Stalin's American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles and the East European Show-Trials [Hardcover]

Compelling Cold War mystery complete with espionage and double-crossing agents, this narrative sheds light on McCarthysim and Stalin's purges.Stalin's American Spytells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the Hungarian secret police. Tortured by them and interrogated too by their Soviet superiors, Field's forced 'confessions' were manipulated by Stalin and his East European satraps to launch a devastating series of show-trials that led to the imprisonment and judicial murder of numerous Czechoslovak, German, Polish and Hungarian party members. Yet there were other events in his very strange career that could give rise to the suspicion that Field was an American spy who had infiltrated the Communist movement at the behest of Allen Dulles, the wartime OSS chief in Switzerland who later headed the CIA.Never tried, Field and his wife were imprisoned in Budapest until 1954, then granted political asylum in Hungary, where they lived out their sterile last years. This new biography takes a fresh look at Field's relationship with Dulles, and his role in the Alger Hiss affair. It sheds fresh light upon Soviet espionage in the United States and Field's relationship with Hede Massing, Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky. It also reassesses how the increasingly anti-Semitic East European show-trials were staged and dissects the 'lessons which Stalin sought to convey through them.AcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction'THE STRONG SENSE OF OTHERNESS ', 1904-19341. 'An outsider from the beginning': Swiss Childhood, 1904-222. New World: Harvard, Social Work and Pacifism, 1922-263. 'Perfect bureaucrat': State Department Years, 1926-34SERVING THE CAUSE, 1934-19414. I Spy: The Massings and the Fields, 1934-365. 'Working for the same boss': Hiss, Hede and Noel, 1935-366. Murder and Defection: The Fields, Reiss and Krivitsky, 1936-377. Promised lsÐ