Noel Haviland Field, 1904–1970
An American communist, Field worked first for the State Department, and from 1935, for the League of Nations. He was probably a Soviet intelligence agent. Field cooperated with the forces opposed to Nazism and spent most of the Second World War in Switzerland. As a leading figure in a US humanitarian organization, he mainly gave assistance to European communists, including some Hungarians. Motivated by his political convictions, he sought to settle in 1949 in Czechoslovakia, which was already under communist rule. In May 1949, he was lured on that pretext into going to Prague, where he was arrested with the help of the communist secret police and abducted to Budapest. He was designed to be the ‘Western link’ in the show trial of László Rajk and his associates, but in the end, he did not become one of the accused, although his name was mentioned several times during the proceedings. Field was also considered as a possible defendant in show trials in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but the former (the trial of Gomulka) never took place and he was not in the event used in the Czechoslovak trial. In October 1949, he was moved to the Conti utca prison, from where he was freed in November 1954 after the investigation into his case had been completed. He then applied for a residence permit in Hungary and received Hungarian citizenship in December. As compensation for what he had suffered, the Hungarian communist authorities made available to him a sumptuous villa in a smart district of Buda. After 1956, he worked as a librarian.
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