He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no more of doubting.
—Shaemas O’Sheel
HOW DOES AN idealist turn into a willing participant in murder? How does such a person—who is neither poor, nor socially deprived—learn to crush those he loves for the sake of a cause, a promise, and an illusion? Noel Field was such a man—and for that reason his story is relevant for our troubled times. The mystery at the core of Field’s life is how an apparently good man, who started out with noble intentions, could sacrifice his own and his family’s freedom, a promising career, and his country, all for a fatal myth. His is the story of the sometimes terrible consequence of blind faith.
The power of an idea that promises a final correction of all personal, social, and political injustices—be it a holy crusade, fascism, Communism, or radical Islam—can be compulsive. Some movements add the lure of immortality. They prey on questing, restless, dissatisfied youth who are gradually persuaded to surrender their freedom to a higher cause, an all-knowing master. In this submission, there is relief from soul-searching. At last there is an answer to every question. Once he surrenders, the convert feels a rush of relief: his existence now has meaning beyond himself. With the conversion he gains a fraternal comradeship, a family of the like-minded. For this rapture, he yields moral responsibility, the duty to think for himself. The master—be it the führer, the commisar, or the caliph—knows best.
The submission demands service and sacrifice, a willingness to break society’s rules and laws for the cause. Human lives must sometimes be sacrificed on the road to the Promised Land. Prison, torture, and the abasement of self: all are explained away as necessary for the cause. One’s families are insignificant compared to the new family.
Beyond a certain point, it is hard for the convert to reclaim his moral freedom, his ability to think for himself. Without his faith, life seems empty. Without his comrades, existence looms as a lonely prospect. Then, too, the convert has almost always compromised himself in service to the cause. With the passage of time, return to his old life becomes ever less possible. He also knows that punishment for such defection can be fatal.
Noel Field’s betrayal of his country and his family for the promise of Communism was not motivated merely by his deep longing for a life of significance. Like so many children of the Depression, disillusionment with democracy, capitalism, and the West’s appeasement of Hitler were strong motivations in signing up with Moscow. For them, the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to offer the only alternative to the West’s breadlines and mass unemployment, as well as the only opposition to the Nazis’ aggression and racism.
But Field’s conversion was not essentially political. He and thousands of others deserted out of far deeper personal needs than politics. They had no way of knowing that their recruitment was managed and manipulated by hard-boiled cynics skilled at spotting society’s vulnerable and promising youth. Nor did they suspect how far the reality of the workers’ state would be from the promised utopia.
Noel Field, a sensitive, self-absorbed idealist and dreamer, was both an unlikely revolutionary and an ideal target for conversion to a powerful faith. In the 1930s, he joined the secret underground of the international Communist movement. It was a time of national collapse: ten million unemployed, rampant racism, and, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Washington parched of ideas. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs. To Field, world revolution and the violent overthrow of his own government seemed a necessary price to pay for the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Strict discipline and sacrifice for a cause beyond his person were expected of Field and his fellow recruits, as they are of today’s Islamist warriors. Noel Field never hoisted an AK-47, or strapped on a suicide vest, because he was never asked to. But his commitment and his submission to his cause were as total, and ultimately as destructive, as those of today’s ISIS recruits.
Field was not one of Stalin’s master spies. He lacked both the steel and the polished performance skills of Kim Philby or Alger Hiss. Field’s betrayals nonetheless led hundreds to the gallows and destroyed scores of lives. Above all, however, Noel Field’s story reveals his master’s boundless cruelty and sinister disregard for human life—including the life of his own faithful. Like thousands of others, Field was used—then, having served his purpose, he was discarded.
Communism tempted many of Field’s generation. Most, having observed the chasm between the promise and the brutal reality, eventually moderated or abandoned their early zeal. Not Noel Field. Though the dream of a triumphant working class soured and turned murderous, he stayed locked to his faith. He did not die a martyr in battle, but eventually he embraced a form of the martyrdom of innocents—his own among them—because that is what his master, Stalin, ordained.
Field never publicly spoke or wrote candidly about his terrible choices. His only candor is contained in these pages—from letters never before published. As Hungarian journalists working for American wire services in Budapest in the fifties, my parents covered Field’s arrest by Soviet authorities, as well as the show trial that followed. Then my parents were themselves arrested, and my father shared Field’s interrogator before his own fake trial for espionage. Moreover, my father was held in the same cell the American had previously occupied; both had been “Prisoner 410” for a period. Later, during the chaos of the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, my parents located Field and his wife, and conducted the only known press interview with them. Those are the circumstances that led me to this strange and prophetic tale, which begins in Prague in 1949.
History—and a certain human vulnerability toward messiahs of all stripes—make clear that there will be other waves of fanaticism in the future. They may be as dangerous and hard to control as the movement that now captures fighters for militant Islam, or the one that once held Noel Field.