I can take no more. I am returning to freedom . . . back to Lenin, to his teaching and cause.
—Ignaz Reiss
CRISP WHITE SAILBOATS sliced the choppy waters of Lac Leman as the long, low wail of a foghorn signaled the arrival of the ferry carrying passengers from the French to the Swiss side of Geneva’s lake. The sober birthplace of Calvinism, Geneva strikes the visitor as cleaner and more orderly than any other European city. When Noel and Herta Field arrived in 1936, they might have been jarred by such a placid place in the sea of European turbulence. But Geneva aspired to be more than a picturesque town in the Alpine foothills. The flags of all the feuding nations snapped in front of the Palace of Nations, the hope-filled fortress against the next calamity. Tragically missing from this colorful display at the League of Nations headquarters were the Stars and Stripes.
Noel and Herta inhaled the bracing air, a nostalgic reminder of their Swiss childhoods. It was sweet relief to be far away from Washington, with all its moral and political confusion. The Fields soon settled in Vandoeuvres, a spotless village perched above Lake Geneva, featuring a simple Calvinist church with a plain wooden steeple and an inn named Restaurant du Cheval-Blanc that served dull Swiss fare and good beer. Skiing weekends in nearby Chamonix reconnected Noel to his childhood love of the Alps. With Herta keeping house, theirs was the very picture of an orderly, petit-bourgeois existence. The reality of their lives could not have been further from that misleading surface.
“Ruddy faced, tall, good clean features,” a colleague from those days at the League, Wallace Carroll, recalled Noel, “a man everybody liked.” With his gentle, almost whispery voice; his unassuming, flawless manners; and his deceptive, wide-open gaze, Noel was a helpful, hardworking colleague and pleasant neighbor. As at the State Department, Field soon had a reputation as an excellent draftsman and a first-rate bureaucrat in the League’s increasingly irrelevant Disarmament Section. “But when we got into League politics,” Carroll recalled, “in bull sessions, he seemed so naïve, so trusting. He got teased a lot; ‘You big dumb Swiss,’ they called him.” It was the perfect cover.
Paul Massing soon called on the Fields. “Noel wasn’t introduced to Ignaz Reiss immediately,” Massing said. “That was normal for the Soviet apparatus. Agents were often left to sit around for months, even years, before Moscow gave them an assignment.” Though he was thirsting for a chance to do something, to be active, to help, Field didn’t complain. Meanwhile, he did what he could for the Soviets. “All Field had to do was to pass on things about the League to me,” Massing recalled. “The Russians always wanted concrete facts. The best thing was if you could steal the original document. They liked that much better than photostats. Noel was eager to give me all the gossip.”
In the age of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—and in the absence of the United States—not much of substance was decided inside the splendid Palace of Nations. Still, Noel continued passing Paul scraps of intelligence, whatever he picked up in the corridors and conference rooms. What mattered was keeping the line to Moscow open.
That summer, the Massings and the Fields, including Noel’s mother, Nina, vacationed together, driving through Switzerland and into France. Massing even enlisted Nina Field as a Soviet courier in Germany. It was a dangerous mission for a Jew or a Communist, but Nina, a spry, silver-haired Quaker, was unlikely to arouse suspicion. Though not a Communist, and unaware of her son’s real affiliation, Nina, guileless and earnest, was as eager to serve as her son.
In late 1936, a portly, carefully dressed man rang the Fields’ doorbell in Vandoeuvres. Ignaz Reiss—the agent painted by the Massings in heroic colors—changed countries and identities as others change their shirts. The bon vivant Reiss spoke half a dozen languages with the thick accent of his Galician origins. A man whose obvious pleasure in life belied a diamond-hard commitment to Communism and to Lenin, Reiss’s charge was gathering intelligence on the Nazis’ war preparations. As he traveled across Europe on false passports and lived illegally in Paris, Reiss never lingered anywhere.
A chasm of cultures and styles yawned between the earnest American and the tough, worldly European Bolshevik. The chemistry between them was toxic. How can America call itself great, Reiss teased the Fields, when it has no cafés? The Fields saw no humor in such flippancy. Later, Noel dubbed Reiss “der Dicke,” the Fat One, and called him a “Philistine.” Reiss found Noel “neurotic” and “untrustworthy.” Thus unimpressed, Reiss did not raise the prospect of the longed-for “important assignment.”
Noel, however, was too valuable to be dropped by Moscow on the basis of one master spy’s poor impression. The Massings’ next choice to connect Noel to the Soviets was another Old Bolshevik. Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet citizen, had fought in the Russian Civil War and held the rank of general. Since 1935, Krivitsky had been operating as chief of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe. Running offices and agents in many capitals, the wiry general chose The Hague as his headquarters. There, under an Austrian passport, Krivitsky made his living as a dealer in rare books.
Though neither Field nor Krivitsky ever described their first meeting in much detail, subsequent events imply that it went better than the disastrous Reiss/Field rendezvous. Krivitsky and Field could at least tolerate each other sufficiently to collaborate. They had no choice: Noel was needed to help put out a fire in the closely watched ranks of Stalin’s European agents.
The man whom Noel had dubbed the Fat One had “turned traitor.” Ignaz Reiss was appalled at the news seeping out of Moscow. Between 1936 and 1938, show trials were Stalin’s instrument to wipe out potential rivals and all those who disagreed with him. Reiss was revolted by the image of Lenin’s most trusted generals and closest comrades reduced to cringing supplication, begging for mercy. He couldn’t silently abide Stalin’s break with Lenin’s legacy by introducing the death penalty for Communist Party cadres. He recalled Lenin invoking the fatal example of the Jacobins in the French Revolution when he barred the execution of Bolsheviks. Expel heretics from the party, imprison or exile them—but no Communist should be put to death for political offenses! Now, pronounced “fascist, mad dogs, and wreckers,” Stalin’s victims were led to firing squads or the gallows, including the two chiefs of the Comintern, the organization to which Reiss, the Massings, Krivitsky, Willy Münzenberg, and Noel Field all reported. Stalin’s chief rival, Leon Trotsky, in flight in Mexico, was beyond his reach—for now. Reiss observed all this with a slow-rising burn. Stalin was destroying the revolution for which he had sacrificed everything.
In an almost unimaginably bold move, Reiss wrote a letter of protest to Stalin himself. “I have gone with you up to now,” Reiss wrote, “not a step further. Our paths part! Whoever keeps silent now becomes an accomplice of Stalin and a traitor to the cause of the working class and socialism.” In a postscript, Reiss added that he was returning the Order of the Red Banner he received in 1928, since Stalin was now giving such awards to murderers.
The letter, from a legendary agent, was a thunderbolt in the Soviet underground. It also sealed Reiss’s fate. Reiss could not be allowed to escape. If he started talking, all his agents would be exposed. “If [Field] is compromised in connection with [Reiss’s] disclosures,” Itzhak Akhmerov, the NKVD’s New York station chief, wrote Moscow on August 15, 1937, “apparently [Duggan] will be frightened and will want to break contact with us.”
Now, finally, Noel received his assignment. He was enlisted in the plot to assassinate the “traitor.” Late one evening, in August 1937, Krivitsky called Field and summoned him to an urgent meeting. Noel meekly protested. The Fields were hosting a party at their home. Krivitsky insisted. We must leave immediately for Paris, he told Noel, who agreed and made his excuses to his guests. The general and his agent drove through the night, arriving in Paris in the early hours. “Krivitsky took me to a café,” Field recalled, “where he introduced me to a Soviet agent. . . . Later, when I went to Moscow I learned that he was a high NKVD official. He wore the Order of Lenin.” In the café, Noel faced Solomon Shpigelglas, who was in charge of the Reiss assassination. Reiss, Shpigelglas told Field, could compromise dozens of agents—including Field himself. “He has to be eliminated.” Field was instructed to return to Geneva. “If Reiss contacts you,” Shpiegelglas told him, “inform us immediately.” The Soviet agent then asked Field if his wife could be trusted with such an operation. “Having received my positive answer,” Field recalled, he was told to welcome the renegade warmly, and immediately contact a Soviet agent named “Max.” Field agreed to his part in the assassination. Max drove Noel back to Geneva, and, in the days ahead, stayed close.
On the night of September 4, Reiss, fleeing his former comrades, his wife and child hiding in the Swiss countryside, left a quiet inn in the sleepy village of Chamblandes, near Lausanne. An old friend and fellow agent, Gertrud Schildbach, had lured him to the rendezvous. Reiss trusted Schildbach, who feigned disgust with Stalin. As the two walked along the lakefront, shots rang out. Reiss lay dead, twelve bullets in his back. Schildbach melted into the night.
The next day, Swiss papers featured gruesome photographs of a bullet-riddled body dumped by the side of the road—a scene from Al Capone’s Chicago, not the Swiss countryside.
“[Reiss] is liquidated,” Moscow informed Akhmerov on September 11, adding, ominously, “but not yet his wife. She knows about [Duggan]. . . . We are not aware of what steps she will take in the future. . . . This does not mean that you should work [Duggan] over any less strenuously. . . . Who could influence [Duggan]? First of all [the Massings]. Second of all [Field].”
“For the time being,” Moscow Center informed its New York agent on November 9, 1937, “[Field] has not been tarnished in connection with [Reiss] so everything is fine from that end—for now.”
Noel had passed his first major test. Though his part in the assassination was more passive than active, he had shown his willingness to do Moscow’s bidding—even as an accessory in a comrade’s murder. He had demonstrated his absolute loyalty to Stalin. “I helped arrange the assassination of your great friend,” he later boasted to the Massings. “He was a traitor,” Noel flatly asserted. “He deserved to die.” The Quaker youth who had once proudly proclaimed to Allen Dulles that his ambition was to bring peace to the world, and had written to his mother of his goal “to be a light which will brighten the path for others” a decade earlier, had made a very long journey indeed.
In Washington, Larry Duggan’s torment deepened. As chief of the State Department’s Latin America Division, Larry planned a trip to Mexico to visit the artist Diego Rivera, an old friend who sheltered Leon Trotsky. This meeting caused consternation in Moscow. “I warned [Duggan],” Akhmerov wrote Moscow on September 28, 1937, “that they might attempt to brainwash him . . . I did not think it was possible to tell [Duggan] not to visit Rivera because he could see it as pressure, as well as lack of trust on our part.”
Duggan, Field, and Hiss were never on Moscow’s payroll. They betrayed their country out of conviction. However, Moscow occasionally provided small inducements, rewards more subtle than financial ones. On January 26, 1938, for example, Soviet agent “Jung” wrote to his superiors requesting “one or two paintings with revolutionary content [for Duggan], preferably reflecting the lives of workers. . . . Such paintings are hung here in fashionable bourgeois salons. As you know, [Duggan] refuses to accept any gifts from us. My wish is to bring him a birthday gift, rich in content, with the aim of developing our friendship.”
Field could rationalize that as a League of Nations official he was no longer spying on his own country. Larry Duggan could not thus deceive himself. He was a tortured soul, alarmed by reports of the Moscow show trials. “He says he just can’t wrap his mind around the events in the Soviet Union,” Akhmerov cabled Moscow on March 1, 1938. “He believes that something is fundamentally wrong and that there can’t be so many [Communists] who have become traitors.”
At the State Department, a new, tougher mood prevailed. There was a growing awareness that those “naïve idealists,” Field and Duggan, might have been up to something. “[Duggan] was summoned by the Assistant Secretary of State,” read Akhmerov’s cable to Moscow on March 7, 1938, “who told him that the present situation was exceptionally serious. State Department employees are supposed to be irreproachable and loyal to the US government. Duggan says that this was a direct and serious warning. . . . He feels he is being investigated. He says a couple of days ago, a suspicious man dressed as a heating system repairman came to his house when he wasn’t there. . . . He thinks it was one of [J. Edgar] Hoover’s agents.”
“Duggan is very nervous and frightened,” the cable continued, “and asked for the meetings to stop for a few months.”
But Moscow would not so easily release such a well-placed and, heretofore, accommodating agent. Three months later, on June 28, 1938, Akhmerov cabled Moscow, “I explained to him the exceptional significance of his help precisely at this time. How fascism and fascist imperialism is brewing world war . . . how by helping Hammer [the Soviet Union] he was helping the world working class and progressive humanity in general. On the basis of all this, I asked him to renew our collaboration and to do everything to benefit our mutual cause.” Pressure from both sides was bearing down on Larry Duggan.
Duggan could not steel himself to break all ties with Moscow. On February 7, 1937, he met with Agent “Granite” and bared his troubled soul. “[Duggan] can’t make sense of the events taking place in the USSR,” the Washington-to-Moscow cable reported. “He is very troubled by the charges against Trotskyite-Fascist spies in every industrial branch and government institution. People he learned to respect have turned out to be traitors to their homeland and the socialist cause. . . . How could such prominent people fall into such an abyss? What would happen to him if there turned out to be a ‘fascist spy’ in the State Department who would unmask him? . . . It troubles him and keeps him awake at night,” Granite added. “He wants to cut ties with us and try to get involved with the [legal] American Communist Party.”
But, as Ignaz Reiss learned the same year, leaving Stalin’s secret service was a hazardous operation. “I spoke with [Duggan] for six hours straight,” wrote Granite, “and explained to him the USSR’s global position and the . . . capitalist encirclement that sends thousands of spies into the Soviet Union. . . . The extermination of these traitors only strengthens the nation and its army immeasurably. . . . The country is united as never before around the Party and the government.”
Granite was a skilled agent—and much tougher than his quarry. “Gradually,” Granite wrote his bosses in Moscow, “[Duggan] agreed with my arguments.” The Soviet agent had one argument more powerful than any other. “I told [Duggan] that he would have to decide once and for all whether he will stand for socialism and progress, or cross over into the fascist and reactionary camp. He agreed that of course he will remain in the first category and agreed that his proposal had been poorly thought out.”
“Let’s forget my temporary weakness,” Duggan conceded at the end of six hours of relentless argument, “and continue our work together. But,” he added, “if there is another purge in the highest circles of the government, I simply won’t be able to continue our work.”
“And so,” Granite concluded, “we were back at the beginning . . . but the whole time, I could feel an ambivalence.”
Despite his ambivalence—and his mounting fears that he was within an inch of getting caught—Duggan continued to spy. “I meet [Duggan] in the evenings at a decent, quiet, bar,” his new control, Jung, reported to Moscow on April 8, 1938, “or he picks me up in his car. We drive to a dark neighborhood, and talk in the car. He gives me telegrams from the [department] during the day, on his lunch break. I photograph them and give them back to him within an hour and a half . . . as he has to return them to the Department the same day.”
On February 10, 1939, Duggan suffered another shock. Jung reported that Larry “arrived at the meeting without his car, looking very sullen and broken hearted. He said he had left his home through the back door, taken a taxi, and gone to the cinema before coming to see me. . . . Undersecretary Sumner Well[e]s called him into his office and told him that the Department had intelligence confirming Duggan collaborated with Hammer [the Soviet Union] passing classified documents to a Kremlin agent.” Find another job, Welles advised his friend. “[Duggan] said he is completely isolated.” If the Soviet cable is accurate, Welles’s reaction to Duggan’s “collaboration” seems astonishingly tepid. Welles seemed more interested in protecting Duggan than in rooting out Soviet espionage in the State Department.
Moscow, however, would not release Duggan. “[Duggan] repeatedly and earnestly asked to sever all ties with me,” Jung wrote in the same cable. “I tried my best to convince him to meet with me if only two or three months from now. . . . He practically begged me not to do this, telling me not to put him in the unpleasant position of forcing him to say he can no longer meet with us.”
Astonishingly, despite a mountain of evidence piling up against him in the newly security-conscious State Department, Larry Duggan’s friends in high places—including the secretary of state—still supported him. “According to the New York Times,” Akhmerov, now in Moscow, wrote, “[Duggan] has been appointed personal advisor to [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull. . . . He has access to absolutely all of the State Department’s information.” The cable closed with this ominous two-word command: “Activate immediately.”
The despairing agent was duly “reactivated,” spying for Moscow from 1940 until 1944, the crucial war years. Duggan’s torment, however, never abated. In early 1941, “he asked me not to call him anymore,” Agent “Glan” reported. “He said that despite the fact that the FBI were still ‘like children lost in the woods,’ in matters of counterintelligence, nevertheless he knows for a fact that all the phones in Washington are tapped.” Duggan continued to meet his Soviet minders, sometimes in a place not famous for privacy: the exclusive Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue.
Noel’s new contact, General Krivitsky, could not accommodate himself to Moscow’s growing brutality against its own. For him, it was personal. Ignaz Reiss had been Krivitsky’s oldest comrade-in-arms. They had started together as young partisans during the Bolshevik revolution. Now Ignaz was dead, and his wife and child were in hiding. Krivitsky had not been as willing an accomplice as Noel was prepared to be in that murder. He, too, would now be suspect. Krivitsky began to plan his own defection from the party—and with far greater caution than Reiss, whose provocation of Stalin was deliberate and public. The general quietly asked for and received the protection of French security services. Then he applied for political asylum in the United States.
Like Whittaker Chambers at around the same time, Walter Krivitsky used publicity as his shield against Stalin’s vengeance. Chambers went public with his confession of treason, then joined Time magazine as a high-profile editor. Later he wrote a well-regarded autobiography and was embraced by such anti-Communist politicians and luminaries as Richard M. Nixon and William F. Buckley Jr.
Krivitsky followed a similar escape plan, becoming the first of Stalin’s defectors to reach out to the American media. With the help of a ghostwriter, Krivitsky exposed Stalin’s rule as just another form of totalitarianism. “Why Did They Confess?” was the title of one of Krivitsky’s Saturday Evening Post articles. “Stalin,” wrote his former agent on June 17, 1939, “has for years been reducing his potential rivals to a condition of desperation through super espionage.”
“Soviet show trials,” the latest “turncoat” wrote, “were not trials at all, and were nothing but weapons of political warfare. . . . The Old Guard leaders were so crushed they seemed shadows of their former selves.” The general had thrown down the gauntlet to Stalin, but he was in New York, and under police protection. He thought he had a chance.
Krivitsky’s defection posed a direct threat to his erstwhile agent, Noel Field. In 1939, Noel returned to the United States, partly to see his ailing mother, partly because of Stalin’s latest “traitor.” “I made a one- to two-day detour,” he recalled, “first of all to meet Hiss. I knew from the newspapers that Gen. Krivitsky was hanging around Washington, and I had to count on the fact that he could betray me. . . . Since Hiss knew all about me, I had to tell him that I was in danger, because of a traitor. We agreed that if he heard anything, he would send me a warning under a cover name.”
Field’s reference to Krivitsky as “traitor” strikes an ironic note from a man actively betraying his own country. By 1940 Noel had quit his increasingly futile post in the Disarmament Section of the Palace of Nations. Suddenly unemployed, “I received a telegram from Alger,” Noel recalled. “Hiss, then in a high post at the State Department, had recommended me as an assistant to the newly appointed governor of the Philippines [Francis Sayre]. . . . A secret battle was going on all around me. Duggan, Hiss and others supported me.”
Despite Hiss and Duggan’s energetic efforts on Noel’s behalf, the 1938 HUAC testimony of J. B. Matthews, claiming that Field had been a Communist as early as 1928, continued to impede Field’s job prospects. He was turned down for the Philippines post.
Field’s troubles were nothing like Larry Duggan’s high-wire act as a Soviet agent in Washington. On February 2, 1942, Duggan told Agent “Mer,” “A month ago [Adolf] Berle [charged with State Department security], after drinking a good deal of wine, reminded [Duggan] about his affinity for left elements. [Duggan] says that as long as Berle is with State, [Duggan] will not be able to get ahead. At present he is working on Mexico and oil related questions and he promised to tell us everything he knows. We agreed to meet once a month.”
On November 26, 1942, Moscow cabled this stern message to Agent Glan: “You need to take a firmer stand with respect to [Duggan]. Make him understand that he is in fact our agent, that this is not his first year working for us, that he gave us valuable documentary materials in the past and that we now have a right to demand from him, at the very least, some valuable oral information about important issues.” Our bond, Moscow reminded the now wary Duggan, is unbreakable.
Two years later, Duggan thought he found a way to escape the tightening vise. On March 1, 1944, Time magazine, under the heading “Foreign Affairs,” in an article entitled “Going . . . Going . . .” reported, “Painters got ready to scratch another name off a State Department door. The latest resignation: genial Laurence Duggan, 38, director of the Office of American Republic Affairs, for 14 years a career diplomat, longtime friend of the recently resigned Undersecretary Sumner Welles.”
Even leaving State to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and then succeeding his father, Stephen Duggan, as director of the Institute of International Education, he could not escape. A new Moscow agent, code-named “Saushkin,” called on Duggan in 1948. After their meeting, Saushkin cabled Moscow: “Duggan, having led me to the elevator, let me know unequivocally that it was time for me to go. He had no wish to talk about anything other than the Institute and tried the whole time to keep an official tone. I got the impression that he was constantly on his guard. . . . We agreed to have dinner at the beginning of September.”
That fall, in their testimonies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley named Larry Duggan, Alger Hiss, and Noel Field as Soviet spies.
Noel Field, desperately seeking a job and a country where he would be safe from Washington’s growing interest in his record of betrayal, wrote Larry a typically disingenuous letter—meant for eyes other than Duggan’s—on November 9, 1948. “The mail brought a number of Times clippings [reporting the allegations about Duggan, Hiss, and Field]. . . . The advice I have been getting from friends and relatives ranges from bringing suit for half a million, to simply ignoring the whole thing. At the moment,” Field wrote, “my inclination is to follow the latter course and not to dignify the absurd concoction by any public denial, although I shall bear in mind your suggestion of sending a communication for the record.
“An equally scurrilous attack on me was made back in 1938,” Noel adds, in reference to J. B. Matthews’s HUAC testimony.