Noel Field - Career

Career

Noel Field began his career in the US 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. Field first met the German anti-Nazis Paul and Hede Massing in 1933; they had arrived in the US from Moscow, with the aim of building a network of Soviet agents among influential left-wing personalities.

In 1935 Hede Massing, who was a NKVD operative, tried to sign Field up for the NKVD. Field finally decided to work for the NKVD, but in 1936 he accepted a post with the League of Nations and moved to Geneva. Massing set Field up with Ignatz Reiss (Ignace Reiss) and Walter Krivitsky, who were in charge of Soviet intelligence in Switzerland.

Field was deeply moved by the Spanish Civil War, and became involved in efforts to aid victims and opponents of fascism. As a League of Nations representative in Spain from 1938–1939, Field helped to repatriate foreign participants from the Republican side. During the Civil War, the Fields had become friendly with a German medical doctor named Glaser who worked in a hospital attached to the International Brigade. When the Brigade retreated during the final collapse of the Loyalist forces, his daughter, Erica, became ill and was separated from her parents. Noel and Herta Field found her in a receiving camp on the French-Spanish border and brought her with them to Switzerland, where they treated her as their own child. 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 daughter.