Spies know things one step ahead of the rest of us.
—Tom Stoppard
NOEL AND HERTA—exhausted and shaken by their close encounter with the Gestapo—were reunited with Erica, still studying at the University of Geneva. “It’s not quite the thing,” Noel wrote his mother describing the women’s dormitory in which they made their temporary home, “me, lone male among a batch of females, from sweet 17 on up. But then, my hair is gray, my wife is with me, and Erica is our daughter, even if only foster . . . and so, at long last and most unexpectedly, we’re again reunited with our beloved child.”
Noel now increasingly blurred the lines between his two lives: humanitarian and Stalinist. Though still with the USC, he was no longer saving lives. Mostly, he was acting as a courier, carrying messages between Communists in France and Switzerland. He missed, however, the soaring feeling that easing human suffering gave him. “I think of the past with a growing nostalgia,” he wrote his mother. “For, though it was hard and often depressing, never in our lives before had we been so intensely alive.” To Dr. Joseph Weil he confided that he “would like to go to the East, to serve the people who were achieving their liberty.”
Surrounded by Axis troops in France, Germany, Italy, and Austria, neutral Switzerland was, once again, as during World War I, the ideal listening post, this time for the newly formed and blandly named Office of Strategic Services. Precursor to the CIA, the OSS was the brainchild of the swashbuckling William Donovan. Determined to build a small and efficient organization, “Wild Bill” didn’t much care who brought him the intelligence. “I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll,” he once said, “if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler.” Later, Donovan became fanatically anti-Communist, but in the forties he claimed that leftists were often the bravest spies and saboteurs. “You can have an organization that is so secure it does nothing,” he noted, “or you have to take chances.” He took chances. “Every man or woman who can hurt the Hun,” Donovan said, “is okay with me.”
All that remained was to find the right man to run covert operations—under diplomatic cover. “We have finally worked out with the State Department,” Donovan wrote FDR, “the appointment of a representative of [the OSS] to proceed to Berne as ‘Financial Attaché.’ . . . A man of a different type; a person who can mingle freely with intellectual and business circles in Switzerland to tap the constant and enormous flow of information that comes from Germany and Italy. . . . As soon as we find the man we need . . . I shall advise you.”
With his thinning gray hair and bemused twinkle behind round, professorial glasses, there was nothing of the dashing secret agent about the new spymaster. Allen Welsh Dulles looked every inch a high school physics teacher. Dulles, whose brother, John Foster Dulles, would be secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had sterling establishment credentials. He shared his boss’s view that agents and informants must be recruited from unlikely places. He still regretted passing up a chance to meet Lenin, who showed up unannounced in his office in 1917. Dulles, who had a rendezvous with his mistress, gave the Soviet leader the brush-off. “The first chance,” he recalled, “to start talking to the Communist leader was lost.” Never again would Dulles pass up a potential source—however suspect.
Dulles soon settled into a fourteenth-century row house with idyllic views of the Bernese Oberland, and a hidden back door. In his cozy sitting room, an Alpine vista to one side, a roaring fire on the other, the avuncular Dulles puffed on his pipe and coaxed information out of a growing net of informants. Based on their reports, the OSS conducted airdrops and sabotage behind Nazi lines.
In 1941, Robert Dexter, another public-service-minded Boston Unitarian, took charge of USC’s European operations. Dexter burned to do more than humanitarian work to fight the Nazis. Moonlighting for the OSS, he thought, might deliver a stronger punch against the loathed enemy. Dexter assumed that the USC’s man in Geneva shared his values and patriotism. “Come along to Berne next time,” Dexter urged Field. “Talk to Dulles.”
Allen Dulles remembered when he first met Noel, in Zurich in 1918, when the youth proclaimed his dream of bringing peace to the world. He also recalled that Noel’s father had been a useful “asset” during the past war. Many of Field’s Harvard classmates and fellow Ivy Leaguers—Richard Helms, William Colby, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Stewart Alsop, as well as such unlikely figures as Julia Child—had signed up with the still largely clandestine OSS. Noel now enthusiastically joined their ranks.
Field never cleared this new role as OSS informer (agent number 394) with Moscow. Wartime communications made such an exchange virtually impossible. Besides, Field’s comrades in the exiled Communist underground in Switzerland and France saw collaborating with the OSS as a great opportunity to infiltrate Nazi-occupied Central and Eastern Europe.
For the next three years—with Noel as go-between—these Communists benefited from OSS financial and logistical support. In exchange, they provided Dulles with intelligence from the largely Communist French and German resistance. United in fighting the “Hun,” this arrangement seemed in everybody’s interest.
In a secret internal cable to the OSS Paris office, Dulles wrote, “Noel Field, our #394, prior to liberation of France maintained close contact with an anti-Nazi German group composed of German political refugees, deserters, etc. Since November 1942, this group has been actively engaged in clandestine propaganda and sabotage, with headquarters largely in Marseille, later Paris. Thru Field we furnished part of the funds for financing this group’s activities. From Field I understand group is now continuing active work in France under the name, ‘Nationalkommittee Freier Deutschland fur den Western.’ While the group is now working largely with the Free French, Field understands they have some representatives working with our troops. It’s possible that the group contains valuable personnel for German penetration and consider it urgent that Field discuss this problem with you, and put you in touch with certain of their leaders who are now in Paris and whom he knows personally.”
Following Dulles’s instructions, OSS Paris agent and the future historian Arthur S. Schlesinger Jr. received Field—and raised an alarm. “Soft spoken but intense in manner,” Schlesinger wrote of Field, “his notion . . . was that OSS subsidize a group of German ‘anti-fascist’ refugees in France so that they could set up a Comitee de l’Allemagne Libre Pour l’Ouest (CALPO), to conduct ‘political reeducation’ in Prisoner of War camps, and recruit agents to be dropped in Germany, for espionage and sabotage.”
“Field’s [plan],” Schlesinger continued, “was obviously the extension to western Europe of the Soviet controlled Free Germany Committee set up in Moscow in 1943 behind a facade of captured German officers. Field’s list of potential recruits had a strong Communist flavor. Giving them priority seemed a poor idea,” Schlesinger concluded. “My impression in the course of several conversations was that Field’s passion for the project and his studied evasiveness about its details and political implications exceeded the reasonable bounds of innocence or enthusiasm.” Schlesinger blocked Field’s plan.
Dulles nevertheless continued to use Noel’s contacts within the exiled Communist Parties, and to fund their return to their Nazi-occupied homelands. Neither Noel nor any of the Communists supported by the OSS had Moscow’s approval for these missions. German, Hungarian, and Czech émigrés assumed that Stalin—as Roosevelt and Churchill’s ally—would be in favor of such collaboration. They falsely assumed defeating the Nazis and setting up postwar Communist states in Central and Eastern Europe to be Moscow’s paramount goal.
In 1944, Field played a minor role in an OSS mission—essentially writing a brief letter of introduction on behalf of a group of Hungarian Communists—to Dulles, with fatal consequences to one of its participants. Tibor Szönyi, the group leader, and Ferenc Vai, György Demeter, Gyula Kuti, and Andras Kalman had spent the war in precarious clandestine exile, in and out of Swiss and French internment camps and prisons. All were committed Communists, impatient to start building a people’s republic in their devastated homeland. Through OSS funding, and with Dr. Joseph Weil’s help in getting them Yugoslav Army uniforms and fake Yugoslav identification papers, they set off on their mission to Nazi-occupied Hungary. A US aircraft flew them from Naples to Bari, and then to Belgrade, finally reaching Budapest in late March 1944. In 1949, Stalin would use each detail of this heroic mission to destroy its participants.
After years of silence, Moscow had finally reached out to Field in 1943—and presented him with a dilemma. “Brook,” the contact he was promised during his Moscow trip in 1938, called. “He asked me whether my earlier political views had remained the same,” Field recalled. “And if I was willing to work for the Soviet Union again. I gave a positive answer. . . . He instructed me to break all my Party contacts, and live like an apolitical man. He also asked me to build good relationships with people at the American Consulate and other Americans.”
Moscow thus asked him to choose between work he loved on behalf of his comrades and the uncertain rewards of a shadow life as a secret agent. To befriend his former American colleagues and break ties with Communists like Jo Tempi and others was too high a price for Field. But, as usual, he equivocated. “I told this person,” Field said, “that at that moment I was not ready to give an answer. I must discuss this question with my political advisers.” The Soviet agent did not appreciate such indecision. “He sharply replied that I was probably going to discuss the matter with the Americans.” The Kremlin’s agent left, and never reached out to Noel again. Field’s next contact with the Soviet secret police would be in prison.
In his vacillating way Noel had made a choice: he was with the expatriate Communists. He did not understand that by Stalin’s lights one could not be loyal to Moscow as well as to the international Communist movement. In fact, Stalin, deeply suspicious of all Western Communists, had virtually ended the international movement. Noel Field was oblivious to these shifting Kremlin policies. He was an inactive agent freelancing in isolation in wartime Switzerland. Nor did he understand that he had just added to the Kremlin’s list of reasons to be wary of him. Krivitsky, Reiss, the Massings—all traitors—were all connected to an agent who just said no to Moscow.