Noel Field
In 2015, the historian David Talbot reignited claims that Field was set up by Allen Dulles in order to create paranoia designed to undermine the Soviet Union.
[15] Massing arranged for Field to make contact with Ignatz Reiss and Walter Krivitsky, who was in charge of Soviet intelligence in Switzerland.
[6][16] Field was deeply moved by the Spanish Civil War and became involved in efforts to aid victims and opponents of fascism.
[9] During the Civil War, Noel Field and his wife Herta became friendly with a German medical doctor named Glaser who worked in a hospital attached to the International Brigade.
[17] They intended to reunite her with her parents who had fled to England, but the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 made that difficult, and Erica became a permanent member of the Field home, in effect their foster child.
The two organizations later shared the same offices in Marseilles and Noel Field, with help from his wife, set up kindergartens in the Camp de Rivesaltes.
Also beginning in early 1941, Noel Field established an extensive medical program to provide aid to Jewish refugees in hiding, those waiting to emigrate, or those held in internment camps.
With the American Friends Service Committee, and his lead doctor, Rene Zimmer, Field implemented a nutritional survey of many thousands of the refugees interned in French camps and provided additional food for those in greatest need.
Unlike some members of the Unitarian Service Committee and Fry, Field did not face hostility from the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Marseilles for his activities, possibly because he sent many of his refugee clients to Switzerland, rather than to the U.S.
When the Germans occupied the rest of France in November 1942, the Fields escaped from Marseilles and re-established a refugee program in Geneva.
In 1944, Field returned to southern France, traveling with the French guerrilla, the Maquis, and with the approval of Allen Dulles before the area was fully liberated.
He arranged for a colleague, Herta Tempi, to establish a small office in Paris as a relief project for the Unitarian Service Committee.
[18] In his relief activities, Field came into contact with a number of communist and antifascist refugees and exiles from Germany and elsewhere and used his position to relay information to various groups.
Dulles hoped Field could use his Communist connections in Switzerland and Germany to shed light on Stalin's postwar objectives in Europe.
[11] Meanwhile, Field's brother Hermann wrote to two Polish friends, Mela Granowska and Helena Syrkus, and asked for help getting a visa to visit Warsaw.
The two women passed the letter on to the Polish secret police, the Bezpieka, whence they were ordered to ensure that Hermann traveled to Warsaw, where he was arrested while on his way to the airport to leave the country.
[25] "Noel Field," stated the prosecutor was "one of the leaders of American espionage," who "specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements.
A matter of interest to students of the Cold War came to light years later when records from Field's interrogations were found in the Hungarian Interior Ministry archives.
[9] Noel and Herta Field, however, opted to settle in Budapest, where, despite the torture inflicted on them, they did not condemn the Communist regime, leading some[who?]
[17] In October 1955, Erica Glaser Wallach was released from Vorkuta Labor Camp, under an amnesty declared by Nikita Khrushchev that year but was unable to join her husband and daughters in the U.S. because of the State Department's concern over her earlier Communist Party membership.
[29] Field was ideally suited to the Communists' show trials; he had known and assisted many highly placed officials, including resistance fighters and members of the Spanish International Brigades with whom he had maintained contact after the war.
[11] The journalist Drew Pearson maintained that the Soviets, encountering resistance to demands for grain and for military support from nationalist Communist leaders in Eastern Europe who had spent the war outside the USSR, used the myth of a Field-led spy network to purge them all.
[30] It has been suggested that Allen Dulles, informed that Noel Field was on his way to Prague, saw an irresistible opportunity to create havoc among his Cold War adversaries and lit the fuse by instructing Józef Światło, his Polish agent within East European counterintelligence, to alert his colleagues to the impending arrival of Dulles's master spy, coming now to activate the network of traitors he had put in place during the war years.
[17] Noel Field remained a staunch communist; his final testament, written in Budapest and published in an American political journal, was entitled "Hitching Our Wagon to a Star.
