Other civilizations rolled and crumbled down, the European civilization was . . . blown up.
—H. G. Wells
WHEREVER YOU LOOKED in the spring of 1945, it seemed as if European civilization had vanished. The ancient cities of Eastern and Central Europe had been blasted into rubble—the great cathedrals, palaces, and monuments—skeletons in mountains of debris. Pitiful lines of orphaned children and shaven-headed deportees, skin and bones, streamed homeward, only to find that there was no such thing as home anymore. Everyone nursed a grievance; nearly everyone had suffered. Thirty-six and a half million Europeans were killed between 1939 and 1945, nineteen million of them civilians. Two out of every three men born after 1918 in Hitler’s Germany did not survive his war. No civilian population was spared six years of total war. With so many hearts hardened by too much suffering, pity was as scarce as food.
One hour before his death, in his final note, Roosevelt sent Churchill a terse message: “We must be firm.” Though the nation was tired of war, this time around, few Americans saw retreating from the world as a serious option, not with Great Britain on the brink of economic collapse and the rest of Europe on life support. The nation’s new and untried president—Harry S. Truman—had no choice but to confront Josef Stalin.
For Eastern Europe, it was too late. Stalin’s handpicked, Kremlin-trained puppets—ready to implement their scheme for a gradual Soviet takeover—arrived with the Red Army to East Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, and Budapest. Noel Field was eager to help rebuild the ruined East in the image of his cherished utopia. The American dreamer and the hard man in the Kremlin did not share a common vision of the future.
“I saw Noel in 1945,” Joseph Weil said, “looking older and more furtive. He’d become more guarded . . . agitatedly traveling between Berlin, Paris, and Budapest. In parting, he told me he considered it his duty to head East, to work for the People, to help them achieve their freedom.”
Desperate to join his comrades in the East, Noel had no interest in returning to his own country. Nor did he want to break ties to America, or to lose his job with the Unitarians. As usual, he thought he could have it all ways: an American who no longer shared his country’s values, who in fact was working for its soon-to-be enemy, and yet still thought of himself as an American.
Increasingly, Noel’s double life broke through the smooth surface of his deception. In a letter protesting USC’s plan to work with Ukrainian refugees, Field pointed out that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and thus America’s ally, which made Ukrainian refugees anti-Soviet and, according to Field, “only a little less reactionary than Nazis.”
Later in 1945, Noel warned his Boston employers of the danger of being anti-Soviet, a position which, he claimed, will lead to renewed war. Anti-Communism, he told them, in practice inevitably spells “fascist.” Brandishing the threat of World War III, Field was repeating the Kremlin’s warning to the West.
Summoned home to Boston by the USC, Noel, the dedicated humanitarian, dazzled even his critics. “He was the hero of the piece just then,” the Reverend Ray Bragg, soon to be the executive director of the USC, said. “A knight in shining armor. Everybody was captivated. They called him a Lincolnesque figure, a quiet, persuasive sort of fellow, very simple in expression, but moving. I came away thinking, Isn’t this a wonderful guy. He explained that the new Europe is not going to be a historical succession of the old. It would have a new orientation.”
But Noel felt a stranger in his own country. America was turning inward, losing interest in Europe. “It is so utterly different from Europe,” he wrote Erica from Boston on December 6, 1945. “I have gone from group to group with hat in hand. . . . I’ve tried to rouse interest right and left. . . . There has been some interest but mostly failures. . . . That is just one among the many disturbing aspects, as a result of which we shall go back to Europe very much sobered.”
From Boston, the Fields traveled to Mexico, where some of Noel’s Communist friends from Spain had sought asylum. “We have met some old acquaintances from Marseille days,” Herta wrote Erica on December 17, 1945. “They are most eager to return to their respective countries . . . we are also seeing some of the people we met years ago in Barcelona, faces out of the dim past.”
These letters also reveal how attached both Fields were to their “daughter.” Weil remembered a bronze bust of Erica on Noel’s desk. “We really did not know how much you had become part of us,” Herta wrote her on March 27, 1946, “till one day in the States we sort of wondered why laughter seemed to have departed from our life. It then dawned on us that you, little wretch, had taken it with you when you left. We have become terribly serious people. I can’t get Noel to produce his famous silly grin. . . .” Herta, who left behind so small an imprint beyond being Noel’s devoted partner in all things, reveals her human warmth in her letters to Erica. No doubt, too, their devotion to their foster daughter was yet another bond shared by Noel and Herta. It was also partial compensation for their decision not to have children for the sake of their great cause.
By 1946, questions about Noel’s loyalties could not be ignored by even the most credulous Unitarian elders. Field—so recently greeted as a “knight in shining armor”—was now under fire. A tense confrontation played out between Dr. William Emerson, chairman of the USC board (and grandnephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson) and Francis Henson, director of Varian Fry’s former organization, now renamed the International Rescue and Relief Committee.
“Individuals have come to me,” Henson began, “and said they had been refused aid by the USC because they were not Communists.”
“If your statements are true,” USC board member Dr. John Lothrop said, “we are done for.”
Jo Tempi, who accompanied Noel, heatedly denied the charge. “We don’t ask people who come to us for aid what political party they belong to,” she protested. “But we have limited funds and can’t help all.”
“At the IRRC,” Henson replied, “we don’t help totalitarians, either of the right or the left. . . . I fight Communism as one of the greatest dangers in the world today.”
Field—with everything on the line—seized the offensive. “You are ready to accuse me of being . . . a member of the American Communist Party and the NKVD,” he protested. “I am neither . . . [but] the Communist Party is legal. . . . In accusing me of belonging to the NKVD, however, you are accusing me of treason.”
That word brought a powerful current into the polite gathering—as Noel intended. Henson backed off. The meeting soon ended, inconclusively. For Noel’s supporters, the question of how anyone could accuse this self-sacrificing “Lincolnesque” relief worker of treason silenced any other consideration—for now.
“I would prefer to combat [the treason charge] in court,” Field wrote Dr. Emerson. Henson did not raise it again.
Field survived this round. “Emerson was a very kind, gentle man,” Elizabeth Dexter, wife of the USC’s Robert Dexter, said. “He just couldn’t believe ill of people . . . would not recognize a Communist under his nose.” Larry Duggan also came to his defense, writing Emerson, “It is distressing to find these old charges about Noel Field still being repeated. . . . They related to a time when Noel was like a brother to me, so that I feel in a position to speak with knowledge. With all the conviction in my power I affirm that to the best of my knowledge neither of the two charges is correct.” Duggan’s line was to become the standard line of scores facing the House Un-American Activities Committee. “To the best of my knowledge” was that corrosive era’s pathetic refrain. Technically, Duggan was not lying. Noel was neither a member of the American Communist Party nor—at that time—an NKVD agent. Duggan, like Field, evaded the substance of the charge: that Field, under cover of relief work, was almost uniquely serving Communists. The Unitarians continued to support their man for a while longer.
Noel’s blazing love affair with Jo Tempi having burned out, she now set her sights on Dr. Charles Joy, the head of USC European operations. “Dr. Joy was not very good looking and had an unattractive wife,” Mrs. Dexter bluntly said. “Jo made a pass at him, and he was swept off his feet. This was something quite new to him. All over Europe, there was already comment about their traveling together, having adjoining rooms, how he couldn’t keep his hands off her in public.” In an essay for the Christian Register, Joy published this embarrassing paean to Jo: “She perceives quickly the true inwardness [sic] of any problem, and elucidates it with equal ease in French, German or English. . . . She is sometimes severe with her subordinates, but they worship her in spite of it. They work as late as she does, and weep sometimes when she compels them to go home. . . . She is essentially and charmingly feminine, and sometimes craves a security that she has never since her earliest childhood known. She is the strong oak on which the weak lean, she could be the vine that clings lovingly to it.”
The enraptured reverend grew careless. The couple was sighted sharing an overnight Pullman from Boston to New York. The affair exploded in public and Dr. Joy was fired from USC. Noel continued to defend Jo, and threated to quit if she, too, were fired.
As suspicion about Noel’s Communist ties mounted, Ray Bragg—Joy’s successor—invited Noel to his home in Minneapolis. “We sat up half the night talking,” Bragg recalled. “I remember asking him—in the early morning hours—‘Noel, can a Communist—with his commitment to a class cause—be a conscientious relief worker?’ And he did not answer—didn’t argue, didn’t make any response at all. And I felt uneasy. Next morning, at breakfast, before going to the airport, Noel said, ‘That was an interesting question you asked last night. The minister of the State of Württemberg [in West Germany], who is a Communist, enjoys a very fine reputation in his relief program.’ I thought, this is no answer! Obviously Noel thought it was, but I did not. I felt his own mind was very subtle. He was trying to hoodwink me. And it annoyed me, hurt my pride.”
Noel, however, felt confident he had again outsmarted his enemies. He was excited about the prospect of heading postwar USC relief efforts in Eastern Europe. Caught between the Nazi onslaught and the Soviet “liberation,” no region was harder hit than the region between Berlin and Moscow. First, the Nazis deliberately tried to destroy a civilization they considered inferior. Then followed the equally brutal Soviet westward advance. In his memoirs, George Kennan, the noted American diplomat and historian, described the devastation. “The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience,” Kennan wrote. “There were . . . sections where . . . scarcely a man, woman or child was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces. . . . The Russians . . . swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.”
For Field, in the destruction of the old civilization, there was opportunity. “People’s democracies” could rise from the rubble. That is what he had been working toward since he joined the USC: rescuing and returning Communists to their homelands, to start the revolution of his dreams. In addition to the Paris office, Noel planned operations in East Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest. On June 10, 1946, he wrote Erica from Berlin, “This is my first long separation from Herta in years, and I’m gradually going nuts for lack of her and for lack of feminine company generally.” Erica and Herta were the twin pillars of his emotional life. “Kid,” he wrote later that year, “I needn’t tell you how much I miss you; I guess you know it without my saying it.”
On the other side of the ocean, vague rumors about Field were hardening into facts. A State Department official, Woodbridge Wallner, who had served in Vichy France, notified Bragg that Field was a “Stalinist.” “State,” Bragg said, “was eager for me to go to Europe [to investigate Field]. I asked for a visa Friday afternoon. Monday morning I had it.”
In contrast to the gutted coastal towns of Caen, Le Havre, and Rouen, Paris miraculously survived the war more or less unscarred—on the surface. But two years after the end of fighting, when the Fields picked up Ray Bragg at Orly Airport, Paris was dark and poor, and Parisians hungry. Noel, however, was in a cheerful mood. “He was at home in Paris,” Bragg said, “knew the city well. We watched the May Day procession from the Place de la Concorde. Noel translated the speeches, and then we drove up to Montmartre and ate some good cakes—hard to get in those days. We had dinner overlooking the Seine.”
Only then did Bragg reveal what brought him to Europe: to learn the truth about the USC’s European chief. “I told Noel I wanted to speak with people of the Spanish Government in exile,” Bragg recalled. “Noel said, ‘OK. I’ll go with you and interpret.’ ‘No, Noel,’ I told him. ‘I’ll get an interpreter from the American Embassy.’ Noel’s presence would have undermined what I learned. So the Embassy gave me an interpreter and I went with her.” Ray Bragg got an earful. “These Spaniards—[anti-Franco] Social Democrats—were violent in their denunciations of Noel Field and of the USC. They said that Communists got all the relief. They didn’t get any.”
“I told him, ‘Noel, you are one heck of an embarrassment to me,’ ” Bragg said, “because from every quarter, suspicion, accusations, doubts are rolling in. I can’t defend you.” Bragg said. “Noel expressed sympathy for my position. . . . His position was that Americans don’t understand that Europe in 1945 is totally different than it was in 1939, and that Europe will never be the same again. I don’t think he ever denied anything I ever confronted him with. Rather, he argued that people don’t understand that this [new Europe] is not a bad thing.”
“Noel,” Bragg said, “was essentially a decent guy. One night, I went out and bought a bottle of Hennessy cognac, and we sat up until four or five in the morning. He loved wine, and I was purposely trying to get him loosened up as we sat up drinking brandy. But,” Bragg said, “he did not.” Cognac was a feeble weapon against Noel’s decades-old Communist discipleship. “I don’t recall he said anything he wouldn’t have said otherwise.”
Bragg never forgot Noel’s chilling nondenial of the most disturbing charge leveled against him: complicity in the murder of Ignaz Reiss. “There are suspicions being circulated about you in the U.S.,” Bragg said, as he and the Fields drove through picturesque Vichy, France. “One of them is that you were implicated in the murder of Ignaz Reiss.” There was a long pause, Bragg recalled. “Herta didn’t say anything. Neither did Noel. I didn’t press it. After considerable delay, Noel just laughed. But he said nothing at all.”
The Unitarian’s most urgent problem, however, was how to contain the explosive Jo Tempi. “I had breakfast with Tempi in Toulouse, in April 1947,” Bragg continued. “I pointed out to her that she had become an embarrassment [to USC] and there was nothing she could do to correct it, so I would be very happy to receive her resignation right then and there. She said, ‘I won’t resign, and what’s more I will sue you to maintain my rights.’ I said, ‘All right. You are fired as of the last day of May.’ I’ll never forgive myself,” Bragg said. “If I had fired her as of that moment, according to French law, she would have lost all authority. But I gave her forty days.”
Forty days was long enough for Tempi to wreak havoc. “She went back to the USC office in Paris, gathered her staff and told them, ‘I’ve been fired as of the last day in May.’ ” Seventeen of her staff of nineteen offered to resign in protest. “No,” Tempi told them, “let me fire you, so USC will be forced to pay your three months’ salary.” Bragg shook his head. “Jo was a very shrewd gal. I thought she was a bitch.”
Reviewing USC’s records, Bragg found massive relief—food, clothing, and medicine—going to Communist organizations. “I never wanted to bar Communists from receiving aid,” Bragg noted, “but I found it all went to Communists. When I visited some of our installations, I was welcomed as a comrade. The meaning was political, not humanitarian.” Noel Field had fulfilled his dream of creating a Red Aid organization. But now the game was up.
“After I fired Tempi,” Bragg continued. “Noel became quite helpless . . . which led me to conclude that while Noel was USC’s European director, he was Tempi’s subordinate in the Communist hierarchy.”
What to do with Noel Field was a difficult problem for Bragg. “Lacking legal proof [against Noel],” he said, “I decided to bring Noel home. I offered him a job. But he said that he wouldn’t come home, because Larry Duggan had been so abused. So, in September 1947, I told Noel we’d pay his salary until October 31. Then he was through.”
“I should have made a much more intensive study of Noel Field’s record,” said Robert Dexter, who had urged Dulles to recruit him into the OSS. “The USC paid a very high price because I was so impressed by the Fields.”
“Dear Kid,” Noel wrote Erica on August 13, 1947, on Unitarian Service Committee letterhead. “Just a line to tell you that my service with the above organization will come to an end on September 30. What I shall do thereafter is still too early even to guess, except that both of us intend to take thorough vacations.”
Instead of a “thorough vacation,” Noel collapsed, mentally and physically. “He is being treated for stomach ulcer,” Herta wrote Erica on January 1, 1948, “gastritis and colitis, both severe. . . . Noel has not been in a very cheerful frame of mind since we left the USC.”
For a decade, the slippery J. Peters, gray eminence of the Washington cell, outfoxed an FBI manhunt. Melting into the ethnic brew of Kew Gardens, Queens, he assumed yet another identity as Alexander Stevens, small-time businessman. After years of false leads, the FBI finally tracked him down in 1949. The firebrand had morphed into a courtly Hungarian émigré in a community where almost everyone spoke with an accent. Subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Peters invoked his constitutional right to remain silent to all questions regarding the Ware group, his relationship to Alger Hiss, and the spy ring he ran on Moscow’s behalf. Deported to his native Hungary in 1949, he kept his pledge of public silence regarding his successful run as spymaster in the heyday of the Washington Communist underground. He and Noel Field would meet again, however.