The Revolution—we loved it so much!
—Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the 1968 French student revolts
IN THE DUSTY and cluttered Union Square offices of the Communist Party USA, in New York City, J. Peters was hearing glowing reports about a young Foreign Service officer at the State Department’s West European Division. Peters’s agents observed Noel Field and noted his promise, his alienation from his country, and the fact that Field was not a man to be rushed. “He was a soul-searching, uncertain person,” Alger Hiss recalled. “Noel was a worrier.”
In 1934, Hede Massing was dispatched to the capital for the express purpose of meeting Noel Field. “Field was important enough to warrant such a trip,” Massing said. “He was rated among the rising young men in the State Department.” The timing was urgent.
The Treaty of Versailles had made a mockery of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which promised the removal of economic barriers, the reduction of national armaments, and diplomatic openness. Seventeen million people had died in World War I, and France and Britain, in particular, demanded revenge. Versailles assigned sole blame and punitive reparations for the war to Germany—uniting that country in a blanket denial of any guilt whatsoever. That left the door wide open to the Nazi Party to proclaim Germany’s absolute innocence. Hitler, one year in power, promised to restore national pride. Flagrantly defying Versailles, he was gearing up for war. Europe, its industries struggling to recover, its male populations tragically depleted, was in no mood to mobilize for more bloodletting. How would the United States—the sole power strengthened, not depleted, by the Great War—react to Nazi aggression? On this crucial matter, the Soviets were looking for hard intelligence.
Noel Field’s perch at State’s West European Division made him an ideal target for recruitment. Moreover, J. Peters preferred tall, pedigreed WASPs. Who would ever believe a well-mannered young man with deep New England roots and immaculate appearance such as Noel Field could betray his country?
A Daily Worker correspondent named Marguerite Young, who socialized with the Fields, introduced the couple to Hede. She addressed Noel in German, the language of his childhood. In the hands of such a pro, conversation flowed easily for the normally awkward Field. Hede spoke of her husband, a hero to Noel. Paul Massing had recently escaped from a Nazi concentration camp at Oranienburg and published Fatherland, the first exposé of life behind Hitler’s barbed wire. With such solid anti-fascist credentials, and under J. Peters’s careful manipulation, Hede and soon Paul Massing were in business with Noel Field.
Hede was beguiled by the “tall, long limbed, lanky Noel, with a mane of soft, slightly wavy brown hair and wide, beautiful, intelligent eyes.” Herta Field she described as “attractive . . . a Nordic-looking woman with a full-busted figure and golden spun hair,” her beauty marred by slightly protruding teeth. But it was Herta’s utter devotion to her husband that struck Hede as extraordinary. “Herta would have followed Noel,” Hede said, “if he had been a Fascist or a Tibetan monk.”
It was a gentle courtship. The Massings knew better than to rush Noel, who liked nothing better than arguing the fine points of Marxism with Paul and Hede all night. In those days, the Massings recalled, Field was opposed to Stalin’s official policy of socialism in one country, and in favor of Trotsky’s concept of a permanent revolution. “Noel was a profoundly moral person,” Paul Massing recalled. “Nazism was gaining strength. Brutality was increasing. Noel felt strongly that it wouldn’t do, just to sit around and watch. He yearned to do something about it.” Strangely, Noel never raised the possibility of using his official position to rouse Americans to oppose Hitler. By the thirties, Field was too deeply enraptured by Communism to compromise. The times demanded radical action and he did not see America moving in that direction. He had given up on his country’s will to do the right thing.
Field first of all sought Communist Party membership, an idea Moscow vetoed. “I remember so well,” Hede recalled, “how I argued with Noel about his not joining the American Communist Party,” Hede wrote. “To convince him that a man of his stature and intellectual capacity would be misplaced in the open Party. . . . It was my job to get him into my apparatus, [the NKVD].” When Noel boasted about marching with the Bonus Army, Massing was appalled. “That Noel would jeopardize his chances of staying in an important government job!” Massing said. But Noel told the story with an indulgent chuckle, as an example of his youthful, pre-Communist recklessness.
At times, Noel’s naïveté worried the Massings. “He knew absolutely nothing of practical Communist politics,” Paul said. Nor, in those early days, of how to conduct himself as a potential secret agent. One evening, after dinner, Noel told Hede he had a special gift for her. “He drove us all to the Lincoln Memorial,” she recalled, “We looked at the Memorial, and then began to walk down the steps toward the car. As we swung around, we heard Noel’s voice singing. Standing tall and straight on the top of the Memorial steps he [sang] the “Internationale” . . . at the top of his voice—in Russian!” The Massings were both touched and terrified. This was indeed reckless behavior for a fledgling spy. “Poor dear Noel!” Hede noted. “My heart went out to him.” Hede did not report Noel’s violation of clandestine behavior to Moscow.
Gradually, Noel embraced the double life. “He found it very romantic,” Paul Massing said. “He almost never slipped up in conversation to reveal his real loyalties. He was a highly disciplined man in that respect. The double life suited him. He was always a selfless, disciplined servant [of Moscow]. Noel could be strong only when he was doing what his superiors told him to do.”
Soon the Massings and the Fields—including Noel’s mother, Nina—were spending weekends together, listening to Noel’s beloved Wagner operas, boating on the Potomac. It was during one such excursion on his little motorboat that Noel brought up the name of his friend Alger Hiss. “I remember that Herta had gone off swimming,” Hede said. “Noel said he had this very close friend whom he considered a man of high ethics and moral standards, a trained Marxist . . . whom he admired very greatly.” “You know,” Field told Hede Massing, “he is trying to win me, as you are, and I am tending to be with him. I’ve known him so much longer than I know you.” “Well,” Mrs. Massing replied, “why don’t you let me meet this man?”
Noel was torn. Not between loyalty toward his own country and the Soviet Union, but between two spies working for different Soviet agencies: his friends the Massings, and his friend and State Department colleague Alger Hiss. Hiss had by then left the Department of Agriculture—though the AAA was among the capital’s most innovative agencies—for the State Department, a far more hidebound bureaucracy. Whether Hiss made the move as a result of Moscow’s urging or his personal ambition is a matter of conjecture. There is no question, however, that for the Kremlin, Hiss was of far greater use at State than at Agriculture. The fact that Hiss was in military intelligence likely also pushed Noel—a recent Quaker pacifist—to Hede’s political apparatus.
The three unlikely comrades finally did meet at the Fields’ apartment, sometime in the fall of 1935. Hede took an immediate liking to the “slender and intelligent-looking” Alger. “I could not keep pace with the cleverness of Hiss and Noel,” Hede remembered. “Later, standing by a window . . . Hiss and I had the brief but decisive talk. . . . ‘I understand that you are trying to get Noel away from my organization into yours,’ I said. Hiss asked, ‘What is your apparatus, anyhow?’ ‘Now, Alger, you should know better than to ask that. I wouldn’t ask you that question.’ ‘Well, we will see who is going to win,’ Hiss replied.”
“Then,” Hede Massing recalled, “one of us—I can no longer recall who, but the words are clear in my memory—summed up the argument: ‘Well, whoever is going to win, we are working for the same boss.’ ”
What the Massings did not share with their recruit was their growing disillusionment with Stalin. Having recently spent two years in the Soviet Union, Paul and Hede had seen the disturbing new face of the movement to which they had attached their hopes. “Not because of the hardships,” Hede noted, “but the pompousness, the hypocrisy, the lack of ethics of the ruling bureaucracy.” But, like so many others, their waning enthusiasm for Stalin was given a fresh jolt by the West’s passivity in the face of the Nazi threat. “We saw that the West did nothing [to stop Hitler],” Massing recalled. “We all believed that sooner or later the Soviet Union would have to fight Hitler. That it was the only country that would fight. So in serving it, providing it information, we were helping the Soviets to prepare for that fight. I tried to convince Noel that with all the stupidity, the ugliness in Moscow, it was a New Society which couldn’t live in peace with the Nazis and that it was an obligation to help them fight Nazism, whether you liked them or not.”
Their still-vacillating recruit frustrated the Massings. “He couldn’t make up his mind,” Hede recalled. “It was very important for him that he not work for the [Soviet] apparatus from the State Department.”
By the fall of 1935, however, the recruiters had achieved their mission. “Finally,” Field recalled, “I succeeded in surmounting my inhibitions and took on espionage for the Soviet intelligence service.” Typically, he cast his betrayal in moral terms. “I had become conscious of the fact that the task [of spying] is an honorable duty.” Noel Field had been captured and for life.
After the thirties, Noel wrote no more anguished, heartfelt letters to his mother. He had found a new family. Camaraderie and the sense of being part of a historic, clandestine movement filled the emptiness and confusion left by his father’s death and the family’s sudden uprooting.
Spying on his government turned out to be less hazardous than Field anticipated. “The mentality of the State Department,” he recalled, “was rather provincial in my days. . . . This was evident from the careless manner in which state secrets were managed. The most secret documents, sometimes in multiple copies, circulated from hand to hand.”
At first, Noel gave the Massings only oral reports—another way to assuage whatever residual guilt still nagged him. Gradually, he overcame those scruples. “I wrote brief bios of my colleagues,” he said, “I also got hold of a memo of the American Ambassador in Moscow—William Bullitt—which was sharply anti Soviet.” Noel’s sources were often his own reports, but he also stole classified documents from the West European Division and turned them over to the Massings.
Most significantly, he reported to the Massings on the State Department’s preparations for the upcoming Naval Conference in London in the winter of 1935–36. From December 9, 1935, to March 25, 1936, Noel attended the London conference and regularly passed classified reports to Paul Massing, who came to personally collect them from Field. Intended to limit the rapid growth of naval armaments, submarines, and battleships, the treaty hammered out was soon to be honored in the breach, especially by Japan (which withdrew from the conference) as well as by the rapidly arming German and Italian navies. Field and Massing spent that Christmas together in the Swiss ski resort of Arosa, where Noel drafted a detailed report on the Naval Conference for Paul to pass on to Moscow.
Herta supported her husband in his fateful new mission, as in all things. Sometimes, she transcribed her husband’s notes in a code they invented for the Massings. But Herta, intuitive rather than intellectual, was a different personality altogether. “I feel as if . . .” was how she often began sentences. Noel was the opposite. He first read everything he could get his hands on concerning a given subject, studied it, agonized, and wavered. But he trusted and relied on Herta’s common sense, something he knew he lacked. Together since early childhood, Noel and Herta generally arrived at the same conclusion. She adored—almost worshiped—him; while he, essentially a loner, was dependent on her as his closest and most trusted human contact. On matters of Communist Party dogma, she matched him in devotion and zeal. It is hard to imagine their marriage surviving had she not.
Noel had made his choice. He would work for the Massings and not Hiss. Still, Alger did not give up on luring him into Soviet military intelligence, which he considered in more urgent need of American agents. Shortly before Noel’s departure for the London conference in late 1935, Alger made one more stab at recruiting Noel.
“Our friend [Field],” Hede cabled the KGB the day before Field’s trip, “related to me the following incident of which he himself will give a detailed account to our friends overseas. Roughly a week before Noel’s departure from Washington,” Hede wrote, “Alger Hiss [whose name appears in full here, a rare breach of spy craft as Hiss is normally referred to as “Jurist,” as well as by other code names. Massing clearly did not know for certain in which apparatus Hiss served—normal Soviet procedure—or his cover name.] informed him . . . that he has ties to an organization working for the Soviet Union and is aware that [Noel] has ties as well. However, [Hiss] fears that [Noel’s ties] are not robust enough, and that his knowledge is probably being misused,” Hede related to Moscow. “Then, he bluntly proposed that [Noel] give him an account of the London Conference. Because they are, as [Noel] put it, close friends, he did not refuse to discuss this topic with him, but he told Alger that he had already delivered a report on that Conference. When Alger, whom as you probably recall I met through [Noel], insisted that he would like to receive that report himself, regardless, [Noel] said he would have to contact his ‘connections’ and ask for their advice. Within a day, having ‘thought it over,’ Alger said that he would not insist on receiving the report himself, but that he would ask [Noel] to speak with Larry and Helen [Duggan] about him and tell them who he is [i.e., which apparatus he is spying for] and give him [Alger] access to the Duggans. . . . [Field] spoke with Larry about Alger and of course about himself as well, telling him, ‘that their main task at present is the defense of the Soviet Union,’ etc., etc. and that ‘each of them has to use his advantageous position in order to provide assistance in this matter.’ Larry seemed upset and frightened and said that he had not gone so far yet . . . he is still hoping to do some work [for Moscow] of a conventional sort. . . . Alger also asked [Noel] to help him in getting into the State Department [Hiss was then working for Senator Gerald P. Nye, chairman of the Senate Munitions Committee as assistant legal counsel]. Which [Noel] apparently did.”
Field, it appears, was an eager but maladroit spy. “When I pointed out to Noel what a terrible lack of discipline he had shown,” Hede reported to Moscow, “and what a danger he had created . . . for the whole enterprise by linking three people with each other [i.e., Field, Hiss, and Duggan], he acted as if he did not understand. He believed that ‘because Alger had been the first to show his cards’ he did not have a reason to keep everything secret. Moreover, because Alger had said that he is ‘doing this for us’ . . . he thought the best thing would be to establish contact between them.”
This long cable from Hede Massing to her control officer is significant in many ways. It unmasks Alger Hiss, who, until the end of his life, denied he was a Soviet spy. It also reveals Hiss, a man of legendary self-control, to be dangerously willful in the service of the Soviet Union. Hiss wanted both Field and Duggan as part of his network, and would not easily take no for an answer. It is, finally, a startling tale of the faith three highly intelligent, superbly educated young Americans placed in a country they had never even visited, and on whose behalf they willingly betrayed their own.
Moscow was not pleased with these zealous recruits. “The outcome,” replied Hede’s Soviet control, code-named “Nord,” on April 26, 1936, “is that 17 [Field] and Hiss [and once again Hiss is identified by his actual name] have in effect been completely deprived of their cover before 19 [Duggan]. Evidently [Duggan] also clearly understands the identity of ‘Redhead’ [Hede]. And more than a couple of months ago Redhead and Hiss [his real name again] also got exposed to each other. Helen Boyd, 19’s [Duggan’s] wife [strange mix of the covert and overt here] having been present at almost all of these meetings and discussions, is undoubtedly clued in as well, and now knows as much as [Duggan] himself. I think in light of this incident, we should not accelerate the cultivation of [Duggan] and his wife. It seems that the persistent Hiss will continue his initiative in that direction.”
“We fail to see,” wrote Moscow Center to Nord on May 3, 1936, “for what reason Redhead met with [Hiss].” The home office reprimanded this unprofessional trio of spies. “As we understand it, this took place after our directive stipulating that [Hiss] is the ‘neighbors’ man’ [GRU vs. NKVD/KGB] and that it is necessary to stay away from him. Experiments of this sort could have undesirable consequences.”
“Don’t mention [Hiss] ever!” Boris Bazarov, her control officer, finally commanded Hede. “Don’t speak about him to Noel or to Herta or to Paul. Never see him again.” Alger Hiss was high value and had to be protected.
“Now for the question how to get out of this mess,” Bazarov continued. “[Noel] (en route to Europe) is isolated. [Hiss] will gradually forget about him. . . . [Duggan] could be of interest considering his position in the ‘Surrogate’ [the State Department], his wife as well, considering her connections,” Bazarov concludes. “Therefore, it is essential that we skillfully smooth over the emerging situation and steer both of them away from [Hiss].”
Further proof that—despite Hiss’s denial under oath—the story of Hede’s conversation with Hiss at the Fields’ apartment took place comes from this cable from Moscow Center on May 18, 1936. “Redhead met [Hiss] only on one occasion. She went to this meeting at the behest of Comrade Nord. After you informed us that [Hiss] has ties with the Neighbors, we did not meet with him. After meeting Redhead and speaking with her in our [Field’s] apartment, [Hiss] no doubt informed his superiors about that meeting.”
The actual damage to US interests by Field and Hiss’s spying often gets lost amid the rhetorical heat of the cultural and political wars surrounding the Hiss-Chambers case. A high-ranking State Department official and close FDR friend, Sumner Welles, when shown the documents Hiss gave his courier, Whittaker Chambers, summed up the real harm. It was not so much the cables’ content, Welles testified, but the clues they provided Soviet cryptanalysts that would have provided code breakers with texts that could be matched against intercepted telegrams. Finally, whether a man or woman betrays his country is not determined by the quality of documents stolen, but by the act itself. Noel Field may not have been a skilled agent, but his willingness to betray the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union is beyond doubt. The full story of Alger Hiss’s betrayal belongs elsewhere.
Even as he spied on his government, Noel agonized. “Was he doing the right thing? He kept asking us,” Paul Massing recalled. “I won’t spy on my own government, he kept saying,” even as he stashed State Department documents in his briefcase for the Massings to copy.
Relief from Noel’s residual doubt about the rightness of his betrayal arrived in the spring of 1936. Field jumped at a job offer from the League of Nations’ Disarmament Section. The Geneva-based League was then still a place infused with hope. Though its greatest champion, President Woodrow Wilson, had failed to persuade his own country to join the body, he considered the League his proudest legacy and the only barrier against the next world war. In the war’s aftermath, however, the US turned sharply inward—again reverting to George Washington’s counsel to avoid Europe’s entangling alliances. Now, Noel was offered a chance to actually work toward his boyhood dream of world peace. Moreover, the Geneva offer was a way out of his dilemma. At the League he would not be betraying his own country—not specifically, anyway—but merely working for the Soviets. In Field’s convoluted thinking, spying on Stalin’s behalf in the League wasn’t really spying at all. “In Geneva,” Paul Massing recalled, “there was an international situation where loyalties could be distributed as you wanted.”
“We told him to go to Geneva,” Paul remembered, “because there he could be of great use and extremely important to the anti-Nazi movement. He was being groomed as a liaison for a Soviet apparatus. Noel was not told which apparatus, however.”
Once in Geneva, Hede assured Noel that he would be contacted by Ignaz Reiss, the Soviet spy who had trained her. Reiss was the real thing: a Jew from Galicia who had joined the Polish Communist Party in 1919, and by the twenties was a highly decorated Soviet agent. In the company of Reiss and his fellow spy, General Walter Krivitsky, the Massings and others of their generation of Communist idealists forged a tight bond of shared struggle, a life of constant danger and dislocation. Jews and Communists in an anti-Semitic age, they were battle-hardened in the treacherous precincts of Vienna, Lvov, and Berlin, skilled at evading marauding fascist gangs, familiar with life in the underground. Lenin’s revolution was a success—but so far only in Russia. Reiss, Krivitsky, and the Massings struggled to ignite it in Germany and the rest of Europe, a continent increasingly enraptured by the hypnotic Austrian orator.
Lenin, however, died in 1924. Bolsheviks plotting world revolution in their clandestine cells from Berlin to Washington, DC, would soon learn that his successor, Josef Stalin, did not share their dreams for international Communism. Stalin, gathering all power for himself, regarded the likes of the Massings, Reiss, Krivitsky, Chambers, and their Old Bolshevik cohorts as dangerous dreamers. Henceforth, the Soviet Union would be the revolution’s focus, its purpose and crowning achievement. Energy expended on pursuits that did not strictly serve the Kremlin’s interest was energy wasted. The ruthless tyrant in the Kremlin had begun a new era in the history of Communism, a fact the men and women in the underground were slow to realize.
Compared to the subterranean world of hardened conspirators he fervently hoped to join, Noel Field’s world—from Zurich to the State Department via Harvard—had been sheltered and privileged. Ten years in Washington, however, had transformed him from an anxious outsider to a committed Communist. Henceforth, all other loyalties—family and country—would be sublimated to the one true purpose: serving the revolution. “Personal affections,” Field wrote, “cannot be determinant.”
The Massings had trained him as well as they could in the spy’s invisible trade. It was Field’s innate need for a guiding faith to imbue his life with meaning, however, that made him a devoted Communist. “The more irrational, nonsensical the Soviets behaved,” Paul Massing noted, “the more devoted he was. For Noel, the leaders of the Revolution can do no wrong.”