The deliberate increase in the chances of death, The unconscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.
—W. H. Auden
NOEL FIELD’S CAPTORS slapped a chloroform-soaked rag on his face and shoved him in the back of an unmarked car. He was unconscious during the drive to Bratislava, near the Czech-Hungarian border. There, dazed and unsteady, Field was handed over to a new set of agents who spoke a language the multilingual Noel did not understand. Field and his captors rode in silence until they reached the Danube bend, and Budapest’s lights flickered in the distance. Noel, however, could see none of this through his blindfold, briefly removed during a stop for the bureaucratic matter of registering the new prisoner at the Andrássy Út headquarters of the Hungarian secret police (today a popular tourist attraction known as the “House of Terror”). Field was then shoved back into the car, which soon accelerated as the driver shifted to a lower gear to grip the hairpin turns to the top of Szabadság Hegy—the ironically named Freedom Hill, one of Buda’s highest peaks. Across the river sprawled the city’s iconic Parliament, a new red star atop its cupola lighting up the black night. As the car slowed down, the crunching sound of gravel under tires signaled to the blindfolded prisoner that he had arrived somewhere. Tightly gripped by his guards, Field felt the soft spring night air. No sound of traffic or human voices broke an eerie stillness. Still blindfolded, the guards led him inside.
The Villa, as it is called, is still a place that chills the blood. Surrounded by gnarled trees, coiled with vines, its overgrown garden is littered with the rusting hulks of abandoned cars. Though it is no longer a crime scene, even today it is as if no one wants to get too close to this place. A man could scream his lungs out and no one would hear. No. 41 Eötvös Utca was one of the secret interrogation houses of the AVO—the Hungarian secret police.
When his guards removed his blindfold, Noel finally saw his jailers: expressionless, grim-faced men, the hammer-and-sickle insignia on their shoulder boards indicating they were “his” people. No doubt that for a moment Field was paralyzed by horror. What was happening? Why? As they led him up the stairs to a hexagon-shaped room with windows covered by thick blackout curtains, his guards did not treat Field as a comrade. Helpless in their grip, he was positioned at the end of a T-shaped table to face his accusers. In heavily accented German, a Hungarian barked at him. “Tell us about your spying activities for Allen Dulles!” A small man, a former tailor named Gábor Péter, was now the chief of the Hungarian secret police and in charge of Field’s interrogation. It was the first time Noel Field heard himself called a spy—not by his own country, but his spiritual homeland. A Russian officer sat in the back, silent, but in charge.
Stunned at finding himself the captive of the people he served for decades, Noel stammered astonished denials. Then the blows began. Most records of his initial interrogation were destroyed by the AVO during the 1956 uprising. There are, however, only so many ways to break a human body and crush the human spirit. From the existing records it is clear that the AVO used all the time-tested methods—sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, and relentless beatings. Field’s “coconspirators” in the same “Titoist plot” have recounted precise details of their interrogation in the same villa. Forced to stand for hours on end, Noel was repeatedly told that his role as an American spy had already been confirmed by many of the people he had helped in his humanitarian work. His torturers turned a two-line note Field sent to Dulles in April 1945—urging Dulles to support the repatriation of the Hungarian Communist exile leader Tibor Szönyi, to mount anti-Nazi resistance in Hungary, passing en route through Yugoslavia—into proof of both Field and Szönyi’s treachery. Obviously, both Field and the Hungarian Communist were Dulles’s agents.
Exhaustion and a sense that he was abandoned by the outside world were the two necessary conditions for a prisoner’s interrogation. A relay of well-rested interrogators, each eager to succeed where the agent before him failed, worked on Noel Field. “The sessions always took place at night,” said Gyula Décsi, one of Field’s interrogators. The blows stopped only when the prisoner agreed to confess to the crimes. “We didn’t have time to find out what precisely Field was guilty of,” Décsi added. The torturers were merely told that Field and his cohorts were “bourgeois careerists, without a conscience, who wanted to harm the working class,” his interrogator said. “I accepted this explanation as satisfactory.” Field, according to his friend Tonia Lechtman, a Polish “Fieldist,” “sometimes had to be carried back to his cell on a stretcher.”
One of Field’s codefendants, Béla Szász, a Hungarian Communist who returned from exile in Argentina to help build the new people’s democracy, described the method used to “persuade” him to confess to being Field’s recruit. “I stood for nine days and nine nights without food and without water.” The AVO, according to Szász, also favored “soling,” the beating of the soles of the victims’ feet with rubber truncheons.
If the show trials had been less murderous, it might be tempting to find humor in certain moments of this judicial farce. Szász was asked, “When did you meet Noel Field?” “But I don’t know him!” the prisoner protested. “This Field is in our hands,” his interrogator proudly proclaimed. “I could only shrug my shoulders,” Szász said. “I had never heard the name of Field.” “How did you come back from [Argentina]?” the interrogator pressed. “I went to France by ship, from there by train.” “Through Switzerland, perhaps?” “Yes, through Switzerland,” Szász replied. “My interrogator was so pleased with my reply that his face brightened. ‘Well, then the whole thing is simple. Field was in Switzerland at that time. When you were passing through Switzerland, Field boarded the train and recruited you as his agent.’ It was hair raising,” Szász said, “that [his interrogator] should be content with such a transparent fairy tale. When I said that it appeared unimaginable to me that anyone should permit himself to be recruited into a foreign secret service by a complete stranger on a train, the colonel shrugged his shoulder. ‘If you don’t like it, write something more convincing. . . . Write also about Field,’ ” he was ordered. This was a challenge for Béla Szász, who had never even heard of the American.
His interrogators turned every facet of Noel’s work for the Unitarians into a crime. Field was tortured into confessing that his rescue of Communists was a cover for recruiting them for Dulles and the other archtraitor, Tito. He was ordered to list all the Communists he had ever met and helped to return to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Field listed 562 names. Once he had “confessed” to being an American spy, all his contacts were considered to have been his “agents.”
As Moscow ordered other Soviet satellites to prepare similar show trials of Titoists, Polish, Czech, and German Communists Noel had known during the war (a chance encounter in a restaurant was sufficient) were soon dragged to other houses of torture in other Eastern Bloc capitals. All paid with their lives, their freedom, or—the lucky ones—merely their livelihood, for the crime of being “Fieldists.”
In a nightmare season, Field’s worst moment was when he was forced to face one of those he “confessed” he had recruited for Dulles. Tibor Szönyi, his face bruised and swollen beyond recognition, was dragged into the room with the T-shaped table. A legend in the underground, Szönyi had until a few weeks before been head of Communist cadres in Hungary. As an Old Guard Bolshevik, a non-Muscovite who had spent the war years in Switzerland, he was automatically suspect. Now, Field was ordered to accuse to his face a man he had seen casually twice before of being his agent. Field did as he was ordered. Szönyi was later sentenced to death and hanged.
On July 7, 1949, a broken and desperate Field resorted to the unthinkable: an SOS to the American embassy in Budapest. “Urgent and Secret,” Noel scrawled on a scrap of paper addressed to the American ambassador:
The undersigned American citizen swears to the veracity of the enclosed: On May 11, at 3:30 in the afternoon, the Hungarian Secret Police abducted me in Prague, and transported me to Budapest and has since kept me confined against my will with the ludicrous charges that I am the arch American spy against the East. I am undergoing third degree treatment—including beating and starvation. My wife was in Geneva but the police claim she is their prisoner too.
I request urgent intervention,
Noel H. Field
“As reference,” Field added in a postscript, “I give Allen Dulles and John Carter Vincent, Ambassador to Switzerland.”
Noel entrusted this message into the hands of a cellmate placed there to tempt him into just such an act of desperation. His SOS traveled as far as the desk of the colonel in charge of his interrogation. After this, Noel’s “third degree” interrogation picked up renewed steam. Field had, in effect, confirmed in writing his close affiliation with Dulles.
By the end of summer, Stalin and Rákosi had their confessions. “Rákosi travelled twice to Moscow to consult Stalin [during the Field case],” Gábor Péter later testified, “and informed him personally about the [Field] case. In August, Rákosi presented Stalin with the text of the indictment which he had written himself. . . . Gen. Byelkin [sic] instructed Rákosi three times a week. . . . Rákosi had to have Stalin’s consent to carry out the death sentences.”
On September 16, 1949, in Budapest’s cavernous Great Hall of the Iron and Metal Workers’ Union, the curtain rose on the show trial of “László Rajk and His Accomplices before the Peoples’ Court of Budapest.” Seated under giant portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Rákosi, seven defendants sat hunched, their beefy police guards squeezing the accused together. After their two-month ordeal, the accused no longer filled out their old suits; their collars hung loosely around their necks. But though they seemed calm—sedated for the occasion—all had the haunted look of those condemned to die. László Rajk, György Pálffy, Tibor Szönyi, András Szalai, Milan Ognjenovich, Béla Korondy, Pál Justus—and, for good measure, Yugoslav diplomat Lazar Brankov, there to connect the proceedings directly to the traitor Tito. All had been, until recently, ranking members of the Communist Party.
The defendants were charged with attempting to overthrow the peoples’ democracy on behalf of the American imperialists, and their local “running dog,” Tito. In their testimony, the accused embraced the charges and piled on others the court had overlooked. Though he had never met Field, Rajk testified, “In the Le Vernet internment camp an American citizen named Field, who was, as far as I know, the head of the American intelligence agency for Central and Eastern Europe, visited me. . . . He referred to instructions he had received from Washington that he should speak with me and help me to get out of camp and return to Hungary, to dissolve the Party and possibly take leadership into my own hands. But my contact with the Americans ended after my meeting with Field.” Rajk then volunteered a jaw dropping plot detail, “Field arrived in the camp after I had already agreed to work for the Gestapo.”
Even in this grim setting, humor occasionally made an inadvertent appearance. Judge Peter Janko asked Szönyi to identify two photographs. “Who is that?” the judge demanded. “Noel Field,” the accused confidently answered. “And this?” Szönyi shook his head. “This man I don’t know,” he said, staring vacantly at the image of Allen Dulles. “You don’t recognize Allen Dulles!” roared the judge. “Oh, yes!” the accused man hastily corrected himself. “I do recognize him. But at that time he did not wear glasses,” a fact which would have been news to the director of the CIA.
In contrast to Alger Hiss’s perjury trial at roughly the same time, no battery of aggressive lawyers defended the accused. In fact, no real evidence was presented in court at all. My parents, reporters for the Associated Press and United Press, covered the Rajk trial in Budapest. “Everybody performed a role—the judge, the prosecutor, the so-called defense lawyers, the defendants,” my father wrote, “after endless rehearsals. . . . The excessive zeal of some of the defendants was almost unreal. They accused themselves of unheard-of crimes bordering on the ridiculous. At times I thought this was their secret message to the world, saying, in effect, no sane person should believe the nonsense they were confessing to.”
Noel Field did not testify in the people’s court. To have the ravaged American appear in person and testify in English would have been too risky—and perhaps too provocative for even Stalin’s taste. But to those in the dock, invoking Noel Field’s name was their death knell.
In his summation, the prosecutor said, “Of Tibor Szönyi it was proved that during the war he became an American spy, that in Switzerland he received instructions from Noel H. Field and Allan Dulles . . . returned to Hungary with the aid of Yugoslav agents of the American spy organizations and . . . placed American and Yugoslav spies into important administrative posts in Hungary.”
“Our people demand death for the traitors,” the prosecutor concluded. “The head of the snake which wants to bite us must be crushed. . . . The only defense against mad dogs is to beat them to death.”
“Long live the Party!” were László Rajk’s final words as the hangman tied the noose around his neck on October 15. Four others went with Rajk to the gallows; another fifty followed in their wake.
Stalin’s bloodlust was not yet slaked. The show-trial producers—including Bielkin—moved to Prague next. There, two years later the same scenario, an all-Soviet production, was reenacted, with certain modifications. The Slánský affair started with the arrest of Czech Communists tainted by the double sin of Swiss exile and Noel Field’s friendship. However, for the Czech inquisition, the “crime” of Zionism (thinly camouflaging Stalin’s anti-Semitism) supplanted Titoism as the Kremlin’s new obsession. Czech prime minister Rudolf Slánský, the target, was, along with ten others accused, Jewish. Noel Field once again conveniently linked the whole sham trial to Washington. “Let us remember,” the Czech information minister Václav Kopecký intoned, “how the whole international network of Anglo-American espionage was unmasked in connection with the well-known Noel Field.”
In the Prague trials, the “master spy’s” brother, Hermann Field, played a supporting role. His 1939 rescue of fleeing Czech Jews in Poland was invoked as American cover for espionage. “Hermann Field,” read the indictment, “under the guise of humanitarian aid, recruited from among the refugees in Kraków a number of agents and turned them over, as did his brother Noel Field, to British and American espionage agencies,” adding that, “in the selection of refugee agents, the Field brothers followed two criteria. First, they must belong to the political left, and second, they should be Jews.”
More than one hundred ranking Communists were executed, and tens of thousands jailed, before the fever broke in Czechoslovakia.
No show trial was staged in Berlin. Though Noel had named three dozen of his closest German Communist contacts, the proximity of West Berlin likely made a spectacular show trial in the Eastern sector too risky, and liable to antagonize West German Communists. Instead, Field’s East German comrades from the Spanish Civil War and the Le Vernet internment camp were imprisoned or, at a minimum, expelled from the party. Of Noel’s closest friends in the East German Communist Party, one—Paul Berz—committed suicide in custody, and the other, Willi Kreikmeyer, was tortured to death.
Having performed his service, Noel Field was moved from the hilltop house of torture to the first of several maximum-security prisons in Budapest. Though he was of no further use to the party, the presence of an American citizen, never officially convicted of anything, languishing in a Hungarian jail had to be kept absolutely secret. Similarly, shooting or hanging an American was more potentially explosive than executing one of their own. Besides, why bother? There was no shortage of space in the Gulag or in the Soviet satellites’ vast network of camps and prisons. Field thus spent the next five years in solitary confinement.
When, in 1954, Field learned for the first time that his testimony led to the execution of Tibor Szönyi, he collapsed. His interrogating officer during this time (when Field was still in jail but fighting for a new hearing), Major Arpad Kretschmer, also interrogated my father the following year. Kretschmer told my father that Field suffered a “complete breakdown” and blamed himself for his “weakness” in implicating an innocent man. He excused his own brutalization and imprisonment without charge as the “mistake” of a few zealots. Field, who would revere the Great Leader for the rest of his life, never learned of Stalin’s intimate involvement with his case. The files were not opened for more than two decades after Field’s death. No doubt, however, that he would have found a rationale for Stalin’s brutality.
“My arrest,” he wrote, “was the right and duty of the authorities. . . . My accusers essentially have the same convictions that I do.”
Field listed all the reasons why his accusers did the right thing in beating a confession out of him.
1. I am an American
2. I worked for the State Department
3. I worked for a Christian philanthropy [USC]
4. I was in touch with Dulles
5. I snooped around the East Bloc after the war
6. I was born bourgeois
Field even apologized for his SOS to his own government from prison. “A Communist,” he wrote, “cannot behave like that.”
This was the ultimate triumph of totalitarianism: the accused accepted, even embraced, his guilt. The party can never be wrong.