Noel Field

Noel Haviland Field (23 January 1904 – 12 September 1970) was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD. His name was used as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia. Much controversy surrounds the Field story. In 2015, the historian David Talbot reignited claims that Field was set up by Allen Dulles in order to create paranoia designed to undermine the Soviet Union. During World War II, Field worked in France and Switzerland to support Jewish and anti-fascist refugees. During this time, he also had contact with the U.S. intelligence service OSS. Arrested in Prague in 1949 by the Czechoslovak secret police, handed over to the Hungarian secret police and subsequently imprisoned in Hungary, he served as the pretext for show trials of Communist functionaries in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary, where it was claimed that he had served as their American spymaster. Among the primary purposes of the show trials was to replace many indigenous communist party members with others more tightly associated with Moscow. After his release in 1954, he stayed in Budapest.