or a sociologist—had she had the chance of a normal life. The times gave her no such chance: Nazi Germany, the war in Spain, postwar chaos, communist prisons and labor camps. She was thirtyone years old when she was freed from Russia, but she had had to spend all her extraordinary vitality in sheer endurance. Now she lives quietly, a suburban wife and mother, and she does not like to talk about the past. In 1955 the pace at which*the prisons were disgorging quickened. In 1956 the flow became a flood. Khrushchev made his secret speech denouncing Stalin as the one really responsible for what had hap­ pened, and gradually the conclusions were drawn. Even the door of the grave was opened. The Hungarian Government exhumed Laszlo Rajk and Tibor Szoenyi and reburied them again with full honors. Leo Bauer was sent home from Siberia to West Germany. Marthe Kreikemeyer, who despite the notification had never be­

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lieved her Willi was dead and had waited long for his return, at last went west as well. She wrote from Strasbourg, which had been her original home, to Noel and Herta in Budapest begging them for any dues they might give her of Willi’s fate. There was a syrupy sweet­ ness to the reply which in no way accorded with Marthe’s bitter desperation. “Our Dear Marthe,” it read, “We are deeply moved by your latest letter which just arrived. When we opened it, we were very happy to get a sign of life from you. But then came the shock at the news that Willi was still missing. We had not heard anything concrete about him nor about any other German acquaintances, but we thought that no news did not necessarily mean bad news. . . .” Noel said he had no idea of whether he could find any informa­ tion about Willi but promised “to give it a try. You know how much we loved you both,” he went on, “and I think I needn’t tell you that this hasn’t changed even in the darkest days. May we hope that you also never lost in your heart the feelings of friendship and confi­ dence for us? “The belief in a better future has remained with us. . . . “I don’t know how much you know about our present life. We have a charming house on a suburban hill with a garden and a splendid view. There is no lack of work. Herta is busy in the house and I am reading proofs of English translations from the Hungarian. . . . Our health is not quite satisfactory and will probably never be again. We are both suffering from premature symptoms of old-age. Herta’s old back trouble has become worse and I’ve got vertebral calcification which is frequently accompanied by heavy pains and can only be eased by much lying down and occasional water cures. . . . One year ago we would hardly have dreamt of ever being able again to take roots as it has happened with us. We have never had any reason to repent our decision to remain here and build up a new existence. Oh, how wonderful it would be if you were to visit us here! Gosh, that would be a feast! . . .” The letter ended, “Let yourself be embraced most cordially by your Noel and your Herta.” Far from being soothed, Marthe Kreikemeyer became increas­ ingly irritated at this bland acceptance of a past that had engulfed

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her husband. She avidly followed the East German Party papers which reported, from time to time, the annulment of various resolu­ tions passed to justify the purges, the rehabilitation of many of her husband's old comrades, and sometimes names of people appointed to some small new job seemingly mentioned innocuously but ac­ tually the only announcement that they were alive and released from limbo. But there was no word of Willi Kreikemeyer, and she could reach no one who knew about him. She decided to send an open letter to Western newspapers, pointing out that Willi had vanished in the purges now revoked and was still missing when it seemed to her that everyone else had reappeared. She begged for anyone who knew anything about him after that day in August, 1950, to get in touch with her. That provoked another letter from Budapest, this time from Herta. It was at once a plea and a reprimand, and was dated Octo­ ber 19, 1956—the day upheaval began in Poland, triggering revolu­ tion in Hungaiy four days later. It read: "Dear Marthe, Please excuse our long silence and please, please do not believe any reasons responsible for it, except for the fact that we still do not know what has happened to Willi. . . Referring to Marthe’s open letter in the press, it continued, "Our hearts do well understand that the tormenting worries over Willi’s fate drove you to make the attempt to obtain some news about him this way. But we are asking ourselves whether it was wise. Also others, among them friends of yours, are putting themselves the same question. . . . "But, Marthe, this doesn’t help any and can even do harm. We think that temporarily [Herta’s underlining] you ought not to do anything. We, and not only we, believe that you should have pa­ tience for a while. We mean that in earnest . . . As far as we know him [Willi] we can say with certainty that also to him rehabilitation is more important than freedom. And, therefore, Marthe, I’d like to ask you most urgently not to do anything rash. . . . Don’t let your­ self be abused and watch out what you do, so that nothing and no­ body can make use of it for their own and perhaps even unclean purposes.”

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Marthe Kreikemeyer had no further correspondence with the Fields, and she never learned anything more about Willi. Hertas letter also mentioned that Noel was “in hospital again. He had a stomach bleeding last week and still feels rather tired and weak. Hes recovering slowly.” Noel was still in the hospital on Oc­ tober 23 when a group of Budapest students, excited at news that Poland had defied the threat of Soviet tanks and installed Wladyslaw Gomulka to lead it against Moscow’s flat demands, began a march to the statue of Jozef Bern. Bern was a Pole who had been a hero of the 1848 Budapest uprising. As the students marched, the population streamed into the streets to join them. Soon there was a crowd of 300,000. The demonstrations began peacefully and spontaneously, but the authorities lost con­ trol. There was shooting. Soon the whole city, the whole country was in revolt It almost seemed to succeed. The Soviet occupation troops withdrew, but then they returned with tanks and armor. Children not yet in their teens fought street by street against the crushing engines of modem war. Peasants, who had never thought much of the dty folk, brought all the produce they could into town and left it on street comers for free distribution to the fighters, their way of nourishing the struggle for liberty. The whole world caught its breath as the Hungarians fought to free themselves and, unaided, lost. Budapest was consumed with the battle; no one at the center of the eruption could fail to be shaken. Noel and Herta lived through it, silent and unobserved. When it was over, when the flames were doused to smoke and ruins, then Noel spoke. Endre Marton, the Hungarian newspaperman, had learned Noel’s address. At the end of the year, Marton and his wife, who worked for the United Press, went up the Buda hill to seek an interview from the Fields. Neither Noel nor Herta was pleased, but they courteously agreed to discuss their attitude to the revolution with the Hungarian couple. Janos Kadar, the new communist leader installed by the Russians, Noel said, had saved Hungary from a “white terror” and he de­ nounced the “counterrevolutionaries.” Now, more than ever, the Fields said, they had no desire to return to the United States, for they found life in Hungary after the rebellion “so exciting.”

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The Hungarians were surprised. What had happened had hap­ pened in plain view. Noel and Herta explained that they had not seen much; Noel was in the hospital, a modern clinic reserved for high Party officials, and Herta had been caught there by the fighting and remained until it was over. Still, a year later, when the United Nations issued a report on the bloody suppression of the revolt and the ruthless immediate aftermath, Noel wrote a goo-word statement which was read on the Budapest radio denouncing the “slanderous falsehood interspersed at best with misleading half truths” issued by the U.N. “Neither 400 nor 4000 pages of dubious testimony by a hundred or ten times that number of defectors can 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 and their own good time,” his statement said. The revolution was a time when dossiers, doors and borders were forced ajar. Lazar Brankov, the Yugoslav in the Rajk trial, had been released from prison the year before but not quite freed, as guards accompanied him wherever he went. In the days of chaos he es­ caped to the West. From inside the prisons, it was learned that Noel had been treated brutally, had finally broken down and made a full confession, and then repudiated it Before his release, he had been re-examined for another eight months. Meanwhile, all through the lands behind the Iron Curtain, the lost were tim ing up again. Alexander Rado, the Soviet agent in Switzerland who had jumped the plane in Cairo at the end of the war when Moscow was bringing him home to report, suddenly turned up in his native Budapest The Russians had found him somewhere in the Middle East, kidnaped him, and eventually dumped him in a Siberian camp. His wife Helene, who had worked in the Unitarian office in Paris, went back to Budapest to join the husband she had thought dead. Both died within a few years, but at least they had a reunion. In Poland, during the hectic days at the end of 1956» the once powerful Jakub Berman sought to explain in a piteous whine to his

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Party's Central Committee why he should not be blamed for die terror that raged when he was responsible for the police. “Evidently,” he said in answer to angry reproaches, “many com­ rades still do not fully understand the whole complexity and omi­ nousness of the situation at that time [the years under Stalin]. . . . The meaning of the events of that period, its lofty flights, heroism and self-sacrifice, and its abyss of degradation, is far more tragic, complex and painful than the facile simplifications and hasty judge­ ments that are frequently put forward about this period . . .” He cited several of the most notorious police purge cases, claim­ ing that “the facts of the employment of impermissible methods were concealed from the leadership. The Field case was conducted in an atmosphere which accompanied the whole period between the Rajk trial in September, 1949, and the Slansky trial in Novem­ ber, 1952, and later events. . . .” This atmosphere Berman described a little more specifically. “In 1949, Field, who in the trial of Rajk had been treated as an American head spy, gave evidence in Budapest mentioning his let­ ter to me and his acquaintance with comrade Anna Duracz. These matters came to the ears of Beria and Stalin, and from that time there began a great campaign against me, and accusations began to pour in charging me with espionage and treason. “In the case of Anna Duracz [Bermans secretary], there was direct intervention on Stalin s part. I was against the arrest until the very end. I was deeply convinced of her innocence, not knowing at the time how much truth there was in the charges made against Field. Comrade (President Boleslaw) Bierut defended me from the slanderous charges of espionage for a number of years; he did it with complete dedication and self-sacrifice, and the accusations were always renewed. . . . We know very well what the fate was of those who in 1949 and in the years after were under the charge of having been in contact with Field. There is no doubt that had com­ rade Bierut not defended my case so well, I could, at the most, be exhumed today. “It is obvious how this reflected on my work. . . .” His work was to run the police and propaganda. In 1956 he was stripped of all offices and lives now, a sick and broken old man, in

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retirement and disgrace. He had a long way to fall, but in 1956 there were cushions for the fallen which never existed when Ber­ man was at the top pushing down. Berman’s disclosure of Stalins direct hand on the strings of the Field case was not surprising, since the case had been used to ar­ ticulate Kremlin policy in so many countries. Stalin never saw the Fields, and yet it was he who plucked them from relative obscurity and made their name one of the plagues of history. It is curious to wonder what he really thought about them, for until long after his death they had thought well of him and tried to serve him faith­ fully, although they never quite managed. As the thaw progressed, and the de-Stalinization campaign de­ veloped openly, Noel along with the great bulk of European com­ munists, probably changed his mind about Stalin. He wrote of the "growing humanitarian advances” and told friends that he regretted the progress was not at an equal pace in the various communist countries. But well after the campaign had reached its height he wrote too, "What awful mistakes, what openings for the poison of a skillful enemy! And at the same time, the world-shaking, history­ making achievements. For a short time—a mere instant of history— the eyes of many had become riveted to what was evil and lost sight of the good. The former was sick excrescence, tragic but cur­ able. The latter is intrinsic. Of this I am sure . . .” The decision not to go home when they were released from prison, Noel said, came when he and Herta realized the "involun­ tary notoriety of our ‘case’ abroad.” Because of that, he felt, "the other America would tolerate us only if we were willing to sell our souls for its Un-American purposes.” Endre Marion told the Senate Committee he felt from his inter­ view with Noel that the Fields’ connection with the Hiss case had been an important factor in their refusal to go home. "I don’t think that there is any doubt why he didn’t come back,” Marion testified. "He knew perfectly well that he was involved in the Hiss case. . . .” Senator Hruska asked Marion, "In what way was he interested in the Hiss case?”

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“He was involved in the Hiss case,** Marton answered. “That is what he said. It wasn’t apparent to me what he meant” Noel admitted to Marton that he was a communist, which he had not said to non-communists before, but this time, at the end of 1956, he attached reservations to his credo. As Marton recounted it Noel described himself as a communist who “accepts the Marxist doc­ trine with the exception of the theory of violence, the theory that the workers’ class has to seize power by force, using force. This he does not—this theory he does not accept Now, how can a man be a Marxist without accepting the theory in full, I do not know, but he is certainly one of them. My impression was that Mr. Field is a rather weak man. The strong character is Herta, his wife. That was my impression.” Although he never specifically said that he would not go home because of his communist background, Noel made clear on more than one occasion that his deepest wish was to see his own country support his faith and join the communist camp. He was convinced, he wrote, that “the American people will some day choose [com­ munism] for itself, in its own manner, with its own institutions, and consistent with its best traditions.” Shortly before the Hungarian revolution, Noel had written to Szabad N ep , the Hungarian Communist Party organ, of his feelings toward his country. “I am not sorry for my decision to stay and work in this country where I suffered so much and where I got such sincere and generous amends,” the published letter said. “But I did not turn my back on my own country. I am and always will be an American watching with passionate sympathy increasing evidence that America grad­ ually is awakening from a nightmare of reactionary internal politics and of foreign policy of cold war. “I hope and believe that the day will come when I also will have my place in the rank and file of American progressive forces. But I am also grateful to enjoy the advantages of witnessing and ex­ periencing in practice the building of socialism in Hungary. I was dreaming of that in prison and the dream now has been realized.” The lesson of Hungary’s revolution, he wrote later, was that the Soviet troops come to put down the uprising against communism

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were “the real freedom-fighters.” This view, Noel felt, was con­ sistent with loyalty to America since the allegiance he acknowl­ edged was to what he called “our America,” those in the country who sympathized or might come to sympathize with his beliefs. So far as is known, Noel and Herta have never left the communist bloc since their release, though they have traveled from Hungary to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Herta’s aged mother, who lives in West Germany, finally went to Budapest to see them as they would not go to her or meet her in the West. The German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in The Measures Taken a summary of the credo: “He who fights for com­ munism must be able to fight and to renounce fighting, to say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and unhelpful, to keep a promise and break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid dan­ ger, to be known and to be unknown. He who fights for communism has of all the virtues only one: that he fights for communism.” Noel did not have the strength for such a total austerity of mind and heart He had sentiment and compassion. It hint him to see others suffering. His generosity and his wish to be good and helpful were real. He felt and he showed genuine warmth for his friends. But he tried to stick to the fierce standards. Their inhuman narrow­ ness not only victimized him but marked thousands victim. He thought he acted from conviction. He was only used.

EPILOGUE

By the summer of i960, the special ruins and scars of Hungary's revolution had been cleared away or blurred by time and dust to outlines indistinguishable from the scars of World War II. Time, which can be so cruel to beauty, is kinder to ugliness, softening jagged edges and mellowing charred remnants until the stark pain of disaster eases to a bittersweet ache. It was a bright, leafy summer, which Budapest used for gentle respite and pleasure where it could be found, in the gaudily umbrellaed cafés beside the Danube, the silent woods upon the hills. There was still fear in the city, but it was a dull undertone and no longer a sharp throb. The prisons were emptying again; the midnight knock was probably a neighbor. Taking the necessary precautions of political discretion that were easy enough because they had become almost a reflex, people bus­ ied themselves in getting on with normal life. That was not so easy. And yet things were already so much better than they had been before the flaming October and November of 1956 that it was pos­ sible to look back upon the revolution as a partial success. The fury had consumed the ferocity of the rulers as well as the passion­ ate courage of the ruled. Both were beginning to work toward a truce, though it was an undeclared truce that had to be approached with caution. So long as the special proprieties against risky involve­ ment with a Westerner were observed, it was possible for a for­ eigner to talk fairly freely with people in Budapest. On a brilliant summer day in early July, I hailed a taxi on the street and rode across the Danube up the hill to call on Noel and Herta Field at their villa. It was a winding road, with a dazzling panorama of the city's domes and avenues at every turn, the more breath-taking in the empty quiet of the suburban noon. I had not sent word ahead that I was coming. Noel, I had been told at the

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publishing house where he worked, was confined to his home wait­ ing for the last of twelve fractures in his leg to mend. He had gone skiing in the rugged Polish Tatra early in the spring, taken a bad spill, and been half encased in plaster since. Herta came down to the office on Budapest’s fashionable Vaci Utca from time to time to collect his pay and bring in work that he had finished; but Noel could barely hobble and was unable to go out. The villa was on a steep hillside, with a long flight of steps lead­ ing up through a modest flower garden from the street An iron fence with a locked gate guarded the approach to the steps. I rang. Someone stirred a lace curtain at a porthole window on the upper floor. Eventually a Hungarian maid opened the door, surveyed the sleepy scene, and finally shuffled down the steps in carpet slippers. She spoke only Hungarian, and did not unlock the gate. So 1 handed her a visiting card through the railing, which she took, trudging up the steps into the house, carefully shutting the front door behind her. The time passed slowly. It was perhaps a quarter of an hour later that she reappeared, made her way down to the gate again and silently handed back the card on which Noel had written that he did not choose to see journalists. Doubtless someone among his relatives or friends in the West whom I had seen had written telling of my interest in his story, for there was nothing on the card except my name to identify me or the purpose of my visit I wrote a note then, explaining it was not for a journalistic interview that I had come but because of the obvious obligation to hear what he might wish to say and in response to the often repeated insistence of peo­ ple once close to him that 1 must "ask Noel about that point It is up to him to say.” There was another long, silent w ait When the maid came back again, she brought an envelope addressed to me. Inside was a card, inscribed with the date and a formal salutation. The message read, "If any friend or relative of mine wished me to talk to you, they would have informed me in writing. I have had previous experience with persons from the West making unsub­ stantiated claims, and I am afraid you will have to take no’ for an answer.

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“Sincerely, Noel H. Field" The taxi driver, knowing better than I how difficult it would be to find transportation back to the center of the city, had thoughtfully waited down the road. There was no one else anywhere in sight. In neighboring villas, laundry hung limp on ropes strung across every little balcony, a sign that in those houses which had not received the upkeep and paint of the Fields’ trim home, living space per capita was much closer to the low national average than what the expatriates enjoyed. But there was no sign of anyone about at mid­ day in the neighborhood, so I climbed back into the taxi and went away without ever talking to Noel or Herta Field. Acquaintances of theirs in Budapest spoke of them uneasily, as incomprehensible creatures whom it was better not to know too well or try too hard to figure out They were both white-haired and sickly when they came out of prison, a reserved couple who now live quietly and very seldom show themselves at the theaters and dubs frequented by the communist intellectuals who know them. Their ordeal at the center of die great net of terror did not draw them closer to their fellow victims but set them apart, leaving them almost alone. An aura of mystery and danger, though the venom had all been drawn, still clung to the Fields unreasonably but ineradicably. The scent of fear, no longer acrid but never quite aired out, lingered in the atmosphere where they had moved. A Czech woman now living securely in Geneva, one of those who had been touched by the Field case a decade earlier in Prague, started in fright when he was mentioned and begged not to be con­ nected again to the name of Noel Field in any way. The U. S. Cen­ tral Intelligence Agency under Allen Dulles politely but abruptly refused to reveal any facts in its possession on the case but the most obvious and well known, long after everyone involved was dead or out of jail; all the related secrets were exposed or harmlessly obsolete; all the dossiers closed for lack of further current relevance. Only once has Noel himself spoken out publicly on the harrowing sequence of events that composed his strange life, a sequence whose meaning still torments and eludes him, he has told acquaintances. That was the article for Mainstream, where for the first time he publicly avowed his faith in communism. He entitled the article

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“Hitching our Wagon to a Star,” and made it dear that the star he meant was a red one. In that article, tracing the evolution of his thoughts, Noel comes to “A summer day in i960” It was a time of international crisis, shortly after the East-West summit meeting which crashed in the shadow of the American U-2 plane shot down over Russia. Noel wrote that he could sense the “decay” of the West and the coming prevalence of “socialism realized and of communism in the making. To some perhaps this may sound like the idle fantasy of denizens of an ivory tower.” But he argued that he had lived in both worlds, and so could speak with the hard knowledge of experi­ ence on the sagging deterioration of one side and the “constant ad­ vance” of the other. Hungary, four years after the revolution, was to him a marvelous display of “promises held, of plans fulfilled, of doubts converted into confidence all around us. • . It was a time when an entrenched communist official, walking through the streets of Budapest with a Western correspondent, could point to small refrigerators and television sets at last coming on sale in poorly stocked shops, speak proudly of progress, and then turn to me with eager eyes and ask in a quite different, beseeching tone, “Tell me, is it true that in East Germany things are even much worse than they are here?” Noel wrote glowingly of the improvements in Budapest, of “years of rising living standards and spreading joie de v iv r e ” It was true in comparison with what had been. “Perhaps, most important of all,” he wrote, is that “the sense of insecurity, so characteristic of the lives of millions in America, has been converted into a priceless sense of security for the individual and his family.” For himself, it may well have been true, for he also wrote angrily refuting sug­ gestions that he and Herta had been obliged to stay in the country of their torture or might come to regret their decision. There was no explanation offered of why he suddenly chose to declare himself in January 1961. From remarks that reached me in­ directly, I would guess it was because he supposed that after my visit to Budapest the previous summer this book would appear at approximately the same time. If so, he underestimated the length of the task of piecing together from many hundreds of people and

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archives in a dozen countries the story of the turbulent and tragic forces in his life. For, when the threads have been gathered and rewoven into place, the pattern of the Field story emerges quite differently from the suspenseful tale of intrigue and adventure which might have been expected, though it contains all the elements of mystery, con­ spiracy, torture, murder, sex and politics. It is instead the pattern of a world in agony and of the bewildering pitfalls for men of good will who tried to walk a hopeful road through it all. Noels generation in many distant parts of the world went through a succession of agonies that seemed in the intensity of the moment to be peculiar to each time and place, unrelated to what had hap­ pened earlier somewhere else. So much separated the depression and the New Deal in America, the French camps for bitter and ragged refugees from Spain, the Nazi concentration camps, the logistical plans for moving armies through the Italian and Bavarian Alps, the devious political struggles for mastery of the embers left among the ashes of world war, the courtroom nightmares of revolu­ tion feeding on itself, the panicky reaction of the self-righteous awakening to danger. Yet all were linked through Noels life, and his life shows that the far-flung upheavals were truly intermeshed and interacting, shoving and tugging at a stumbling world. It was sheer arbitrary chance that made an obscure American and his family the focus of it all, and yet, as Noel said, the chain of events that led him pulled “in an almost straight line.” The inevita­ bility arose from the fusion of his times and the human weaknesses and strengths of his particular personality. He was not an unusual or special person, though he started off with more advantages than most. His family enjoyed the material comfort to give him an excellent education and the opportunity of a rewarding and satisfying career. By nature and background he was highly endowed with intellect, sensitivity, compassion, and an ar­ dent desire to serve his fellow man and reinforce the goodness in humanity that ever struggles for ascendancy. His visions were gen­ tle, so serene that he always abhorred all violence and pain, but that is what his life was made of, and that is what he was made to serve. He sought adventure for what he believed was a good cause, and

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he was willing to offer himself for the furtive chores of espionage. But he never really performed as a spy or an agent; he was used otherwise. He sought to rule himself by the precepts of loyalty and decency, yet he lived a secret double life, hurt most those whom he most admired, and rejected the friends who most sincerely wished him well. “Personal affections,” Noel wrote in Mainstream, “cannot be determinant in times when, throughout the world, family ties and bonds of friendship often fail to stand the strain of basic po­ litical divergencies.” Noel’s life and aspirations were an endless series of bitter ironies, the reflection of an essential irony in himself that goes far to explain why he was one who succumbed to the forces and pressures which other contemporaries felt and overcame. It is the irony of arrogant humility. With true humility, he placed himself at the disposal of generous urges and convictions which, with true arrogance, he de­ termined to impose on others regardless of the consequences. With humility, he accepted a credo and a sense of obligation to it, and with arrogance he refused to examine its effects. With the courage of humility, he performed the tasks which intellect and conscience set for him, and with the cowardice of arrogance, he rejected the demands of common sense and simple human feeling. A once dose friend, reflecting on the inner dictates that moved Noel, concluded that he was driven by the urge to martyrdom, the yearning for glory through self-sacrifice. Perhaps he was, but he hadn’t the stamina, the strength of character, or the clarity of vision to achieve ennoblement of this kind through self-immolation. 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 the circumstances were out­ rageously extraordinary, and he had the proud ambition to be an extraordinary person. It was beyond his capacity. He never man­ aged 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 peo­ ple used him, that offers special insights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barton, Paul. Prague à THeure de Moscou. Paris: Editions Pierre Horay, 1954Bauer, Leo. “Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte.” Die Partei hat immer Recht, (July 4» 1956).

Boveri, Margaret. Verrat im XX Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag GMBH, 1956. Brankov, Lazar. “Prisoner in Budapest.” Unpublished. Brooks, Howard. Prisoners of Hope: Report on a Mission, New York: L. B. Fischer Publishing Corporation, 1942. Browder, Earl. “How Stalin Ruined the American Communist Party,” Harpers Magazine (March i960), pp. 45-51. Cary, William. Poland Struggles Forward, New York: Greenberg, 1949. Childs, Marquis, and James Reston, eds. Walter Lippman and His Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace &Company, 1959. Dallin, David. Soviet Espionage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955De Toledano, Ralph. Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1952. ----- and Victor Lasky. Seeds of Treason. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1950. Dewar, Hugo. The Modem Inquisition. London: Allan Wingate Ltd., 1953Ehrmann, Herbert B. The Untried Case: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the MoreUi Gang. New York: The Vanguard Press, i960. Field, Hermann, and Stanislaw Mierzensld. Angry Harvest. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1958. See also publisher s note. Field, Noel Banishing War Through Arbitrationr-A Brief Sketch of PostWar Arbitration Treaties. Washington, D.C.: National Council for Prevention of War, 1926. — . “Hitching Our Wagon to a Star.” Mainstream (New York, January 1961). Field, Kate (Mrs.). Boston Sunday Globe, October 17,1954. Fischer, Louis. Men and Politics: An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan &Pearce, 1941.

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Flicke, W. F. Agenten Funken nach Moskau. Switzerland: Kreuzlinger, Foote, Alexander. Handbook for Spies. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949* Fry, Varian. Surrender on Demand. New York: Random House, Inc.,

Griffith, William E. “Thaw and Frost in Eastern Europe.” Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Manuscript. Halperin, Ernst. The Triumphant Heretic: TUo’s Struggle Against Stalin. Translated from the German by Usa Barea. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1958. Harvard College. Alu m n i reports on Dr. H. H. Field, Noel H. Field, and Hermann Field. Hiss, Alger. In the Court of Public Opinion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1957. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Testimony of Whittaker

Chambers, August 27, 1948. ----- . Testimony of J. B. Matthews, November 7,1938. ----- . Testimony of Herbert A. Philbrick, July 23,1951. ----- . Testimony of Erika Wallach, March 1958. Humbert-Droz, Jules. “Le Procès de Budapest” Le Travail (Fribourg et Sion, September 30, 1949). Hyde, Douglas. I Believed: An Autobiography of a Former British Com­ munist. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1951. Kempton, Murray. Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties. New York: Simon &Schuster, Inc., 1955. Krivitsky, Walter G. In Stalins Secret Service: An Exposé of Russkfs Secret Policies by the Former Chief of the Soviet Intelligence in Western Europe. New York: Harper &Brothers, 1939. Lazio Rajk and his Accomplices Before the People’s Court: A Transcript of the Rajk Trial. Budapest: Budapest Printing Press, 1949. League of Nations Reports. Repatriation of Foreigners with the Spanish Loyalists. C. 34, M. 18, 1939, IX. Leonhard, Wolfgang. ChÜd of the Revolution. Translated by C. M.

Woodhouse. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1958. Levine, Isaac Don. "The Strange Case of Laurence Duggan.” Plain Talk (February, 1949). Marton, Endre. “The Story of Noel Field.” Unpublished manuscript Massing, Hede. This Deception. New York: Duell, Sloan &Pearce, 1951. Matern, Hermann. “Agents of American Imperialism Exposed.” For Last­ ing Peace, For a People’s Democracy [the Cominform journal] (October 27, 1950).

RED PAWN

269

Nollau, Guenther. Die Internationale. Cologne: Verlag fuer Politik und Wirtschaft, 1959. Polish Central Committee. “Report on the Eighth Plenum.“ Nowe Drogi (Warsaw, October 1956). Reinhardt, Guenther. Crime without Punishment: The Secret Soviet Terror Against America. New York: Hermitage House, Inc., 1952. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt. Four volumes. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957,1959, 1962. ----- . “Sources of the New Deal: Reflections on the Temper of a Time.” Columbia University Forum (Fall 1959). Senate Committee on Judiciary. Testimony of Endre Marton, May 13, 1957----- . Institute of Pacific Relations Hearings, Part 2. Testimony of Whit­ taker Chambeis, August 9-23, 1951* ----- . Institute of Pacific Relations Hearings, Part 1. Testimony of Hede Massing, August 7, 1951. Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., i960. Thompson, Craig. “What has Stalin done with Noel Field?“ Saturday Evening Post (December 15, 1961). “The Trial of Nikola D. Petkov.” Record of the Judicial Proceedings. Sofia, 1947. “The Trial of Rudolf Slansky.” Transcript of Prague radio broadcasts during the trial. From the files of Radio Free Europe, Munich, 1953. T he Trial of Traicho Kostov.“ Transcript Sofia, October 1949. Unitarian Service Committee in World War II. Pamphlet published by the Unitarian Service Committee (January 1946). See also other USC bulletins. “Ueber die Hintergruende der Affaere Noel Field.“ Einheit, Sonderaus­ gabe (East Bureau, German Social Democratic Party, Bonn).

INDEX

( F . m ea ns N o e l F i e l d )

Ackermann, Anton, 232 Adam, Mr., 152 Agents, recruitment, 61-63 Aghnides, Theo, 81, 87, 120 Allied Control Commission, 169, 183, 187 Allies: Paris liberation, 165-66. See World War II America First, 75 American Civil Liberties Union, 65 American Relief for France, 167 Angry Harvest, 243 Anschluss, 104 Anti-Semitism, 237; Slansky trial, 229; Soviet Union, 229 Arnold, Thurman, 52 Associated Press, 228, 235, 242 Austria: Hitler, 104; Mauthausen camp» 137> USC, 167, 169 Baldwin, Roger, 65 Baltic States, 119 Bankov, Lazar, 211 Barbusse, Henri, 38 Bauer, Leo, 138, 139, 140, 150-51, 182, 183-87, 189, 196, 218, 226, 251; arrest, 219, 221, 222; Dexter, 143; F., 143, 227; Glaser, Erika, 140, 144, 218-19, 220; imprisonment, 223-25; oss, 143-44

Baumann. See Bauer, Leo

Belgium, 153 Bern, Jozef, 254 Benedite, Daniel, 144-45 BeneS, Eduard, 231 Bergamo, Italy, Architects’ Con­ gress, 6 Beria, Lavrenti, 12, 237-38, 256; murder, 238 “Beriovschisna,” 12 Berle, Adolf, 123 Berlin: blockade, 9, 189, 198; Deutsches Theater, 1615 fall of, 163; Hilton Hotel, 19; Tempelhof airport, 9 Berman, Jakub, 11-12, 14, 195, 201, 255-57; F-» 11» 12 Bertz, Paul, 138-39, 151, 182, 225 Beveridge, Sir William, 54 Bierut, Boleslaw, 11, 201, 256 Bill (Walter Grinke), 69-70 Bonus March, 45-46, 69 Boston: post-World War I, 28-29; School for Social Work, 30 Bragg, Rev. Mr. Ray, 176-78 Brandt, Heinz, 20 Brankov, Lazar, 205, 223, 255 Bratislava, 4 Bratsk Dam, 19 Brecht, Bertolt, The Measures Taken, 259 British Trust, 116-17

272

RED PAWN

Brooks, Howard, 130, 137; Prison­ Comité pour les Réfugiés AntiFascistes, 120 ers of Hope, 128-29 Browder, Earl, 42, 43, 57, 62, 66- Communism: Brecht on, 259; intel­ lectuals, 89-90; Russia, 41, 67, 121, 212; F., 67, 192; Sta­ 61; U.S., 42. See under name lin* 191- 9* of country Budapest: F., 199, 204 ff; post-re­ volt, 261 ff; trials, 205-6. See Communist party: agents, 62, re­ cruitment, 65; dues, 155; Ger­ also Hungary man, 150; Hitler, 68-69; his­ Bukharin, Nikolai, 153, 154; execu­ tory, 19-20; terror, 248 tion, 153 Communists: European post-war Bulgaria, 136, 169, 200, 233; com­ governments, 170-71; free munists in Switzerland, 140 love, 132; Nazis, 117, 171; re­ Bullitt, William C., 56 cruitment program, 61-62; re­ Burlac, Anne, 38 sistance in occupied countries, 121; U.S. post-World War I, CALPO (Comité de TAllemagne 30. See also under name of Libre Pour TOuest), 172, 173 country Canaris, Admirai Wilhelm, 182 Coolidge, Calvin, 31, 38 Capone, Al, 39 Corcoran, Thomas, 52 Carnegie Foundation, 90, 190 Coughlin, Father Charles E., 39 Central Intelligence Agency Cripps, Sir Stafford, 54 (CIA), 141,239, 247; F. case, Cseresnyes, Sandor, 213, 214 263 Cyrkus, Helena, 7, 201 Chamberlain, Neville, 116 Cyrkus, Simon, 7, 201 Chambers, Whittaker, 123, 193-94 Czechoslovakia, 136; communists, Charles University, 2 1, 108, 117-18, 162, 229; F. Chicherin, 94 case, 9; Germany in, 115, 116; Nazis, 117; purges, 227, 228; China: communism, 11, 245; Ja­ refugees, 117-19, 128; relief pan, 56, 59, 76, 98 work, 127; Rude Pravo, 118, Churchill, Winston S., Yalta, 163 227, 232; Soviet Union, 231; Clark, Fred, 184 Clark, Jean Ainslee, 78 Trust Fund, 230; USC, 167 Clementis, Vladimir, 227-28, 231— 32; trial, 228-29 Dahlem, Franz, 137, 182, 186-87, Clementis, Mrs. Vladimir, 227 225-26, 232 Colby, Bainbridge, 42 Daily Worker, 40, 42, 43, 60, 62 Cold War, 173, 192, 196, 198, 242 Dallin, David, 97 Collins, Henry H., 57 Davidson, General, 52 Comintern, 68, 132; GPU, 154-55; Davis, Norman, 39, 76, 77 original Secretaries, 152-53; De Gaulle, Charles, 166 Russia First policies (Stalin's), Deschamps, Monsieur, 147 Dexter, Mrs. Elizabeth, 127 153

RED PAWN Dexter, Nancy, 134 Dexter, Dr. Robert, 127, 133-34, 141, 143 Dies, Martin, 122 Dies Committee on Un-American Activities, 121, 122 Disarmament, 79; conferences, 3940; F-» 37» 39- 40; Litvinov formula, 99; London Naval Conference, 76-77 Djilas, Milovan, 206 Dmitrov, Georgi, 153-54, 157, 158 Dolivet, Louis, 132 Donovan, William, 172 Doob, Dr. Elsie Field. See Field, Elsie Duclos, Jacques, 160, 192 Duggan, Laurence, 44, 57, 58,1905 death, 194; F., 194; Hiss case, 194

Dulles, Allen, 15, 40, 160, 163, 185, 206, 212, 230, 247, 263; communists, 14&-44; F., 1414*. M3* 150, 151» 160-61, 170, 172, 173, 181, 224, 227; OSS, 141 Dunn, James Clement, 81 Duracz, Anna, 12, 194-95, 201, 256 Eastern Europe, 6, 13, 194-99; purges, 200

East Germany, 20, 224; communist hierarchy, 137, 155; Commu­ nist Party, 182, 218; F., i82r83; purges, 225, 232, 2535 Soviet Union, 182-84 East-West Summit Meeting (i960), 264 Economist, 116 Eicheldorfer, 185 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 32, 245 Eisler, Gerhard, 60, 123, 178, 225

273

Emergency Relief Committee, 126 Emergency Rescue Committee,

144-45

Ende, Gertrud, 225-26 Ende, Lex, 225-26 Engels, Friedrich, 40 Eschwege, Nina, 21-22. See Field, Nina Ethiopia, 76, 82, 87 Europe, 26, 181. See Eastern Eu­ rope and under name of country Existentialism, 181 Fascism, 41, 53 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 42,175,194,197,247, 250; Eisler, 225; F., 180, 196; Hiss, 74 Fellowship of Youth for Peace, 37 Ferguson, Ma, 39 Feygin, Anatol, 238 Field case: communist police, 13; ramifications, 16, 17; secrecy, 16-17 Field, Dr. Herbert Haviland (fa­ ther), 21-22, 24; American Peace Commission, 24-25; death, 25, 26 Field, Elsie (sister), 2, 3, 6, 27, 44, 79» 197» 216, 317, 3i8, 342; birth, 22; education, 48 Field, Hermann (brother), 6, 7-8, 27, 116, 123, 138, 230; Angry Harvest, 243; appearance, 7; arrest, 201, 202-3, 238; birth, 22; communists, 118; disap­ pearance, 8-9, 199; educa­ tion, 48; Herta, 243; imprison­ ment, 13, 15, 202-4, 240-41, release, 13, 16, 241-43; mar­ riage, 78, 116, 119; Noel, 120, 243; Poland, 117-19, 200-1

m

RED PAWN

field, Herta (wife), 2, 3, 4, 6-9, 38, 47, 48, 180, 197; appearance, 49; background, 4, 60; characteristics, 4-5, 33, 34, 64, 69, 258; childhood, 88, 89; children, 90; Communist Party, 69, 70-71, 108, 146; disappearance, 9, 199; family, 116, 259; Geneva, 87, 88 ff, 98, 99, 104, 106; health, 252; Hiss, 58; Hungary, 246-47, 252, 254, 257, 259, 262, 264; husband, 4-5, 35, 71“7^> 245; imprisonment, 13, 15, 204, 205, 240, release, 13, 16, 244-46; interests, 48-50; marriage, 48-50, 90, 106, 128, 129 (see husband); ref­ ugee work, ii2r-i3, 127-34, 135, 148- 47, 149®, 15«» 167-69; Soviet Union, 95, 100-4; Spain, 107 ff; unpopu­ larity, 72; U.S., 81 Field, Jean, 116 Field, Kate Thomeycroft, 7, 216, 217, 242-43 Field, Letitia (sister), 22, 27, 48 Field, Nina Foote (mother), 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 91, 123-24; characteristics, 47-48; death, 124; health, 48; Noel, 47, 48; Soviet courier, 78-79 Field, Noel Haviland, 1, 3, 25, 3032, 38, 75, 87, 88, 92,121-24, 177-78, 190, 196, 209-10, 216, 226, 230; appearance, 1; arrest, 199, 214-15; birth, 22; Bonus March, 46, 69; Buda­ pest trials, 205, 206; charac­ teristics, 4, 18, 20, 33, 35, 36, 41, 43, 47, 58, 59, 64, 65, 69, 70-71, 75, 76, 77, 84, 85, 87, 94, 99, 127, 168, 174- 75, 181,

258, 259, 265-66; childhood, 22-24, 88» 89; communism, 42- 43, 44, 89, 103, 105, 108, 109, 122, 130-31, 148, 180, 168, 177-78, 194- 95» 235-38, 245, 255» 257, 258, 259, 26364; communist agent, 88, 91, 92- 93, 97- 98, 104, 107-8, 131, 138-42, 146, 151, 156, 158, 160-62, 182 ff, 216, 224; Communist Party, 30, 37, 42, 65, 66-67, 90, 154, 155, 156; daughter (see Glaser, Erika); disappearance, 3-4, 197; du­ ality, 13-14, 55, 58, 66-68, 70, 85, 90, 99-100, 131, 134» 156, 181, 191, 216, 266; editlog, 247, 262; education, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37; father, 25-26; friends, 3, 27, 44, 55, 57, 58, 91, 99, 103, 123» 148, 190, 191, 194, 233; Geneva, 87, 88 ff, 98, 99, 104, 106; health, 3, 37, 48, 128, 190, 246, 252, 254, 255, 262; Hun­ gary, 245- 47, 252, 254- 55, 257» 258-59, 262, 264; ideal­ ism, 28, 29-30, 35, 37» 88; imprisonment, 13, 15, 36, 204-5, 228, 234-36, 240, 255, release, 13, 16, 244-46; influ­ ences on, 37, 75; in-laws, 116; interests, 25, 27, 39, 48-50, 52, 55, 89; languages, 31, 9394, 100; Mainstream article, 247, 263-64, 266; marriage, 31, 48-49» 90-91, 106, 128, 246; mother, 47, 48; Nazism, 60, 84; purges connected with, 225, 226, 227 ff, 232-34, 256; recruitment as spy, 62-67, 7075, 77-82, 85-86; refugee work, 127-34, 135®, 144-47»

RED PAWN Field, Noel Haviland (confd) 149 ff» 167; religion, 27, 37, 127, 168; search for, 6, 7, 216 ff; self-delusion, 97; sex, 49* 89, 91* 1*9- 31* 133» 17576; Soviet Union, 56, 84-85, 95, 100-45 Spain, 93, 100, 105, 107-14; U.S., 180, 19091, 258-59, loyalty to, 71, 75, 79, 86, State Department, 33, 35-36* 38, 39-40, 42-43, 44, 48, 77* 83-84, 85; Washing­ ton, 33- 35* 39; wife* 71- 7** *36, 245. See also Dulles, Allen; Hiss, Alger; League of Nations; Unitarian Service Committee Fields (family), 41, 48, 78-79 Fischer, Dr. Hans von, 156 Fischer, Louis, 109 Fischl, Otto, 232 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 36 Flack, Joseph B., 242 Foldi, Ivan, 213 Foote, Alexander, 157-60, 173; Handbook for Spies, 158 France, 153; communists, 108, 130, 136-37; fall of, 124, 132; fas­ cists, 98; F., 120 ff, 135; Hit­ ler, 82; liberation, 159, 160; post-war, 166; refugees, 106, 112-14, 124-28, 167; resist­ ance, 130, 136, 139; Soviet Union, 94; Spanish Civil'War, 93; Vichy, 124, 128,144, 145, 146 Franco, Francisco, 93, 98, 104, 108, 112 Frank, Joseph, 231 Frankfurt University, 187 Fred, 70, 73, 74» 80, 102-3, 143 Free French, 128, 166

275

Free German Committee, 161-62, 172 Frejka, Ludvik, 230, 231 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 67, 71 Fry, Varian, 126 Fuhrmann, Bruno, 225 Fullerton, Hugh, 144 Gandhi, Mahatma, 37 Geminder, Bedrich, 231 Geneva, 2, 3, 4, 79, 80, 87, 140,

149

Germany: Allied Control Commis­ sion, 183, 187; American Mili­ tary Government, 184; Army, 161; Bendlerstrasse (War Ministry), 156; Bund Deut­ scher Mädchen, 110; commu­ nists, 68, 131, 132, 137-38, 139» 161-62, 163, 170-71» 178, 188-89, F-» 140-41, in France, 136, OSS, 224, in Spain, 136; currency restric­ tions, 110; Gestapo, 149, 159, 207; Hitler Youth, 110; Italy, pact, 93; rearmament, 42; ref­ ugees, 128; Reichswehr, 132, 139; Soviet Union, 172, 173; Spanish Civil War, 104; sur­ render, 163; Wehrmacht, 104; Weimar Republic, 68, 131-32. See Hitler; Nazis Gero, Emo, 233 Gibson, Hugh, 51 Gilbert, Prentiss, 39 Glaser, Dr., 110-12, 114, 136, 187; death, 189 Glaser, Erika (foster daughter), 116, 158, 161, 162-63, 182, 187, 188, 189, 250-51; ap­ pearance, 150; characteristics, 188, 189; children, 190, 219; communism, 135-36, 140*

276

RED PAWN

Glaser, Erika (cont’d) 150-51» 187-89; education, 187; Fields, 110-15, 151» Ge*" many, 184 ff; marriage, 18990; OSS, 184-87. See Wal­ lach, Erika Glaser Glaser, Kurt, 110, 115 Glaser, Mrs., 110-13, 136, 187, 189, 219, *50 Goldhammer, Bruno, 136, 138, 150, 221, 225 Goldhammer, Esther, 221 Goldsmith, Michael, 242 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 11, 12, 207, *38, 254; purge, 200, 204 Gomulka, Mrs., 203, 204 Gonda, Eugene, 151-52 Gottwald, Element, 227, 229 Granowska, Mela, 201 Great Britain: communists, 11718; Czech refugees, 116-17; fascists, 98; Free German Committee, 172; Hitler, 82; Munich Pact, 116; naval power, 39, 5-5-3 formula, 77; RAF, 115; Spanish Civil War, 93; Tito, 170; U.S., 75-76 Grinke, Walter, 69-70 Guisan, General, 159

77- 7®, 194, 257-58; FBI, 74; Hede Massing, 73, 74 Hiss, Donald, 57 Hiss, Priscilla, 58, 73 Hitler, Adolf, 42, 59,61,65,68,79, 98, 110, 118; Austria, 104; Bavarian redoubt, 163; com­ munists, 68, 188; conscription, 76; F., 84-85; Festung Eu­ ropa, 146; July 20, 1944 at­ tempt, 157; Locarno treaties, 82; Paris, 165; Rhineland, 82; Soviet Union, 96, 137; Spanish Civil War, 93; Stalin, 207; Sudetenland, 116; suicide, 163; U.S., 75-78; World War H, 95. See Germany; Nazis Hodinova, Anezka, 118 Hoffmann-Szoenyi, Tibor, 136. See Szoenyi, Tibor Hofmeier, Carl, 158 Holdos, 230 Holland, 167 Holstein, Hans, 183, 224 Hoover, Herbert, 38, 45, 50 Horthy, Mildôs, 152 Hudson, Manley O., 28, 34 Hughes, Charles Evans, 42 Humbert-Droz, Jules, 19-20, 94, 95, 15^-54, 159; F., 152,

Hajdu, Vavro, 232 Harding, Warren G., 28 154-58 Harrington, Donald, 176 Hungary, 4; Budapest trials, 205Harvard University, 21, 27, 30, 34, 6; communists, 108, 140, 162, 171, 233, 258; patriotism, 207; 48, 57, 78; Sacco-Vanzetti case, 29 police, 223; Rajk trial, 208-15 Haskovec, Dr., 229 (see Rajk trial); Red Army, Haus, Elsie, 169 169; refugees, 151-52; revolt Heine, Fritz, 125, 126 (October, 1956), 11, 168, Helen (Russian agent), 101 233, 453, 254-55, 258-59, Hiss, Alger, 57-58, 121, 190; case, 261; Spanish Civil War, 209; Swiatlo disclosures, 243 ff; 73, 74- 75, 192- 94, 196- 97, 216; F., 57, 58, 73, 74-75, 76, Szabad Nep, 258; U.S., 240-

RED PAWN

277

Hungary (confd) Kimmel, René, 4 41; USC, 167, 169. See Buda­ Kleinova, Dora, 195-96 pest Klinger, Evzen, 227 Hurley, Patrick, 45-46 Kopecky, Vaclav, 228 Kopriva, Ladislav, 228 International Consultative Group, Korean War, 10, 198, 245 Korondy, Bela, 205 90 “International Friendship Club,” 37 Kostov, Traicho, 215 International Institute for Educa­ Kotykov, General, 183 tion, 190 Kovacs, Istvan, 243 Iron Curtain, 75, 216, 217, 231, Kreikemeyer, Marthe, 146, 147, 226, 251-54 «34» «55 Italy, 153; communists, 162; Ethi­ Kreikemeyer, Willi, 139, 146, 147, opia, 82, 87; fall of, 163; 225, 252, 253-54 fascism, 41; League, 76.. 82; Krivitsky, Walter, 92-93; defec­ Spanish Civil War, 93, 104; tion, 123; F., 92, 95, 108; Spanish Civil War, 93 USC, 167 Japan: China, 56, 59, 76, 98; “Manchurian incident,” 56; na­ val power, 39, 5-5-3 for­ mula, 77 Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Com­ mittee (JARC), 120, 134, 167 Jolis, Bert, 172 Jones, Dorothea, 8 Joy, Charles, 127 Jurr, Werner, 131-32 Justus, Pal, 205 Kadar, Janos, 254 Kägi-Fuchsmann, Regina, 167-68 Kamenev, Lev, 94 Kardelj, 206 Katovis, Steve, 40 Katz, Otto. See Simone, André Katz, Rudolf. See Bauer, Leo Kelley, Robert, 56 Kellogg, Frank, 34 Kerensky, Aleksandr, 53, 55 Khrushchev, Nikita, 160, 237-38; Gomulka, 11; Stalin, 15, 251; Zhukov, 183

La Chaux-de-Fonds, 19 Langhoff, Wolfgang, 161, 226 Latin America, 153 Lautner, John, 214-15 Layton, Lord, 116, 230, 242 League of Nations, 28, 32, 34, 37, 39; enthusiasm, 87; F., 35, 79, 80, 81-83, 85, 87-88, 99-100, 105-7, !i«» 116, 120-21; in­ ternational groups with, 90; Italy, 76, 82; misconceptions about, 79-80; secretariat, 95; setting, 87; Spain, 93, 104-8, 112; Soviet Union, 95; U. S. Senate, 35 Lechmann, Tonja, 151, 194“95 Lenin, Nikolai, 19, 37, 40, 55, 95,

153

Levine, Isaac Don, 92 Libby, Frederick, 34 Lieberman, Sali, 116 Liechtenstein, 159 Lindbergh, Charles, 75 Lippmann, Walter, 39 Litvinov, Maxim, 99, 118

278

RED PAWN

77, 78, 84, 86, 97, *16; break with Moscow, 1*3; F., 91, 102-3; in Soviet Union, 100-3 Matem, Hermann, 218-19 Matthews, J. B., 37, 121-22, 123 Merker, Paul, 136, 137-38, 139, 182, 225 Mierzenski, Stanislaw, 203, 204, 243- Angry Harvest, 243 Mihailovié, Draia, 161 Moffat, J. Pierrepont, 83 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 19, 118; Ribbentrop pact, 207 Morgan, Laura Puffer, 34, 106-7 Moscow: Hotel Lux, 153; Hotel Metropole, 101, 102; Lubyanka prison, 249; Moskva Hotel, 102; purges, 95-96, 97-98, 101, 104, 132, 153 Muenzenberg, Willi, 132 Munich Pact, 116 MacArthur, Douglas, 32, 46 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, Murphy, Raymond, 122 Mussolini, Benito, 55-56, 65, 153; 250 Ethiopia, 76, 98 McCarthy, Joseph, 194 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 39 Namek-Karpeles, 230 Mainstream, 247, 263-64, 266 Malenkov, Georgi, 237-38 National Conference for the Pre­ vention of War, 34 “Manchurian incident,” 56 Nationalist Chinese Government, Margolius, Rudolf, 232 Markin, Valentin, 61 159 Markowska, Mrs., 241 National War Fund, 127 Nazis (nazism), 7, 41, 59-60, 68; Marseilles, 124, 127, 139 Marshall Plan, 181, 198 anti-Semitism, 110-11; com­ Marton, Endre, 235, 254, 257-58 munists, 117, 171; F., 78-79, Marx, Karl, 37, 40, 55 84-85; German-American Marxism, F. and, 64, 68 Bund, 76; Roosevelt, F. D., Maslovsky, 130 84; -Soviet Non-Aggression Massing, Hede, 60-67, 69-70, 71Pact, 118-19, 136-37, 156 75» 78, 79, 80-82, 85-86, 91, Negroes, 37-38 216, 225; break with Moscow, Nevins, Allan, 39 101-3, 123; FBI, 197; in So­ New Deal, 51, 53, 54, 57, 59 New Masses, 60 viet Union, 100-3 Massing, Paul, 59-61, 64, 67-71, New Republic, 53-54

Locarno treaties, 82 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 28 Loebl, Evzen, 227, 230, 232 Lombardo-Toledano, Vincente, 153 Lompar, Miso, 161 London: Naval Disarmament Con­ ference, 39-40, 76-77; U. S. Embassy, 9 London, Arthur, 230, 232 Long, Huey, 39 Lothian, Lord, 82 Lovestone, Jay, 37 Lowrie, Donald, 127, 130-31, 144 “Lucy.” See Roessler, Mr. Ludwig, 60, 70, 86, 91, 95-96; as­ sassination, 96-97, 101, 102, 154; defection, 96, 100-1, 123; F-> 92, 95» 97- 98; Stalin, 96; widow, 97

RED PAWN

279

News Chronicle, Ltd., 116 Nicole, Leon, 140,152 Nicole, Pierre, 140, 152 Nixon, Richard, 193 North Atlantic Alliance, 198 Norway, 163 Nosek, Vaclav, 118 Novy, Vilem, 118, 119, 227, 230 Nye, Senator, 75

ugees, 128, 151; Soviet Un­ ion, 11, 119, 201, 239-40; Tenth Department, 201, 238, 239» U.S., 240— 41; USC, 167; Warsaw, 6, 7, 16 Popular Front, 156 Portugal, 124, 153, 167 Prague, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9; F., 199; Palace Hotel, 1, 3-4, 6, 197,

Oatis, William, 228 O'Casey, Sean, 38 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 134, 141, 142-44, 150, 152, 206, 224; CALPO, 172-73; F., 142, 143, 162-63, 181, 191, 2 ii, 212, 227; objectives, 162-63; post-war govern­ ments, 170-73, 184 ff Ogyenovics, Milan, 205 Oren, Mordecai, 229 Orenstein, Simon, 229

Princeton University, 57

Palffy, Gyorgy, 205, 211 Panin, 183, 224 Paris, 2; liberation of, 162, 165, 173; USC office, 172-77 Partisans for Peace, 132; Congress, 2, 218 Pavlik-Pollitzer, 230 Peoples’ Democracy, individualism in, 3 Perpignan, 106-7, 112, 114 Pestalozzi School, 23 Petkov, Nikola, 200, 210 Philippines, 121 Pieck, Wilhelm, 155-56, 186 Poland, 136, 169, 253, 254; com­ munists, 11-12,140, 171,195; fall of, 12O; Field, Hermann, 6, 117-19, 240-42; purges, 200, 201-2, 203-4, 255-56; Reconstruction Board, 7; ref­

199

Quakers, 127, 146-47 Radek, Karl, 153 Radio Free Europe, 239,5241 Rado, Alexander, 140, 158, 15980, 173, 255; death, 160 Rado, Helene, 140, 174, 177, 255 Rado, Imre, 174 Raedel, Siegfried, 137 Rajk, Laszlo, 108, 191, 200, 251; execution, 213; trial, 200, 205, 206, 207, 219, 227, 228, 231, 233» 243, 256, F. and, 20815, 216, 225 Rakosi, Matyas, 209, 233 Rankovich, Alexander, 206, 212 Rassemblement Universel de la Paix. See RUP

Rau, Heinrich, 137 Ravndal, Christian, 244, 246 Red Army, 171, 198; communist governments, 181; execution of officers, 96; Hungary, 169; intelligence, 92; Poland, 11; purges, 208 Refugees, 124-28; Czech, 117-19; F., 112, 116, 120-21, 124, 127-30, 133- 35* 144- 47» 149 ff, 167ff Reicin, Bedrich, 232 Reiss, Ignatz. See Ludwig

280

RED' PAWN

(see Red Army); Bolshevik Revolution, 28-29, 42, 53, 94; Bratsk slave labor camp, 225; Cominform, 191; Comintern, 42, 68, 94, 13a, i 5a- 55>Ä09> Czar, 53; de-Stalinization, 1516, 257; “doctors’ trial,” 229, 237; East-West confrontation, 198; GPU, 92, 96- 97» 101, 102, 153, 179, Comintern, 154-55; Hi6er attack, 137; Hungarian revolt, 254; intelli­ gence, 140, 158 (see GPU); Intourist, 100, 101; Italy, 153; Kremlin, 94; League, 95; “Manchurian incident,” 56; Moscow purges, 95-96, 97“ Sacco, Nicola, 29 98, 101, 104, 132, 153; -Nazi Sacco-Vanzetti case, 29, 38-37, 56, Non-Aggression Pact, 118-19, 234 Satellites, 198-99, 207-8; anti136-37» 156; post-war, 208; power position, 42; prisoners, Semitism, 229; purges, revoca­ release of, 251 ff; propaganda, tion of, 255 ff 96; purges, 12, 13, 15, 248 Sayre, Francis B., 121, 122 (see Moscow purges); Radio Schildbach, Gertrud, 98-97 Moscow, 94; revolution, 109; Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 36, 172, satellites (see Satellites); Si­ 173 beria, 248, 250; “Spaniards,” Scout movement, 127 109, 208-9; Spanish Civil Silver Shirts, 76 War, 93; Stalingrad, 159; Simone, André, 230, 232 Sino-Soviet dispute, 209 TASS, 52; U.S., 42, 55, 56, Slansky, Rudolf, 117-18, 227; trial, 142, 208; Vorkuta camp, 13, 227, 228-32, 234, 256 222, 248; World War H party Sling, Otto, 232 line, 119 Snowsko-Borowsld, 166, 233 Spain, 153; Civil War, 93, 104-5, Socialism, 53 108-14, 208-9; communists, Sokolin, Vladimir, 94-95 108-9,111, 209; F., 105,107Sommerfeld, Herta. See Tempi, 14» 139; “fifth column,” 98; Herta International Brigade, 107, Sorn, Maria. See Tempi, Herta 111, 112, 209; League, 104Soviet Union: agents, 72-73, 915; Loyalists, 104-5, 107; ref­ 92, 101, 224 (see under ugees, 128; Soviet Union, 109 name); Allies, 158, 159, 160; Sperling, Fritz, 225 anti-Semitism, 229, 237; army Spiegelglass, Mr., 96, 97

Ribbentrop, Joachim, 118 Richard (Soviet agent), 150-51 Rockefeller Foundation, 90 Roessler, Mr., 158-59 Romania, 11,169, 171, 233 Rompe, Robert, 182-83, 195, 224 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 75, 123; F » 76; Soviet Union, 56; Yalta, 163 Rosenberg, Marcel, 94, 109 Ross, Mike, 52 Rote Kapelle (Red Chapel), 15657, 158 RUP, 132 Russia. See Soviet Union

RED PAWN Stalin, Joseph, 10, 12, 15, 40, 41, 68» 153» 256; anti-American line, 192; Bolsheviks, 156; Browder, 191-92; death, 16, 222, 225, 229, 232, 237, 245; F., 14, 105, 130, 257; hatred of, 96-97; he“«» 237-38; Hit­ ler, 207; Humbert-Droz, 153, 154; Hungary, 169; industrial­ ization campaign, 95; intelli­ gence cooperation, 158, 159, 160; Khrushchev, 15; Krivitsky, 93; Nazi Non-Ag­ gression Pact, cost of, 119; postwar efforts, 198; power, 41; principle, 207; purges, 204, 227; Russia First line, 69, 153; Tito, 191,194, 206; Trot­ sky, 95, 207; Yalta, 163; Zhu­ kov, 183 Stalingrad, 161 Standley, Admiral, 78 Stockholm Appeal, 2 Sudetenland, 115 Sullivan, Mark, 53 Svab, Karel, 232 Sverma, Jan, 232 Svermova, Maria, 232 Sweetser, Arthur, 99-100 Swiatlo, Jozef, 201, 204, 238-40, 241, 242, 243; defection, 23839, 241; Field, Hermann, 240 Switzerland, 20, 21, 78, 89, 98; ArbeiterhUfwerke, 167; Army, 159; communists, 94, 140-41, 142, 143, 150, 151, 152, 162, cells, 156; escape route to, 147; espionage, 140, 149 ff; F., 60, 138, 139-41» 147- 48; Free German Committee, 172, 227; neutrality, 23-24; OSS (see Office of Strategic Serv­

281

ices); Schweizerdeutsch, 23; World War I, 23-25 Szalai, Andres, 205, 213 Szçenyi, Dr. Tibor, 152, 171, 205, 206, 212, 235, 251; execution, 213

TASS (Soviet news agency), 52 Tempi, Herta “Jo,” 18-19, 131-34, 136, 137» 138, 140, 166-67, 172- 73, 174, 233; F., 177, 178, 179; “1 U.S., 174,175-76 Tempi, Raoul, 132 Teubner, Hans, 225 Thaelmann, Ernst, 20 Thayer, Judge Webster, 29 This Deception, 60, 69, 73 Thomas, Mr., 219-20 Thompson, Big Bill, 39 Thomeycroft, Kate, 116, 117, 119. See Field, Kate Thomeycroft Tito, 108, 170-71, 206, 208; Amer­ ican military support, 161; partisans, 160-61; Stalin, 191, 194, 206, 207 Todd, Larry, 52-53 Togliatti, Palmiro, 153 Trotsky, Leon, 95, 207 Troyanovsky, 56 Tukhachevsky, General, 96, 109 Ulbricht, Walter, 20,155,172,186, 225 Unitarian Service Committee (USC) 127,133-34» 141» 144» 145, 194- 95» 212; Bulletin, 147-48; communist use of, 173- 80; F., 167-69, 180, 182, 190; Geneva office, 149, 152; Paris office, 166-67, 172-77 Unitarians, 127-28, 130, 137, 144-

45

United Front, 65

282

RED PAWN

United Nations, 80, 227, 255; UNRRA, 230 United Press, 254 United States, 26, 30, 38-39, 4042, 47, 55; aid programs, 126, 129, 166 ff; Bonus March, 4546; Bulgaria, 200; commu­ nism, 37, 42, 43, 55, 56-57. 59, 62, 192, 193, 214, F., 6567; Depression, 39, 40, 43, 45, 54, 265; Hitler supporters, 75-76; isolationism, 34, 75, 98, 100, 193; League, 99100; naval power, 39, 5-5-3 formula, 77; New Deal, 265; Soviet Union, 42, 55, 56, 142, 171, 192; Tito, 170; World War H, 141. See also Wash­ ington, D.C. U. S. Agriculture Department, 52, 56- 57. 56; Ware cell, 56-57 U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, 141, 239, 247, 263 U. S. Navy Department, 32, 78 U. S. State Department, 31-32, 42, 56, 87; F.: opinion of, 47, 66, 81-82, 83, 121, 122, 123, 142, disappearance, 199, 216, 24041, 243, 246; Hitler, 83-84; League, 81, 83; officers, 44; Soviet Union, 42, 56; Wallach, Erika, 249, 250 U. S. Supreme Court, 57 U. S. War Department, 32 University of Geneva, 149 University of Leipzig, 196 University of Prague, 196 USC. See Unitarian Service Com­ mittee Vandenberg, Arthur, 75 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 29 Versailles Treaty, 42

Vieser, Herta, 25, 28. See Field, Herta Vltava Riva-, 6 Vogeler, Robert, 214 Von Pauhis, General, 161 Waldrop, Frank, 40 Walker, James, 39 Wallace, Henry A., 56 Wallach, Erika Glaser (foster daughter), 9, 216-22; appear­ ance, 9; arrest, 249; Bauer, 140, 144, 218-19, 220; char­ acteristics, 222-23, 251; de­ fection, 250; disappearance, 10; imprisonment, 13, 15, 222-23, 225, 248-49, and re­ lease, 13, 16, 249-51. See Glaser, Erika Wallach, Robert, 10, 189, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 249, 250 Walter, Francis, 250 Ware, Harold, 56-57 Washington, D.C.: Bonus March, 45-46, 69; color prejudice, 37-38; "cross-fertilization,” 57; "Little Red House on R Street,” 52; reformers, 59; Roosevelt, F. D., administra­ tion, 51-57 Washington Post, 234 Webb, Beatrice, 89 Webb, Sidney, 89 Weiterer, Maria, 136, 225 West Germany, independence, 187 Whalen, Grover, 41 Wilson, Hugh, 83 Wilson, Woodrow, 24, 28, 34, 42 Wirt, Dr. William, 52-53 World Peace Congresses, 196-97 World War I, outbreak, 23 World War II, 2, 146,158-60, 163, 208, 209, 265; aftermath,

RED PAWN World War H ( confd)

283

Young, Marguerite, 43, 44, 60, 62, 164-65; Normandy invasion, 67 170; occupied countries, com­ Yugoslavia, 108, 136, 140, 160-61, 170-71; Soviet Union, 191, munist resistance organiza­ 206-7; U.S., 213 tions, 121; outbreak, 120; Paris liberation, 165-66; ref­ Zhukov, Marshal, 183 ugees, 124 ff Zilliacus, Konni, 230 Zurich, Switzerland, 21-26, 88, 89; Yale University, 57 Concilium Bibliographicum, Yalta Agreement, 163 22, 26; Pestalozzi School, 23 YMCA, 90, 127, 144