How did a snake get in the tower?
Delayed in the democracies
By departmental vanities
The rival sergeants run about
But more to squabble than find out.
—W. H. Auden
ON OCTOBER 15, 1948, Field’s world was shattered. In Prague, looking for work, he picked up the New York Herald Tribune and was stunned by the headline: “Ex State Department Aide Called Red by Chambers—Noel Field Named in House Inquiry.” “Hitherto secret testimony by Whittaker Chambers, self-confessed former Communist, that an important official in the Western European division of the State Department in the 1930s was a Communist—was made public today. . . . Mr. Chambers identified the State Department official as Noel Field. He charged that Alger Hiss, then also a State Department official, attempted to draw Mr. Field into the Communist cell in which Mr. Chambers contends Mr. Hiss was a leading figure. However, Mr. Hiss failed, the witness testified, because he learned that Mr. Field was working in another (Communist) apparatus.”
Herta asked her husband if he had given Paul Massing [now in the United States] as many documents as Hiss gave Chambers. “Yes,” Noel said, “I gave him a great deal.”
This front-page outing ended Field’s double life. In his own country, Noel Field had benefited from the same bias that had shielded Larry Duggan and Alger Hiss. How could such an earnest, courteous, well-educated Quaker humanitarian be a traitor? “His colleagues still could not believe it,” Paul Massing remembered. “Even Wallace Carroll—the respected editor of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel—wrote that it was ridiculous, unbelievable, quite out of character.” “He fooled us all,” said Elizabeth Dexter. The mild, open-faced, always-helpful Noel had turned out to be someone quite different—capable of deceiving his family and closest friends for the only cause that mattered to him.
Now, without a country or a job, Field was a desperate man. Out of the question, after Chambers’s revelation, was his plan to try his hand at journalism reporting from the East for “progressive” American publications. What he most feared, however, was an FBI subpoena to testify in a New York court. “I was afraid I might harm others [if forced to testify],” he said, “primarily my friend Alger Hiss. . . . Alger defended himself with great intelligence; he had been trained as a lawyer and knew all the phrases and tricks. I, on the other hand, had no experience. . . . I did not trust myself enough to stand in front of my accusers and shout ‘innocent’ in their faces. . . . I also understood the same from a short letter from Hiss, who obviously could not write openly.”
Back in Geneva, Noel avoided places where he might run into Americans, giving especially wide berth to the American consulate. Herta now answered the phone and the front door of their apartment on the rue de Contamines.
“You may or may not have heard,” Alger Hiss wrote in a typically insincere letter to Noel on October 19, 1948, “of the irresponsible smearing of [your] name before HUAC. . . . I am enclosing [the testimony] for your information. The man seems to be unbalanced and to be given to hallucinations. There have been no further press accounts and the chances are that you will hear no more of this foolishness.”
In New York, Larry Duggan could not so easily elude the FBI. Pressed to name his recruiters and his comrades in the Washington Communist underground, Duggan withheld Hiss’s and Field’s names. In late November, two FBI agents called on Duggan at the Scarsdale home he shared with his wife and four young children.
On December 20, 1948, Duggan’s broken body was found on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk below his sixteenth-floor office window.
On Capitol Hill, Congressman Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, chairman of HUAC, did not allow this tragic event to pass unexploited. At a hastily summoned midnight news conference, Mundt revealed that Duggan had been mentioned in recent closed-door hearings, one of six State Department officials named by Whittaker Chambers. Asked by reporters when Mundt would release the names of the five others, the Republican congressman replied, “We will give them out, as they jump out of windows.”
In his eulogy, Sumner Welles, Duggan’s former State Department boss, praised the forty-three-year-old diplomat for his “high patriotism,” adding, “he typified the finest kind of public servant that the United States has produced.” Welles concluded by sternly rebuking “a handful of fanatical or unscrupulous slanderers that Laurence Duggan was sympathetic to the doctrines of the Communist Party,” concluding, “If there was ever an American who in his daily life practiced democracy as Franklin Roosevelt defined it—it was Laurence Duggan.”
Welles did not live to see his fellow American Brahmin, Exeter and Harvard graduate, and Soviet spy, Larry Duggan, exposed.
For the rest of his life, Noel Field blamed the FBI’s harassment of Duggan for his suicide. As usual, he missed the point. The Soviets never released Duggan. KGB files reveal that just three weeks before his suicide, Agent “Shaushkin” called Duggan’s office and left his name with his secretary. “Tell him Shaushkin called.”
The KGB, at least, acknowledged its possible role in Duggan’s suicide. “I do not exclude [the possibility] that . . . [Shauskin’s persistence] promoted his decision to commit suicide. . . . We can cause great damage to our country by striving to get information from old agents who are exposed, and information acquired from them . . . has no value.”
For Duggan, the acknowledgment was too late.
Increasingly, the Fields were only furtive visitors everywhere, even in Switzerland, where they had just lost their resident status. Michel Gordey spotted Noel at the Communist front “Partisans for Peace” conference in Paris’s Salle Pleyel. “I saw Noel, hanging around,” Gordey remembered, “trying to get in. He looked very bad; thin, sick, poor, badly dressed. His shirt was frayed. He had no delegate’s pass, couldn’t get in, but he wanted badly to hear the speech that was scheduled. I think it was [Soviet author] Ilya Ehrenburg. I got him in as a newspaperman.
“I didn’t have much money either,” Gordey said, “but I took the Fields out to lunch. They ate and ate, like really hungry people who haven’t had a meal for some time. Herta had turned gray, become an old woman since I last saw her. They were obviously broke and both were extremely depressed. Noel said he wasn’t making any money, was in a bad way but that he had an offer to teach American civilization at Prague University. I told him it was a very bad time to take a job in Prague—just after the Communist coup. He said, ‘But I have no other job, I’m starving and sick. They’ve offered the job with a guarantee of complete freedom in teaching. I just have to take it.’ He said I could get in touch with him at the Prague Press Club.”
In another blow, his beloved Erica followed her heart in a different direction than Noel had hoped. Though she had briefly joined the German Communist Party in 1946, two years later, in March 1948, in Epsom, Surrey, Erica married her GI sweetheart. Noel was crushed. “One of my greatest disappointments,” Noel later wrote, “was that she never returned [to the East].”
“As to ourselves,” he wrote Erica, in March 1949, “the sky certainly hasn’t brightened. I’m getting pretty sick and tired. Our friends,” Noel concluded this doleful note, “all seem to have forgotten us.”
What depth of despair prompted the once proud and ambitious man to write his foster daughter, “Do you suppose that it would be possible for Bob [her husband, Robert Wallach] to lend me some dough—maybe twenty or thirty thousand francs . . . paying him back when we come to Paris?”
“My own mood at the moment is particularly black,” he wrote Erica for the last time on April 10, 1949. “I woke up feeling just about ready to jump out the window.”