I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars.
—Edmund Wilson
The only form of strength in the weak and wavering is fanaticism.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
FOR TEN YEARS, with declining conviction and growing doubts,” as Noel later described his conversion to Communism, “I tried to do my share within the framework of American policy. . . . Many an inner conflict had to be fought out and overcome before the pacifist idealist—a typical middle class intellectual and son of a middle class intellectual—could become the militant communist of later years and the present.”
Communism—like his original Quaker faith—eased Field’s guilt for his privilege amid so much misery. Like the Quakers, Communists encouraged self-sacrifice on behalf of others. The austere Quakers, however, were no match for the siren song of the Soviet myth: man and society leveled, the promise of a new day for humanity. Communism also offered a tantalizing dream: join us to build a new society, a pure, egalitarian utopia to replace the disintegrating capitalist system, a comradely embrace to replace cutthroat competition. Then, too, in embracing Communism, Noel felt he could deliver on his long-ago promise to his father to work for world peace.
Another convert of the same disillusioned generation, Arthur Koestler, described the process: “To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows. The new light seems to pour across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic in one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past—a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know.”
“From 1927 onward,” Field wrote, “I gradually started to live an illegal life, separate from my official life.” It was thrilling to be in on a secret, to fool those smooth careerists rushing past him—thinking they knew Noel Field! They were all wrong. “There were occasionally charges made against me,” Noel recalled. “My colleagues smiled at these suspicions, and noted that I was merely a ‘naïve ideologue’ whose ‘youthful indiscretions’ should be forgiven.”
Noel’s friend Ben Gerig recalled a dinner at the Fields’ apartment. In the middle of an argument, Noel jumped up from the table to root around a coat closet, where, under a pile of old clothes, he kept back issues of the Daily Worker. An amateur’s mistake. Eventually, secrecy and duplicity would come as naturally as breathing.
“I browsed around the Communist Book Store,” he wrote Herta on January 6, 1929, during a trip to New York, “and bought myself a $2.50 ticket for the evening festivity in honor of the 5th anniversary of the Daily Worker. . . . I felt thrilled the moment I got in. . . . Every seat and standing space was filled by an eager audience—mostly Jewish workers. W. Z. Foster (Bolshevik candidate for President) sat in my row, just a few seats from me. . . . The revolutionary dancers were inexpressibly beautiful. . . . The audience simply forgot itself and yelled and stamped. . . . For once, I felt myself a ‘comrade’ among that enthusiastic workers’ audience. I saw visions of Moscow with its peasant worker theaters, and of the future, the distant future which they spoke about in speeches between the dances. And they say that workers can’t appreciate beauty!” Joining with the others, Noel shouted, “Long live the American worker!” in Russian.
For the stiffly self-conscious Noel, melting into an audience of “real workers,” joined together in warm, spontaneous fellowship to the thumping beat of Russian revolutionary music and dancing, was rapture akin to what Koestler experienced. Since childhood, Noel had dreamed of being part of the “brotherhood of man.” Here, finally, he felt a “comrade.”
“Please don’t lose the enclosed program,” he wrote Herta. “Also, keep this letter!”
George Orwell described a similar enchantment a few years later in Barcelona, in the intoxicated, early days of the Spanish Revolution. “It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” Orwell recalled. “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags. . . . Every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties. . . . Nobody said, ‘Senor’ . . . everyone was called ‘Comrade.’ ”
Knowing the atrocities Stalin committed in the name of the people, it is hard for us to fully comprehend what Field experienced. His exposure to Stalin’s Russia came entirely from Moscow’s propaganda. America’s economic disintegration and its hateful bigotry Noel observed with his own eyes.
The prospect of being part of the high-voltage, transformative Roosevelt administration drew some of the brightest, most idealistic youth from across the land. Many joined the Department of Agriculture. Under Henry Wallace, the department was on the cutting edge of innovation and the reform of a sector twice pummeled: by the Depression, and by drought. An Iowa farmer-revolutionary named Harold Ware soon arrived to galvanize the bright Ivy Leaguers at the Agriculture Department. Legends swirled around Harold Ware, who, in the twenties, had rounded up a group of midwestern farmers and traveled with them to the Soviet Union. Ware tried and largely failed to instruct Soviet farmers in modern farming methods. The Iowan would prove more adept at organizing the first underground Communist cell in Washington.
“Hal Ware,” Hope Hale Davis, a member of the cell, recalled, “with his tanned, lean face, his rolled-up blue shirtsleeves showing the muscles in his forearms, might have been a farmer neighbor out in Iowa.” The Ware group—ultimately over forty members—boasted five Harvard graduates, a University of Chicago Phi Beta Kappa, and extreme youth: only one member of the group was over thirty. Electric with plans for a workers’ state, New Dealers Alger Hiss, his brother Donald, Nathaniel Weyl, Nat Witt, John Abt, Victor Perlo, Julian Wadleigh, Henry Collins, Hope Hale Davis, and Noel’s best friend, Larry Duggan—among others—formed the clandestine underground in the nation’s capital.
Ware had chosen them for their intelligence, their seriousness, and their potential entrée into the highest reaches of the Roosevelt administration. When (not if) the Communists took control in America, these revolutionaries-in-the-making felt there would be a need for men and women who knew government and politics. The Communist Party (a legal entity) was unaware of the cell’s existence; its members were ordered to have nothing to do with other Communists. Membership in the underground was a secret not to be revealed even to a husband or wife. Once a week, the group gathered in a converted coach house on St. Matthew’s Court, near Dupont Circle. Approached by a long, narrow passageway, it seemed to have been designed as a clandestine meeting place. Hung with mirrors, its walls lined with books, the studio belonged to Alger Hiss’s former roommate, Henry Collins, another New Deal rising star, employed by the National Industrial Recovery Act.
Ware provided the revolutionary magic, but a much less visible, tougher apparatchik actually ran the group. Known as J. Peters, he had a dozen other names. Born Sándor Goldberger in Hungary, the Moscow-trained Peters was a hardened veteran of Hungary’s failed 1918 Communist revolution. From the legal Communist Party USA headquarters on New York City’s Union Square, the short, barrel-chested, mustachioed Peters ran the clandestine Ware group. From the same ninth-floor shambles of an office, he also supervised a fake passport operation for Soviet agents. Peters made regular trips to Washington to impose discipline on the aspiring revolutionaries. If questioned or resisted, Peters’ jovial mood vanished in a flash. Hope Davis recalled Peters’s “thundering accusations” when she asked an innocent question about Moscow’s ever-shifting policies. Membership, she realized, made it her duty not to think for herself. Assignments to group members came directly from Moscow, and could not be challenged.
Peters had credentials to impose respect and fear, including being the author of the much-quoted Communist Manual on Organization, which, among other things, advocated “the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the establishment of a Socialist Soviet Republic in the United States, the complete abolition of classes, the establishment of socialism, and the first stage of the classless Communist society.”
The Hungarian revolutionary had two goals for “Apparatus A,” as he called the Ware group. First: espionage, the theft of government documents for copying, to be transmitted to Moscow. Second: influencing US policy by infiltrating the so-called old-line agencies of the government: State, War, Treasury, and Interior. Apparatus A was the first of a number of Washington cells and, in terms of talent and access, represented the high-water mark of Soviet infiltration of the US government. “This veritable little intellectual army,” Peters’s liaison, Whittaker Chambers, boasted, “joined the Communist Party without the Party having to exert any particular effort for their recruitment.” Peters had a sharp eye for those poised for rapid career advancement. “Even in Germany,” J. Peters said of his Washington cell, “under the Weimar Republic, the Party did not have what we have here.”
Recently declassified KGB files spell out the rules of the Ware group: “The secret apparatus created by Peters was financed by people who are entirely without Party affiliation and hence undercover.” Paying dues to the party was part of the group’s weekly ritual, “a test and a binder of party loyalty,” in Lenin’s words. Like the income tax, party dues were progressive. Alger Hiss—a respected figure in the group—voluntarily paid more than the others, changing his stepson Timothy’s school to a less expensive one so he could contribute more to the party. Named for Horatio Alger, the writer of rags-to-riches fiction, Hiss, with his aristocratic bearing, Ivy League credentials, and winning personality, seemed to embody the American dream. Few of his comrades were aware of the Hiss family’s history of loss and suicide.
For members of the Ware group, lying about their true affiliation was a sacred duty. When on August 25, 1948, Hiss swore under oath to a subcommittee of the House of Representatives, “I do not believe in Communism. I believe it is a menace to the United States,” he was doing no more than fulfilling his early pledge to his primary loyalty. But, in a way, he was telling the truth too. For Hiss was not formally a party man; he was an agent of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. He neither wanted, needed, nor sought party membership. That was for the civilians, the amateurs. Actual truth was reserved for the comrades. As late as 1939, Noel Field, in a notarized letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, swore that “I am not and never have been a communist. I am not and never have been a member of the communist party nor of any other radical organization. I have never engaged in any radical activities. By no stretch of the imagination can my brief membership in the Fellowship of Youth for Peace during my student days be considered as a ‘radical’ activity.”
Field, too, embraced unconditional obedience and the distancing of friends who were not comrades. “If a friend ceases to be a comrade,” Field said, “he is no longer my friend.” The party was the embodiment of the revolutionary idea of history, and could not be wrong. Noel encouraged others in the Field family to strike out on a radical path, though he never revealed to them how far his own radicalism had led him. “Good for thee and thy strike activities, Comrade Nina!” he wrote his mother on May 26, 1933. “Next thee will be setting off bombs on Boston Common!” he wrote, only half in jest.
By the midthirties, anti-fascism was as strong a motive in joining the Soviet underground as the original impulse, disillusionment with democracy and capitalism’s feebleness. Hope Davis’s husband and fellow Ware group member, German economist Hermann Brunck, was ordered to infiltrate the German embassy in Washington to learn Hitler’s plans in the coming war. Equally important for Moscow was binding these promising recruits to the cause—partly through faith, partly by compromising them irreversibly. “The underground agents,” Weyl recalled, “bound themselves to lives of secrecy and silence. If discovered, they would be deprived even of the small joys of martyrdom for a cause. Their role under such circumstances would be to repudiate any taint of even sympathy for Communist ideas.”
Similar Communist cells were springing up in Europe too. Koestler was a member of a Berlin cell. “One among several thousand in Berlin,” Koestler recalled, “and one among the several hundred thousand basic units of the Communist network in the world. . . . The consciousness of being one unit among millions in an organized, disciplined whole was always present. . . . Half our activities were legal, half illegal.”
In the early thirties, Noel was not yet part of any Communist cell. His Communism was based on conviction, not yet action. His closest friend, however, was a member of the Ware group. “My best, almost my only friend,” Noel said of Larry Duggan, a fellow State Department official. Duggan was the first person, other than Herta, with whom Noel shared his conversion to Communism. “Later,” Field wrote, “Hiss joined [Duggan] in this knowledge.”
Duggan and his wife, Helen, lived in the same building as the Fields, at 419 Fourth Street in northwest Washington. The two couples soon discovered shared interests, values, and a mutual disillusionment with their own country. Two gentle idealists—Noel and Larry—resembled each other in background and appearance. Larry, too, was tall, fair-haired, and pedigreed. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, Larry was two years Noel’s junior, and from a similarly distinguished lineage. In KGB files, Duggan is referred to as “Prince.” Like Noel, Duggan, too, was the son of a celebrated academic, and avid for a cause beyond his own advancement. Most important, the two men were enthralled by the example of the distant land that claimed to stand for world peace. “The repeated Soviet proposals for complete disarmament,” Noel wrote, “thrilled me. But the Soviet government stood alone and the rest of the world laughed.”
A former small-time Viennese actress, tall and statuesque, with wavy red hair and flashing red-lacquered nails—a Raymond Chandler heroine—helped to lure both Duggan and Field into the secret life of a Soviet spy. Working out of Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, Hede Massing had been transformed from so-so actress into seasoned agent by Ignaz Reiss, a legendary Soviet spy. Reiss taught her to have eyes in the back of her head, to feel that someone is watching, to hear that someone behind you is adjusting his pace. Never be in a rush, the master instructed his protégée; never flustered, never obvious, never self-conscious. Walk slowly into a place of meeting, always with a back exit. (Hede’s favorite meeting places in New York were the public library on Forty-Second Street and the lobby of Radio City Music Hall.)
Hede’s most important lesson from Reiss was how to exploit the unspoken yearnings of young American idealists and tap their just-below-the-surface rage at their society’s injustices, which cohabited alongside their ideals. “Of the conquests I made while a Soviet agent,” Hede said, “the one I regret most is Larry Duggan. . . . Larry impressed me as an extremely tense, high strung, intellectual young man. . . . His wife, Helen, was beautiful, well balanced, capable and sure of herself. She was an attentive and loving companion to Larry. They had four young children.” Hede’s job as KGB recruiter (under the cover of reporter for the German magazine Die Weltbühne) was to stoke the intense unhappiness beneath the surface of Larry Duggan’s sweet American portrait.
Hede invited Larry to lunch. “Every decent liberal,” she told him, “has a duty to participate in the fight against Adolf Hitler.” The Soviet agent was on sure ground here. Larry agreed the Nazis were a real threat to peace—and isolationist America had shamefully tuned out the world. Emboldened, Hede soon revealed that she was a Soviet agent. “Much to my surprise,” she wrote, “he not only consented to work with us, but developed a complete plan, and explicit details of how he would collaborate with us.”
The next step, persuading Larry to steal documents from his own government, would take more lunches, more subtle persuasion. “He was not going to hand over any documents to us,” Massing wrote, “that he made clear beyond a doubt. But he was willing to meet me . . . every second week and give me verbal reports on issues of interest.” The first step was always the hardest. Hede had done her work exceedingly well. Larry was hooked.
By 1936, when Hede Massing left for Europe, Duggan was regularly turning over State Department documents to a Moscow handler named Boris Bazarov, a veteran Soviet agent newly posted to Washington as a reward for his recent success penetrating the British Foreign Office. “Duggan,” Bazarov cabled Moscow, “said that the only thing that kept him at his hateful job in the State Department, where he did not get out of his tuxedo for two weeks, every night attending a reception . . . was the idea of being useful to us.”
Another of the Fields’ circle of friends, Communist Party supporter and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, recalled hosting a picnic at his place in New Jersey. Noel and Herta, Alger and Priscilla Hiss, the Duggans, and Henry Collins were all there. “All of them the same young aristocrats,” Baldwin said, “polished and athletic and vigorous looking. Real gentlemen, lively and full of interests.” Noel’s mother, Nina, was also present, “Mama Field looked like everybody’s aunt, a wiry, thin, very active woman. She would take a dare on anything. Plunged into the icy water of our pool. She got deference from Noel, who seemed to accept that Mama knows best.”
To Alger, Noel “seemed rather British, and that appealed to me.” Priscilla and Noel, fellow Quakers, slipped into comfortable “thees” and “thous.” “Noel was always inviting me for the weekend,” Alger said. “The Fields had this little boat and they liked to drift along the Potomac and laze about. That wasn’t my idea of fun. I never went. Noel was rather incompetent with his hands and he was afraid of handling the motorboat for fear it would blow up. I guess that’s why he wanted me. Imagine anyone being afraid of such a little thing! . . . Field was a man of real sincerity, spiritual grandeur, but not a brave man.”
Much of the still ongoing acrimonious dispute regarding core values of American life—from the meaning of patriotism to the role of elites—can be traced to a fateful meeting arranged by J. Peters in 1934. That year, Peters introduced to each other two men whose names would forever be entwined and spark debate and argument well into the twenty-first century. The case of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, pitting two former friends and comrades against each other, has left a permanent mark on American politics. Hiss’s 1948 trial and conviction for perjury (he was tried only for perjury, as the statute of limitations on espionage had expired) has shadowed liberal and conservative discourse for generations. McCarthyism in the 1950s, and the astonishing rise and spectacular fall of Richard M. Nixon, can both be traced, in part, to the Hiss trial. The seemingly never-ending saga began in a cafeteria in the nation’s capital. This meeting, in a dimly lit, forgettable setting, was the decisive encounter of Hiss and Chambers’s lives. Noel Field would be swept up in its wake.
“Peters and I picked up Hal Ware,” Chambers remembered. “We drove his car to a basement cafeteria on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. There we sat talking . . . there I again heard the name . . . of Alger Hiss. I learned that he was an American, a lawyer, an exceptional Communist for whom Peters had an unusual regard, and that he was a member of the Ware group. He was about to leave, or had just left the AAA [the Agricultural Adjustment Administration], where he had been assistant general counsel, for the Senate munitions investigating committee. This change made it important that he should be separated from the Ware group at once. He would be the first man in the new apparatus, which I was to organize. . . . It was a brief meeting, for the sake of introducing Hiss and me.”
“Hiss began an intensive campaign to recruit Field and Duggan,” Chambers recalled. “He reached the point of talking very openly to Noel Field. . . . I was soon to learn just how far the two young State Department men had gone. One night, Alger reported to me that Noel claimed to be connected with ‘another apparatus.’ ‘Is it possible?’ Alger asked me in surprise. ‘Can there be another apparatus working in Washington?’ ” Chambers asked Peters what he knew of this “other apparatus.” “It’s probably Hede’s,” Peters answered. “Leave Noel Field alone,” Peters told him. “But Alger’s spirit was up,” Chambers said. “He was determined to recruit Noel Field.”
The “other apparatus,” was, indeed, Hede Massing’s NKVD—predecessor to the KGB—charged with political espionage. Chambers and Hiss worked for the GRU, Moscow’s military intelligence agency.
In 1935, Hal Ware was killed in a car crash while visiting Pennsylvania mines. “Each comrade,” Hope Davis recalled, “felt a personal devastation.” Peters now took charge of the entire Washington underground. The Hungarian ruled more by Soviet-style discipline than charisma.
In retrospect, Peters’s plan to infiltrate the highest reaches of the US government seems grandiose and almost delusional. But in the thirties—the peak period of Soviet infiltration of the upper reaches of both the US and British governments—security was lax, to put it mildly. The FBI took little notice of Peters. Its chief, J. Edgar Hoover, dismissed Peters’s activities as uninteresting “Communistic inner circles.” As the world edged toward war, Hitler and fascism were the immediate menace. Communists, in those days, were seen as just a bunch of youthful radicals posing no danger to anyone at home or abroad. By the decade’s end, Hoover bitterly regretted his early nonchalance. Partly to compensate for his prior negligence, Hoover ignited a witch hunt long past when the witches were dead.
In the early to midthirties, however, they were very much alive.