by David Talbot
The so-called Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee, over which Dulles quickly assumed control, allowed him to roam freely through the halls of the new intelligence agency and develop a plan for how to give it teeth. The committee’s report was conveniently timed for January 1949, when Tom Dewey would presumably be inaugurated as president and Dulles would take over the CIA. The 193-page report would conclude its sharply critical assessment of the CIA by demanding that the agency take off its gloves in the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union. The CIA, it declared, “has the duty to act.” The agency “has been given, by law, wide authority.” It was time to take full advantage of these generous powers, the committee insisted.
Dulles and Forrestal didn’t wait for the report to be finished before taking their own action. In March 1948, James Angleton flew back from Rome to meet with Dulles, warning his mentor that Italy’s Communist Party was on the verge of taking power in the upcoming national elections in April. Seeing an opportunity for the kind of decisive counterattack that they had long envisioned against the Communist advance in Europe, Dulles and Forrestal flew into action, raising millions of dollars to tilt the election in favor of the U.S.-supported Christian Democrats. Within days, a satchel stuffed with American cash was being handed off to Italian agents at Rome’s Hassler Hotel, the luxurious villa atop the Spanish Steps favored by Dulles during his stays in the Eternal City. More cash would soon come pouring in. The massive infusion of campaign money and U.S. aid ensured victory for the U.S. government’s political clients. On the evening of April 17, the first day of Italian voting, Dulles scrutinized the election tallies from Rome at Forrestal’s home in Washington. The two men raised a toast when it became clear that the Italian Communists had suffered a stunning defeat.
In November, Dulles suffered his own electoral defeat when Truman pulled off a shocking upset over Dewey. It was a humiliating reversal of fortune, not just for Dewey but for the Dulles brothers.
Soon afterward, Allen would lose his strongest ally in the Truman administration, Jim Forrestal, when the president ousted the Dulles ally from the Pentagon. By the time he was pushed out, Forrestal was showing signs of severe nervous exhaustion. Angry and despondent about his ouster, he began spiraling quickly downward, ranting about how the Soviets had infiltrated Washington and how they had marked him for liquidation. Early in the morning of May 22, 1949, after Forrestal was checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, he squeezed through the small bathroom window of his sixteenth-floor hospital suite and fell to his death. The tragic collapse of the defense secretary, a man who had controlled America’s fearsome arsenal, was one of the stranger episodes of the Cold War.
With the Democrats maintaining control of the White House in the election of 1948, the Dulles brothers’ dream of running U.S. foreign policy seemed dashed. But Allen would find ways to stay in the spy game, no matter who was president.
In June 1949, Dulles organized the National Committee for a Free Europe in conjunction with an illustrious board that included General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, and Time-Life publishing magnate (and close friend) Henry Luce. Ostensibly a private philanthropic group, the committee was actually a CIA front that channeled funds to anti-Communist European émigrés and financed major propaganda efforts like Radio Free Europe. At least $2 million of the money poured into the committee’s clandestine projects came from the Nazi gold that Dulles had helped track down at the end of the war. In the early years of the Cold War, the Nazi treasure looted from Jewish families and German-occupied nations would become a key source of funding for Dulles’s secret operations.
Private citizen Dulles further spread his influence by inserting close allies like Frank Wisner in key intelligence posts. Like Dulles, Wisner was a former Wall Street lawyer who had fallen for the glamour of espionage life. In 1949, Dulles helped create a new intelligence outpost and buried it in the State Department bureaucracy under a purposefully dull name—the Office of Policy Coordination. Despite its innocuous title, the OPC would evolve into the kind of combative agency that Dulles envisioned the CIA becoming in a Dewey administration. Wisner was maneuvered into position as OPC chief, and under his gung ho leadership, the obscure unit quickly threw itself into the black arts of espionage, including sabotage, subversion, and assassination. By 1952, the OPC was running forty-seven overseas stations, and its staff had ballooned to nearly three thousand employees, with another three thousand independent contractors in the field.
Dulles and Wisner were essentially operating their own private spy agency. The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were ex-Nazis. While President Truman continued to regard the primary purpose of an intelligence agency as the gathering of information for the president and his national security advisers, Dulles and Wisner were engaged in their own no-holds-barred war with the Soviet bloc. They saw Eastern Europe as their primary battlefield in the great struggle to roll back the Soviet advance, but their field of combat often strayed into the sovereign territory of U.S. allies such as France, West Germany, and Italy.
During World War II, Dulles had resolutely pursued his own initiatives in Switzerland, often in conflict with the policies of President Roosevelt. Now, in the early years of the Cold War, he was doing the same, directly under the nose of another Democratic president. Although the OPC’s tactics had been sanctioned by a National Security Council memo titled “NSC 10/2,” which had been formulated in the heat of the 1948 presidential campaign—when Truman was fending off Dewey and the Republicans’ charges that he was soft on Communism—it is uncertain how fully informed the president was about the exploits of the Office of Policy Coordination.
Whether or not Truman was fully briefed, Wisner pursued his job with a sense of daring abandon, dreaming up ever more inventive and dangerous ways to disrupt Soviet rule over its European dominion. Wisner would present his ideas to Dulles, as if the Sullivan and Cromwell attorney were still his boss. Dulles found one of Wisner’s brainstorms particularly intriguing. The idea was sparked in May 1949 when British intelligence informed Wisner that one of Dulles’s former wartime assets, a man named Noel Field, was planning to fly to Prague, where an attractive academic post was being dangled before him.
Why shouldn’t U.S. intelligence take advantage of Field’s ill-advised journey behind the Iron Curtain? Wisner had acquired a high-placed double agent inside the Polish security service, a man named Józef Światło. He could be told to spread the word, all the way from Warsaw to Moscow, that Field was actually coming to Prague on a secret mission, sent by his old spymaster, the infamous Allen Dulles. While in Prague, Field would be contacting his extensive network from the war years—the brave Communists, nationalists, and antifascists he had helped to survive when he was a refugee aid worker. These men and women were all part of the top secret Dulles-Field spy network.
None of this was true—but Wisner and Dulles knew that if they could successfully plant this seed in Stalin’s mind, they might wreak havoc throughout the fragile Soviet empire.
Allen Dulles had a long history with the Field family. Most men with this sort of connection to a family would have found it impossible to use such old acquaintances as pawns in a game of geopolitical intrigue. But Dulles was not like most men. His plan was heartless but inspired. By turning the unsuspecting Field family into members of a far-reaching U.S. spy ring, Dulles would panic Stalin—already rattled by the 1948 defection of Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito—into launching witch hunts that would fracture the Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. As with all the bold counterintelligence gambits he undertook during his career, Dulles threw himself into the Field affair with great relish, even personally giving it a code name: Operation Splinter Factor.
Dulles had first met the Fields in Switzerland during World War I, when he tried to recruit Noel’s father as a spy. Herbert Haviland Field was a Harvard-educated, internationally renowned zoologist
who ran a scientific institute in Zurich dedicated to the encyclopedic classification of the animal kingdom. The senior Field—a devout Quaker with a full, Darwinian beard—turned Dulles down, but he did feed him bits of information from time to time, and he invited the young diplomat to his home for dinners. It was here—in the Fields’ four-story, hilltop villa overlooking Lake Zurich—that Dulles became acquainted with Noel and his three siblings. A shy, gangly adolescent at the time, with a long face and soft, searching, green eyes, Noel impressed Dulles, when he asked the boy what he wanted to be, by earnestly declaring, “I want to work for world peace.” Noel became deeply committed to pacifism during the war, when he saw trainloads of horribly maimed soldiers in transit through neutral Switzerland. After Armistice, his Quaker father reinforced the boy’s feelings by taking him on a tour of the war’s blood-soaked battlefields.
When his father died suddenly of a heart attack after the war, a grief-stricken Noel vowed to dedicate his life to becoming a “saint” and helping lift the sorrows of mankind. He enrolled at Harvard, his father’s alma mater, and after storming through his courses in two years and writing his dissertation on the League of Nations and disarmament, he graduated with honors in 1924. Shortly afterward, he married his Swiss-German sweetheart, Herta, whom he had known since they were both nine. Noel then applied for the U.S. Foreign Service, deciding with typical moral gravity that it was “by far the most practical field in which an individual can do his bit towards international understanding.” In 1926, after passing the exams, Noel and Herta moved to Washington, D.C., where he began work as a junior foreign officer at the State Department.
From the very beginning, Noel was an odd man out in the insular world of the State Department, whose preppy officers liked to think of themselves as “a pretty good club.” Noel was bookish and idealistic, and he betrayed a sentimental weakness for the left-wing causes of the day, from the trial of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti to the Bonus March of impoverished war veterans on Washington in 1932 that turned violent when General Douglas MacArthur unleashed his troops on the protesters. While other young foreign service officers were dining with their own kind at Washington’s exclusive clubs, Noel and Herta would frequent the capital’s racially segregated theaters, where they sat with their black friends. The Fields also invited their racially mixed circle to their home in downtown Washington, a modest apartment overrun with cats.
Although he did not join the Communist Party, Noel was intrigued by the Soviet revolution, which he began to see as the hope for a world torn apart by war, greed, and poverty. He taught himself Russian by listening to phonograph records. He liked the sound of the language and wanted to read Lenin and Stalin in the original.
In a later era, Noel and Herta Field would have been just another young, free-spirited couple, given to utopian dreams, book clubs, nature hikes, and camping. But in the Washington of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the growing misery of the Great Depression pushed the desperate and the idealistic in extreme directions, the Fields seemed marked for trouble.
In 1934, the couple fell in with a Viennese woman named Hede Massing, who turned out to be a Soviet intelligence agent. Noel began secretly passing information and copies of documents to Massing. But, increasingly tormented by his dual loyalties, he decided to quit the State Department, and in 1935 Noel and Herta moved to Geneva, where he took a job with the disarmament section of the League of Nations.
Field thought that by returning to Switzerland, he could maintain an honorable neutrality. For the rest of his overseas career—which took Noel from his League of Nations post to humanitarian work on behalf of Nazi refugees during World War II—he convinced himself that he could in good conscience serve his own country as well as the Soviet Union. But in the end, he would be crushed between these implacable forces. Both sides saw the dreamy Field as a useful victim. Earl Browder, leader of the U.S. Communist Party, would anoint him “a stupid child in the woods.” As for Allen Dulles, the man who was so impressed by the teenage Field’s sincerity, he came to see him as just another of those “little mice” whose necks would soon be snapped.
During the war, Field volunteered to work for Dulles, using his cover as a Unitarian Service Committee relief worker to transmit information back and forth across the Swiss border and to deliver packages of OSS cash to resistance fighters in France. Noel was particularly useful as a conduit to the German Communist underground. The Fields’ foster daughter, Erica, also proved helpful for Dulles, bicycling guns and medicine across the border to France.
It was clear that Noel’s antifascist work had a Communist tilt. In February 1945, he arrived at the OSS office in Paris with Dulles’s written blessing. Field met with young OSS officer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the future historian and Kennedy White House aide. Field proposed that the OSS subsidize the recruitment of left-wing German refugees in France, who would be dropped inside liberated areas of Germany, where they would begin to establish the country’s new political foundations. Schlesinger, a man of the left, but an ardent anti-Communist, immediately sniffed out Field’s proposal as a scheme to give the Soviet Union a head start in the occupation of Germany.
Schlesinger took a strong disliking to Field. Years later, he would describe him as a “Quaker Communist, filled with idealism, smugness and sacrifice.” Or, as another observer put it, Field exuded “the arrogance of humility.” In Schlesinger’s estimation, he was less of a dangerous figure than a pathetic one. His pious dedication to the Soviet cause “did little damage to the interests of the United States.” Nonetheless, after their Paris meeting, Schlesinger strongly advised his OSS superiors against buying into Field’s scheme for postwar Germany.
Dulles ended up funding Field’s project anyway, which later resulted in much ridicule from his counterparts in British intelligence. Some observers have suggested that this is why, later on, Dulles was able to betray Field with such ease, spreading the lie that he was a secret agent working behind the Iron Curtain for the Americans. But when Dulles decided to feed Noel Field to Stalin—and then, one at a time, three of his family members—there was probably very little spleen involved, just cold calculation.
After Noel dropped out of sight in Prague, his family implored Dulles to help. He had been a guest in the family’s Zurich home. Both Field and his father had put themselves at his service. But Dulles did nothing to rescue Field. And he did nothing to prevent Noel’s family members from walking headlong into the same trap.
Three months into his long ordeal as a captive of Poland’s Stalinist regime, Noel’s brother Hermann was taken from his cell for another round of grilling. This time Hermann’s interrogator was someone like himself—a tweedy, academic type in his forties. He seemed eager to help Hermann out of his predicament, if only he would fully cooperate. There was no use in playing games any longer: Polish security knew that he and his brother were part of a conspiracy against the peace-loving peoples of the Communist world.
Hermann, a political innocent whose ideology amounted to nothing more than a kind of do-gooder Quakerism, was utterly confused. He had no clue about why he, or his brother, had fallen into this Kafkaesque nightmare. “But you’re not talking sense,” he told his inquisitor. “What conspiracy? Tell me what I have done to you. Give me just one example.”
The tweedy man began pacing back and forth in front of the stool where Hermann sat. Suddenly he stopped and blurted out, “Who is Allen Dulles? Mr. Field, tell me precisely, what were your contacts with Allen Dulles, and what was the nature of your assignments from him?”
Hermann’s interrogator clearly thought that by abruptly invoking Dulles’s name, Field would finally crumble. But the question only served to deepen Hermann’s confusion. Field had been too young to remember meeting Dulles as a child in Zurich. He had only a vague memory of the name.
“There’s a John Foster Dulles,” Hermann tried helpfully. “That’s the only one I’m sure of. He’s some sort of adviser on foreign affairs to the Republican Party.”
But the interrogator would have none of this evasion. He kept on badgering Hermann, hour after hour. “I felt like I was in an insane asylum,” Field later recalled.
In fact, the mysterious Allen Dulles was at the center of Hermann Field’s ordeal. Field just didn’t realize it.
Operation Splinter Factor succeeded beyond the OPC’s wildest dreams. Stalin became convinced that the Fields were at the center of a wide-ranging operation to infiltrate anti-Soviet elements into leadership positions throughout the Eastern bloc. The Dulles-Wisner plot aggravated the Soviet premier’s already rampant paranoia, resulting in an epic reign of terror that, before it finally ran its course, would destroy the lives of untold numbers of people. Hundreds of thousands throughout Eastern Europe were arrested; many were tortured and executed. In Czechoslovakia, where nearly 170,000 Communist Party members were seized as suspects in the make-believe Field plot, the political crisis grew so severe that the economy nearly collapsed.
Anyone whose life had been even remotely touched by Noel Field during his war relief work was subject to the sweeping purge. Many of the officials rounded up had been war heroes in their countries—antifascist fighters who survived the Nazi occupation only to be falsely accused as traitors by Stalin’s secret police. Most victims were independent-minded nationalists, the sort of leaders who put their own people’s interests ahead of blind obedience to Moscow. Jewish officials, whose “cosmopolitan” and “Zionist” sensibilities aroused suspicion, also bore the brunt of Stalin’s crackdown.
