(1) Alger Hiss—who, like his friend Noel Field, betrayed his country in search of a Communist utopia—is shown with head bent just behind a haggard and ailing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Yalta. Field, like Hiss, began as an idealist and ended up serving a brutal system.
(2) FDR’s successor, President Harry S. Truman, clasps Hiss’s hand, oblivious that it is the hand of a traitor.
(3) Noel Field (far right), with his mother and three siblings, set off for America from Switzerland in 1921.
(4) Fresh out of Harvard, Field landed his dream job as a Foreign Service officer assigned to the State Department’s Western European division in 1926. He was launched on a brilliant career, but within a few years he would be recruited by Moscow’s agents.
(5) Already a Soviet spy, Field (seated, back row) attended the 1935 London Disarmament Conference and passed classified documents to the Soviets. His colleagues did not suspect the well-mannered, well-bred Noel Field of serving Moscow.
(6) During HUAC hearings in 1948, Hiss calmly denied he was a spy. Icily composed throughout, Hiss was nonetheless convicted of perjury, the statute of limitations for spying having expired.
(7) Field and Hiss stayed in touch throughout their lives, before and after prison. This letter—which calls ex-spy Whittaker Chambers “unbalanced and given to hallucinations”—was found in the Hungarian Secret Police archives in Budapest.
(8) Field left the State Department to work for the League of Nations. Dispatched to civil war–torn Spain in 1938, he was charged with helping refugees, such as those shown here, to flee Franco’s savage onslaught. In Spain, Field befriended many future Communist leaders.
(9) With desperate refugees fleeing the Fascists by the thousands and the US government tightening its quotas on immigrants, American humanitarians formed the Unitarian Service Committee to rescue those it could. Field and his wife, Herta, shown here at an internment camp at the base of the Pyrenees in Rivesaltes, focused almost entirely on saving Communists and sending them back to Eastern and Central Europe to start planning postwar satellite states.
(10) Field hired Jo Tempi, a Berlin-born Stalinist, as his aide in 1940. Their love affair lasted for five years and wreaked havoc in his marriage and later with the USC—which did not realize Tempi and Field had turned the Boston-based charity into a Communist rescue organization.
(11) Whittaker Chambers named Hiss and Field as spies, ending Noel Field’s career as a Soviet agent and sending him in panicked search for refuge in the Eastern Bloc. Instead of providing sanctuary, Stalin ordered his faithful acolyte arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for five years.
(12) At first, few believed Chambers’s accusations against the popular Hiss and the proper Field. One who did was the junior California congressman Richard M. Nixon, shown here examining the now famous “Pumpkin Papers”: microfilm of classified documents stolen by Hiss and hidden by Chambers in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. The future president (pictured here with Robert Striping, HUAC’s chief investigator) doggedly pursued Hiss and kept the investigation alive.
(13) No one paid a higher price in the search for the illusory utopia promised by Communism than Larry Duggan. “My best, my only friend,” Noel Field called Duggan, shown here receiving last rites on a New York City sidewalk on December 21, 1948. Duggan, age forty-three, plunged to his death shortly after he was exposed by HUAC investigators as a member of Hiss, Chambers, and Field’s Washington cell.
(14) This house of horrors was the first stop on Field’s journey as a key witness in a new wave of Stalinist show trials. Abducted from his Prague hotel, he was bound, blindfolded, and driven to this secret interrogation house in Budapest in 1949. Here, Moscow’s agents tortured him into confessing that he was actually an American spy, not a Soviet agent. Unbeknownst to Field, his wife was also a prisoner here, and at times could hear her husband’s late-night torment.
(15) Having beaten a fake confession from Noel Field, the Kremlin raised the curtain on the show trial of Hungarian foreign minister Laszlo Rajk, accused of being Field’s agent in the CIA. Seven defendants—squeezed between their secret police guards—were charged as “Fieldists.” Though Field never appeared, his name was frequently invoked as the spy at the center of Washington’s anti-Stalin plot. My parents, though not shown, were in the Budapest courtroom covering the trial for American wire services.
(16) Freed from Stalinist captivity in June 1956 was the widow of the executed “Fieldist” Laszlo Rajk, shown here with her son, Laszlo Jr. Julia Rajk called her former jailers “criminals and murderers who should be punished.” Two weeks after this ceremony marking the reburial of her husband, revolution erupted in Hungary. Noel Field, even after torture and prison, remained a true believer. He called it a “counterrevolution.”
(17) A notorious Polish secret police agent, Josef Swiatlo brutally interrogated both Field brothers, and then, five years later, when the Fields were given up for dead, defected to Washington. Here, the secret police agent reveals that Noel, Herta, and Hermann are still alive in Soviet prisons. With a new identity, shrouded by the FBI, Swiatlo disappeared forever under the Federal Witness Protection Program.
(19) Though released from jail, Noel Field was never really free. As these documents in the Budapest Secret Police files attest, his every letter was opened and translated from English to Hungarian by scores of agents whose job was to keep him under tight surveillance. He never returned to America.
(20) Hermann Field, who went looking for his vanished brother and was himself jailed by the Soviets, was suddenly freed five years later, in late 1954, following Swiatlo’s astonishing revelations. Here, Hermann is reunited with his wife, Kate, and sons Hugh and Alan at London’s Victoria Station.
(21) The fourth member of Noel Field’s family to be kidnapped by the Kremlin, his foster daughter, Erica Glaser Wallach, was freed in October 1955. The bouquet she holds is from the CIA, which was not yet prepared to let her rejoin her American husband and children. It took Erica almost two years to win that struggle.
(22) Erica found domestic happiness in the Virginia countryside, after the most turbulent twentieth-century life imaginable, with husband Robert Wallach, who had waged a heroic campaign to free her from Soviet custody.
(24) Together since age nine, Noel and Herta are shown in a flatteringly touched-up photograph taken in the late sixties in Budapest. Though they look like an ordinary elderly couple, their private correspondence and surveillance records reveal the depth of the torment they suffered at the hands of those they loyally served. Used and abused by the Communist Party and by Josef Stalin, the man they most admired, they never recanted their faith.
