Vanishing Act

"Whatever became of that fellow Noel Field, and that girl he married?"

For years this casual question got casual answers: the Fields did not seem to be leading very remarkable lives. Last week the question led the U.S. Department of State down misty avenues to a dead end of mystery.

Harmonious Feeling. Lean, long-legged Noel Haviland Field was born in London of an English mother and an American father. In 1920 he came to the U.S. with his German wife Herta, went to Harvard. In the early '30s he worked for the State Department's Western European section. In 1936 he switched to the disarmament section of the League of Nations in Geneva. Herta, it was rumored, did not like the U.S.

In World War II, Field served briefly with the OSS as liaison officer between the U.S. and the Communist undergrounds in Western Europe. When peace came, Field turned up as a relief worker, handling Eastern European refugees for the Unitarian Service .Committee.

When it became clear that Field helped only pro-Russian refugees, his superiors protested by cable. "Charity in present day Europe," answered Field, "cannot be neutral. Never have I had so clear a conscience . . . [and] such a harmonious feeling of concord between my convictions and my obligations to suffering mankind."

The Unitarians, nevertheless, dispensed with his services. What happened to Field after that is uncertain. In 1948 ex-Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers testified that Noel Field had once headed a Communist "apparatus" in the State Department. Last month Hungary's ex-Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk, who was himself executed last week (see FOREIGN NEWS), said Field was a U.S. intelligence agent who had helped blackmail him into becoming "a servant of American imperialism."

One day last May Noel Field, ostensibly bound for Prague, left his wife in Switzerland and disappeared. After two months Herta Field went to Prague to search for him. She found no trace. She sent a plea to his brother to come and help. Brother Hermann Field, a sometime architect, professor, refugee worker and tourist guide, flew posthaste to Prague and from there to Warsaw in search of Noel.

The Last of Mrs. Field. In August, he bought passage on a plane bound back to Prague. When the plane landed in Czechoslovakia, Hermann was not aboard; his name had been crossed off the manifest. That was the last anyone heard of Hermann. Noel's wife wrote Hermann's wife, who was in England, telling her that Hermann too had disappeared. That was the last anyone ever heard of Herta. Last week, Mrs. Hermann Field took the case to the State Department.

State sternly asked Prague, Budapest and Warsaw what information they had on the Fields. But behind the Iron Curtain, no one knew--or would say--whatever had happened to that fellow Noel, his brother Hermann, and that German girl whom Noel had married.

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