Fielding Error

Among all the confusing participants in the cold war, no family can match the American family Field. Noel Haviland Field was a wanderer among nations and ideas. Born in London, brought up in Switzerland, educated at Harvard, he worked for the State Department in Washington, for the League of Nations in Geneva, for the OSS in wartime Europe, for the Unitarian Service Committee in France. After the war, he and his brother Hermann sauntered through the Iron Curtain countries like welcome guests. Whittaker Chambers said Noel was a friend of Alger Hiss and a Communist agent; the Communists said he worked for the U.S. "imperialists." His sister said Noel and his whole family were just "Quaker-Liberals" who were "arch-individualists."

Noel Field disappeared from his hotel in Prague two weeks before Chambers started testifying in the Hiss trial in early 1949. His wife Herta, his brother Hermann, and finally, his adopted daughter Erika Glaser Wallach, went behind the Iron Curtain to look for him. One after another, like the three little Indians, they vanished--one, two, three.

Last week Noel and Herta Field popped back into sight as the Hungarian government announced their release from political prison. The Fields' reaction was typically "arch-individualistic"--instead of dashing for freedom, they elected to repair to a Hungarian hospital and hole up, incommunicado. Hermann, released with apologies three weeks earlier by Poland with the admission that it had all been a terrible mistake, flew to Zurich, where CIA agents slapped a cloak of security around him and hustled him off to a secret reunion with his wife. No one could yet be sure whether the Fields, individually or collectively, were innocents, double agents or Communists.

But in the still tangled web woven by the Fields, one thread lay clear as a trail of blood on snow. In their five years in Communist hands, the Communists had used the American name of Field in trial after trial, until it became a symbol of death.

The major cases:

P: In Hungary, September 1949, Laszlo Rajk, lifelong Communist, top party theoretician, onetime all-powerful Hungarian Interior Minister and later Foreign Minister, pleaded guilty to plotting to assassinate Communist Boss Matyas Rakosi. And who got Rajk into the gory plot? "Noel Field," cried the prosecutor, "one of the leaders of American espionage," who "specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements." Verdict: hanging (and burial in unmarked graves) for Laszlo Rajk and four others; life imprisonment for two.

P: In East Germany, in August 1950, six Communist functionaries, including the director of East zone railroads and the boss of Radio Berlin, were accused of "special connections with Noel Field, the American spy." All are now in jail or dead.

P: In Czechoslovakia, November 1952, Rudolf Slansky, Communist Party secretary-general, and 13 high-placed codefendants confessed to high treason, conspiracy, murder, espionage, Titoism, Zionism, in behalf of "foreign imperialist agents." Who was their spymaster? "The well-known agent Field." Verdict: death on the gallows for Slansky and ten others; imprisonment for three.

Last week, in releasing the Fields, Communist Hungary admitted: "It has not been possible to justify the charge made in the past." Thus the Communists conceded that every trial in which Noel had been used as the chief agent was trumped up. For the first time, the West realized just how much a Hungarian spokesman was admitting, when he confessed last month: "We may frankly admit that the leaders of the former Security Office arrested many comrades, using criminally improper methods, and that they were convicted by the court on the grounds of invented and forced charges and testimony. This was a great mistake."

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