Noel Field
| Noel Field | |
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| Birth name | Noel Haviland Field |
| Born |
January 23, 1904 Lewisham, London, England |
| Died | September 12, 1970 (aged 66) Budapest, Hungary |
| Parents |
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| Spouse | Herta Katharina Vieser |
| Children | Erika Glaser Wallach (adopted) |
Noel Field (January 23, 1904 – September 12, 1970) was an American spy for the NKVD, whose activities before and after World War II allowed the Eastern Bloc to use his name as prosecuting rationale during the Rajk (1949) and Slánský (1952) show trials.
While employed at the U.S. Department of State in the 1930s, Field acted as a Soviet spy. During World War II, he worked in France and Switzerland to support Jewish communist and anti-fascist refugees. During this time, he also had contacts with the U.S. intelligence service OSS. Arrested in Prague in 1949 and imprisoned in Hungary, he served as the pretext for show trials of communist functionaries in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary, when it was claimed that he had served as their American spymaster. The purpose of the show trials was to replace indigenous Communist Party members with others more aligned with Moscow. After his release in 1954, he stayed in Budapest and remained a convinced communist.
Field was born in south London in 1904, the first son of Brooklyn-born zoologist Herbert Haviland Field, who directed an international scientific bibliographical institute in Zurich, and his English wife. After Herbert Field's death, his wife took Noel Field, his brother Hermann, and two sisters to the U.S., where the boys attended Harvard University. Upon completion of his studies, he married his childhood sweetheart from Switzerland, Herta Katharina Vieser.
Noel Field began his career at the State Department in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, he was an antifascist and sympathised with Soviet peace initiatives, as did many Western progressives at the time. In 1933 (1934 per Hede Massing's later testimony), Field met the German anti-Nazis Paul and Hede Massing, who had come to the U.S. from Moscow in order to build a network of Soviet agents among influential left-wing circles.Marguerite Young recommended Field to Massing.
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