True Believer

Stalin's Last American Spy

Kati Marton

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781476763781
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Russian History

"Kati Marton's True Believer is a true story of intrigue, treachery, murder, torture, fascism, and an unshakable faith in the ideals of Communism….A fresh take on espionage activities from a critical period of history" ( Washington Independent Review of Books ). True Believer reveals the life of Noel Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American who spied for Stalin during the 1930s and forties. Later, a pawn in Stalin's sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades.How does an Ivy League-educated, US State Department employee, deeply rooted in American culture and history, become a hardcore Stalinist? The 1930s, when Noel Field joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement, were a time of national collapse. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs and many in Field's generation were seduced by its siren song. Few, however, went as far as Noel Field in betraying their own country.With a reporter's eye for detail, and a historian's grasp of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, Kati Marton, in a "relevant…fascinating…vividly reconstructed" ( The New York Times Book Review ) account, captures Field's riveting quest for a life of meaning that went horribly wrong. True Believer is supported by unprecedented access to Field family correspondence, Soviet Secret Police records, and reporting on key players from Alger Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and World War II spy master, "Wild Bill" Donovan—to the most sinister of all: Josef Stalin. "Relevant today as a tale of fanaticism and the lengths it can take one to" ( Publishers Weekly ), True Believer is "riveting reading" ( USA TODAY ), an astonishing real-life spy thriller, filled with danger, misplaced loyalties, betrayal, treachery, and pure evil, with a plot twist worthy of John le Carré.

CHAPTER 1

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A SWISS CHILDHOOD

I went to Communism, as one goes to a spring of fresh water.

—Arthur Koestler

NOEL HAVILAND FIELD spent his first eighteen years in the Swiss lakeside town of Zurich. It was a tidy if dull place, where money, science, and Christian values commingled. Here Noel’s father, Dr. Herbert Haviland Field, a Harvard-trained biologist and Quaker pacifist, set up his research and documentation institute. Switzerland, then as now, cherished its neutrality in a sea of fractious neighbors. Beneath its tranquil surface, however, Zurich was a listening post for both sides during the first and second world wars. Both the elder Field and his son Noel would be swept up in Zurich’s web of intrigue—the son more lethally than the father.

A burly, bushy-bearded Victorian paterfamilias, Noel’s father built the Field family’s massive stone house—the very embodiment of their solid, New England values. In the Harvard alumni newsletter of 1938, the elder Field was described by a classmate as “one of the most high minded and pure minded men I have ever known, and I doubt that the Quaker spirit ever produced a finer specimen of mentality or character.” Field family life revolved around this intimidating and remote figure. All Fields addressed each other in the Quaker manner as “Thee” and “Thou.” This earnest, rather austere family was singularly ill prepared for the intrigue in which they would soon be enmeshed.

The Fields first settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1644. They were proud of their sturdy Yorkshire roots, and their political nonconformism. Even during the Revolutionary War, the Quaker Fields, referred to as “between the lines,” supported neither colonists nor the colonial power, and were thus harassed by both. Pacifism and service were the family’s core values and, in quest of both, the Fields gradually migrated from Boston to Brooklyn over the next hundred years. In keeping with their Quaker faith during the Civil War, the family actively supported and sheltered slaves in flight from Southern states.

Much later, Noel described himself as a “dreamy, feminine, and withdrawn child, shunning interaction with peers.” From early childhood, Noel was an outsider: an American in a Swiss school; taller, more awkward, and more earnest than other children. Emulating his father’s air of moral superiority did not win him playmates. The boy preferred long, solitary Alpine rambles to the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard. He had one companion, a classmate, Herta Vieser. The plump, blond daughter of a German civil servant, she, too, was an outsider. With her long blond braids and full figure, Herta was in sharp contrast to the gangly Noel. But in her eyes, the bookish, wistful Noel could do no wrong. Herta’s unshakeable devotion eased the awkward youth’s loneliness—and would for a lifetime.

For the rest of his life, Noel would recall a single childhood event more vividly than any other. Shortly after the end of World War I, Dr. Field took Noel, his eldest child, on a tour of the battlefields. The trip was of such importance to his father that he ordered a car from America to make the drive to the recent killing fields of Verdun and the Marne. The still-smoldering battlefields where not a living thing stirred made a powerful impression on the young Noel. He never forgot the landscape of blackened tree trunks and lunar craters full of stagnant water, where hundreds of thousands of the Continent’s youth had recently been slaughtered—and for what? A few miles of territory. They rested under mounds of still-fresh earth—and left a searing memory. Thanks to the machine gun, automatic rifle, poison gas, airplane, and tank, a thousand soldiers died per square meter in Verdun, Dr. Field explained to his son. And what was achieved by four and a half years of carnage? The trauma suffered by the eleven million soldiers who returned from the front—having experienced poison gas, exploding grenades, and artillery barrages, as well as the deaths of their comrades—was beyond compensation. Noel took his father’s unspoken message to heart: Do something to prevent the next one.

“A Call to the Young Throughout the World” by N. Field, founder of the “Peace League of Youth,” was the young man’s first political engagement and a direct result of that shattering battlefield expedition. “We must not wait any longer,” Noel wrote in a tract that his mother typed and that he distributed to his classmates at his Swiss gymnasium. “If the rising generation of the whole world were to cry with one voice: Enough of slaughter and murder! From now on let there be peace! If they were to set to work and start a real crusade against war, then a world peace will no longer be an idle dream.”

Noel then outlined a ten-part program for the youth of the world, including abolishing war propaganda and military training in schools. “So come and lend a hand!” Noel urged his classmates. “Forget the barriers of country, race, and religion, show that we are brothers! We will not confront might with might, but with the persuasive power of a great idea, the firm conviction of a divine ideal.”

Within a decade, the young man would find both the divine ideal and the brotherhood he hungered for.

“My high school days in Switzerland during World War I,” Noel wrote, “were the determining factor in the choice of my subsequent life. They set up my dual interest . . . to work for international peace, and to help improve the social conditions of my fellow being.” He might have added that they also laid the groundwork for his dual life.

Wedged among France, Germany, and Italy, Switzerland, haven to fleeing European radicals, was the ideal spot for Allen W. Dulles, a spy operating under diplomatic cover, to set up shop in Berne, the Swiss capital. Shortly after Noel’s field trip with his father in 1918, he met Dulles, whose name would be like a curse on Field’s future. Dulles, two decades from becoming the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the brother of future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, was in search of local “assets.”

Dr. Field, who straddled the expatriate and Swiss communities, was known to keep his ear to the ground, a good man to know. During World War I, the elder Field routinely shared high-level local gossip with US officials. In fact, his meddling nearly ruined the career of American consul James C. McNally. Field complained to the State Department about McNally’s too “pro German” attitude. McNally never forgave him, though others admired Field’s zealous patriotism. Another Swiss-based American diplomat, Hugh Wilson, described Noel’s father as having “the gentlest, bluest, most candid pair of eyes that I ever saw on an adult man. They were the eyes of an unsophisticated and lovable child.” His son inherited that candid, childlike aspect and used it to great advantage.

In early 1918, Allen Dulles joined the Field family for lunch in their spacious lakeside home. “What do you plan to do with your life?” Dulles asked the reedy fourteen-year-old Noel. “To bring peace to the world,” the boy answered without hesitation, making his father beam with pride. The lesson of the battlefield had hit its mark. Dulles and Noel Field would meet again, two decades later, and cause each other great trouble.

On the morning of April 5, 1921, everything changed for the Field family. Fifty-three-year-old Herbert Field suddenly suffered a massive heart attack and died. The peaceful, well-ordered family life presided over by the aloof father was shattered. The eldest of four children, Noel—the focus of his father’s attention—was hardest hit. Moreover, he felt a personal responsibility for his father’s death. The night before his fatal attack, Dr. Field had fulfilled one of his dreams. A passionate admirer of Richard Wagner, he had talked for years of taking Noel to the first Swiss performance of Parsifal. “In the months and years after his death,” Noel later wrote, “I built up a guilt complex, believing that I had caused [Father’s] death by hurrying him up the stairs at the opera performance to which we arrived late.”

His father had high hopes for his bright, sensitive son. But he left the job unfinished. Noel, emotionally immature and highly sensitive, was suddenly unmoored. Full of outrage at the world’s cruelties and guilt at his privileged status, he was now without direction or guidance. Years later, he wrote his younger brother, Hermann:

You ask for my memories of our beloved father. . . . I loved, revered and stood in awe of him, almost as a distant, unknown and unknowable god. He was often absent and even when at home, always so busy that I was afraid to approach him (I can still hear Mother’s “Hush, Father is busy, don’t disturb him!”).

[After his death] I began a pathological hero worship in which I pictured him as one of the greatest saints of modern times and swore to imitate him as a means of relieving my guilt.

Of one thing I am certain: had he lived longer, there would have been growing conflict between him and his elder son—unless I had simply taken over his ideals and sought to adapt my thinking to his. This I know: his socialism was of the religious kind and in his diary he expressed hostility to the more militant variety that I ultimately found my way to.

At age seventeen, Noel lost the powerful figure who might have moderated his dreams of changing the world. How differently might Field’s tragic life have turned out had his father lived long enough to harness his son’s idealism to a milder faith?

“Not long before his death,” Noel wrote his brother, “Father had a serious talk with me about my future. . . . It was, as I remember, mainly a question of his desire that I should . . . go to America, to study at his beloved Harvard.”

Reeling from the sudden loss of their patriarch, his widow, Nina, and her four children set off for Herbert Haviland Field’s cherished homeland. There, too, Noel Field would be a stranger.

CHAPTER 2

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AMERICA

I can sum up the United States in two words: Prohibition and Lindbergh!

—Benito Mussolini

NOEL’S FANTASY AMERICA was a land of boundless opportunity, free from the Old World’s stagnant class system and its savage wars. All Noel knew of this distant land he had heard from his father.

Harvard in September 1922 was a shock to the young man. The most privileged sanctuary of American higher learning, it did not match Noel’s fantasies.

Many undergraduates in those days arrived with trunks containing dinner jackets, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and the swagger of those born to privilege. The sons of the nouveau riche shunned Harvard Yard for the more opulent new dormitories on the “Gold Coast,” Mount Auburn Street. In their sophomore year, the social clubs picked the brightest stars from the new crop—the Crimson’s editors, the Lampoon’s wits, and the man who might score the final, memorable touchdown against Yale. There were still other Harvards—for scholars, for carousers, for those already decided on a Wall Street career. Noel did not fit in with any of these Harvards.

Instead of a dorm, Noel lived at home, in the faded gentility of a Berkeley Street row house. With three younger siblings, and a matriarch presiding, this was not a place the freshman would bring new friends. Filial obligation had brought him to Harvard; he treated it as a place to get through honorably, but as fast as possible. Taking twice as many courses as required, he earned his BA with highest honors in two years.

As awkward outsider in the hail-fellow world of the Yard, Noel’s social conscience deepened. In a 1923 term paper entitled “On the Present Distribution of Property” he submitted for his Social Ethics course, the nineteen-year-old raised issues that still seem strikingly relevant. “There are two very dark spots . . . in the existing system . . . which have led to the crying injustice of the present distribution of wealth. It is not right to pass on to the heir enormous wealth without the latter’s moving a finger for it. Inheritance of property seems to be as old as mankind; and yet I think it is a great evil and must be changed if social injustice is to stop.

“And as for interest on capital,” he wrote, “its injustice appears to me self-evident. If a man can live off this interest, while his capital is increasing without his doing any work, while millions of others have to work for every crumb, it is clear that the fundamental justification of property is completely disregarded.”

Later, he would regret his Harvard years as a missed opportunity. Four years after graduating, he wrote Hermann, “Nobody has ever been interested in the fact that I graduated with distinction . . . whereas the fact that I raced through college without mixing in its life and without learning its practical life lessons has caused me endless embarrassment.” Social embarrassment fueled Noel Field’s alienation from American life.

Noel’s deepest estrangement from his country occurred outside the classroom. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, rarely recalled today, in the 1920s came to symbolize the political volatility of the Depression. A shoemaker and a fish peddler, the pair of Italian immigrants were charged with robbery and murder in a Braintree, Massachusetts, payroll holdup in a case that grew from local crime story to an international cri de coeur. Sacco and Vanzetti—names redolent of ethnicity and the immigrant experience—turned into a chant that galvanized the Depression era.

Class resentments that normally simmer below America’s surface exploded in the trial of the two self-declared anarchists. In the witness box, the two immigrants mangled their English and reeked of stubborn unassimilation, a couple of “greasy wops,” in the era’s ugly vernacular. Facing an all-Anglo-Saxon jury and a judge who freely declared his hatred of radicals, Sacco and Vanzetti never had a chance at a fair trial. (“Did you see what I did with those anarchist bastards the other day?” Judge Webster Thayer was heard to remark at a Dartmouth football game, after he had turned down a defense motion for a new trial. “That will hold them for a while!”)

The Boston trial became one of those not-to-be-missed events, a magnet for the day’s celebrities, pundits, poets, and radicals of all shades, some of whom were actually interested in getting Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco a fair hearing. For much of the population, one and a half years after World War I, pumped by patriotic fever and growing isolationism, love of country was on trial.

“Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?” the prosecutor asked Sacco, referring to the week of the crime.

“That is pretty hard for me to say in one word,” the shoemaker answered, sealing his fate. The prosecution never established a motive, nor was the stolen money ever found. A jury not of their peers sentenced the accused to die in the electric chair. The case took seven agonizing years to resolve—seven years during which Sacco and Vanzetti languished in prison and young idealists like Noel Field grew more estrange...

Índice

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface: The Capture of Minds
• Introduction: The Trap
• Chapter 1: A Swiss Childhood
• Chapter 2: America
• Chapter 3: The Making of a Radical
• Chapter 4: The Convert
• Chapter 5: Spy Games
• Chapter 6: Spies in Flight
• Chapter 7: Desperate Comrades
• Chapter 8: Spain
• Chapter 9: War
• Chapter 10: Marseille
• Chapter 11: The Spy in Wartime
• Chapter 12: Child of the Century
• Chapter 13: Cold Peace
• Chapter 14: Man without a Country—1948
• Chapter 15: The End of the Line
• Chapter 16: Bloodlust Again
• Chapter 17: Kidnapped
• Chapter 18: Two More Fields Disappear
• Chapter 19: Erica Falls in the Net
• Chapter 20: The Prisons Open
• Chapter 21: Still Not Free
• Chapter 22: The Age of Suspicion
• Chapter 23: Twilight Years
• Chapter 24: Prague
• Chapter 25: Home at Last
• Chapter 26: The Stranger
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Credits
• About Kati Marton
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright