True Believer CHAPTER 1 A SWISS CHILDHOOD
I went to Communism, as one goes to a spring of fresh water.

—Arthur Koestler

NOEL HAVILAND FIELD spent his first eighteen years in the Swiss lakeside town of Zurich. It was a tidy if dull place, where money, science, and Christian values commingled. Here Noel’s father, Dr. Herbert Haviland Field, a Harvard-trained biologist and Quaker pacifist, set up his research and documentation institute. Switzerland, then as now, cherished its neutrality in a sea of fractious neighbors. Beneath its tranquil surface, however, Zurich was a listening post for both sides during the first and second world wars. Both the elder Field and his son Noel would be swept up in Zurich’s web of intrigue—the son more lethally than the father.

A burly, bushy-bearded Victorian paterfamilias, Noel’s father built the Field family’s massive stone house—the very embodiment of their solid, New England values. In the Harvard alumni newsletter of 1938, the elder Field was described by a classmate as “one of the most high minded and pure minded men I have ever known, and I doubt that the Quaker spirit ever produced a finer specimen of mentality or character.” Field family life revolved around this intimidating and remote figure. All Fields addressed each other in the Quaker manner as “Thee” and “Thou.” This earnest, rather austere family was singularly ill prepared for the intrigue in which they would soon be enmeshed.

The Fields first settled in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1644. They were proud of their sturdy Yorkshire roots, and their political nonconformism. Even during the Revolutionary War, the Quaker Fields, referred to as “between the lines,” supported neither colonists nor the colonial power, and were thus harassed by both. Pacifism and service were the family’s core values and, in quest of both, the Fields gradually migrated from Boston to Brooklyn over the next hundred years. In keeping with their Quaker faith during the Civil War, the family actively supported and sheltered slaves in flight from Southern states.

Much later, Noel described himself as a “dreamy, feminine, and withdrawn child, shunning interaction with peers.” From early childhood, Noel was an outsider: an American in a Swiss school; taller, more awkward, and more earnest than other children. Emulating his father’s air of moral superiority did not win him playmates. The boy preferred long, solitary Alpine rambles to the rough-and-tumble of the schoolyard. He had one companion, a classmate, Herta Vieser. The plump, blond daughter of a German civil servant, she, too, was an outsider. With her long blond braids and full figure, Herta was in sharp contrast to the gangly Noel. But in her eyes, the bookish, wistful Noel could do no wrong. Herta’s unshakeable devotion eased the awkward youth’s loneliness—and would for a lifetime.

For the rest of his life, Noel would recall a single childhood event more vividly than any other. Shortly after the end of World War I, Dr. Field took Noel, his eldest child, on a tour of the battlefields. The trip was of such importance to his father that he ordered a car from America to make the drive to the recent killing fields of Verdun and the Marne. The still-smoldering battlefields where not a living thing stirred made a powerful impression on the young Noel. He never forgot the landscape of blackened tree trunks and lunar craters full of stagnant water, where hundreds of thousands of the Continent’s youth had recently been slaughtered—and for what? A few miles of territory. They rested under mounds of still-fresh earth—and left a searing memory. Thanks to the machine gun, automatic rifle, poison gas, airplane, and tank, a thousand soldiers died per square meter in Verdun, Dr. Field explained to his son. And what was achieved by four and a half years of carnage? The trauma suffered by the eleven million soldiers who returned from the front—having experienced poison gas, exploding grenades, and artillery barrages, as well as the deaths of their comrades—was beyond compensation. Noel took his father’s unspoken message to heart: Do something to prevent the next one.

“A Call to the Young Throughout the World” by N. Field, founder of the “Peace League of Youth,” was the young man’s first political engagement and a direct result of that shattering battlefield expedition. “We must not wait any longer,” Noel wrote in a tract that his mother typed and that he distributed to his classmates at his Swiss gymnasium. “If the rising generation of the whole world were to cry with one voice: Enough of slaughter and murder! From now on let there be peace! If they were to set to work and start a real crusade against war, then a world peace will no longer be an idle dream.”

Noel then outlined a ten-part program for the youth of the world, including abolishing war propaganda and military training in schools. “So come and lend a hand!” Noel urged his classmates. “Forget the barriers of country, race, and religion, show that we are brothers! We will not confront might with might, but with the persuasive power of a great idea, the firm conviction of a divine ideal.”

Within a decade, the young man would find both the divine ideal and the brotherhood he hungered for.

“My high school days in Switzerland during World War I,” Noel wrote, “were the determining factor in the choice of my subsequent life. They set up my dual interest . . . to work for international peace, and to help improve the social conditions of my fellow being.” He might have added that they also laid the groundwork for his dual life.



Wedged among France, Germany, and Italy, Switzerland, haven to fleeing European radicals, was the ideal spot for Allen W. Dulles, a spy operating under diplomatic cover, to set up shop in Berne, the Swiss capital. Shortly after Noel’s field trip with his father in 1918, he met Dulles, whose name would be like a curse on Field’s future. Dulles, two decades from becoming the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the brother of future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, was in search of local “assets.”

Dr. Field, who straddled the expatriate and Swiss communities, was known to keep his ear to the ground, a good man to know. During World War I, the elder Field routinely shared high-level local gossip with US officials. In fact, his meddling nearly ruined the career of American consul James C. McNally. Field complained to the State Department about McNally’s too “pro German” attitude. McNally never forgave him, though others admired Field’s zealous patriotism. Another Swiss-based American diplomat, Hugh Wilson, described Noel’s father as having “the gentlest, bluest, most candid pair of eyes that I ever saw on an adult man. They were the eyes of an unsophisticated and lovable child.” His son inherited that candid, childlike aspect and used it to great advantage.

In early 1918, Allen Dulles joined the Field family for lunch in their spacious lakeside home. “What do you plan to do with your life?” Dulles asked the reedy fourteen-year-old Noel. “To bring peace to the world,” the boy answered without hesitation, making his father beam with pride. The lesson of the battlefield had hit its mark. Dulles and Noel Field would meet again, two decades later, and cause each other great trouble.



On the morning of April 5, 1921, everything changed for the Field family. Fifty-three-year-old Herbert Field suddenly suffered a massive heart attack and died. The peaceful, well-ordered family life presided over by the aloof father was shattered. The eldest of four children, Noel—the focus of his father’s attention—was hardest hit. Moreover, he felt a personal responsibility for his father’s death. The night before his fatal attack, Dr. Field had fulfilled one of his dreams. A passionate admirer of Richard Wagner, he had talked for years of taking Noel to the first Swiss performance of Parsifal. “In the months and years after his death,” Noel later wrote, “I built up a guilt complex, believing that I had caused [Father’s] death by hurrying him up the stairs at the opera performance to which we arrived late.”

His father had high hopes for his bright, sensitive son. But he left the job unfinished. Noel, emotionally immature and highly sensitive, was suddenly unmoored. Full of outrage at the world’s cruelties and guilt at his privileged status, he was now without direction or guidance. Years later, he wrote his younger brother, Hermann:

You ask for my memories of our beloved father. . . . I loved, revered and stood in awe of him, almost as a distant, unknown and unknowable god. He was often absent and even when at home, always so busy that I was afraid to approach him (I can still hear Mother’s “Hush, Father is busy, don’t disturb him!”).

[After his death] I began a pathological hero worship in which I pictured him as one of the greatest saints of modern times and swore to imitate him as a means of relieving my guilt.

Of one thing I am certain: had he lived longer, there would have been growing conflict between him and his elder son—unless I had simply taken over his ideals and sought to adapt my thinking to his. This I know: his socialism was of the religious kind and in his diary he expressed hostility to the more militant variety that I ultimately found my way to.

At age seventeen, Noel lost the powerful figure who might have moderated his dreams of changing the world. How differently might Field’s tragic life have turned out had his father lived long enough to harness his son’s idealism to a milder faith?

“Not long before his death,” Noel wrote his brother, “Father had a serious talk with me about my future. . . . It was, as I remember, mainly a question of his desire that I should . . . go to America, to study at his beloved Harvard.”

Reeling from the sudden loss of their patriarch, his widow, Nina, and her four children set off for Herbert Haviland Field’s cherished homeland. There, too, Noel Field would be a stranger.