'True Believer,' story of a Soviet spy, is riveting reading

Anyone who reads about Noel Field, an American who became a spy for the Soviet Union, will want to grab Mr. Field by his lapels, shake him like a human bobblehead and demand: “Can't you see what you're doing?”

That’s a testament to the narrative power of Kati Marton in her new book True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy (Simon & Schuster, 249 pp., ***½  out of four stars).

Field, an educated, peaceful Quaker, became disenchanted with the United States in the 1920s, drifted into Communism, and became a longtime spy for the Soviet Union. Along the way he rubbed shoulders with Cold War warriors from both sides, including Alger Hiss, the infamous State Department official convicted of perjury in connection with being a Soviet spy, and Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of the CIA.

For his absolute obedience, Field was rewarded with prison and torture.

Field grew up in Zurich, the eldest son in an American family of privilege. His pacifist father took him on a tour of World War I battlefields where the smoldering ruins of Verdun left a lasting impression about the horrors of war. Field returned to the United States, graduated from Harvard and dreamed of making a difference in the world.

Those who follow espionage cases are the first to ask how did this happen, and Marton provides key historical moments that help explain the radicalization of young Field. She puts us on the streets of 1920s and ’30s America and the infamous injustices that blackened the period: the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Great Depression, and the government’s brutal treatment of World War I “Bonus Army” veterans.

Field “had seen America at its most heartless,” and the memory never left him. After college he worked for the State Department but in private life was drawn to the plight of the less fortunate. He and his wife lived in a shabby Washington apartment where they socialized with black neighbors — unconventional behavior for the time. He joined black friends to picket a segregated theater. He invited homeless men in for meals.

Beyond these acts, Marton says, Field began searching for meaning in life. He found it in relentless Soviet propaganda that blanketed America in the 1920s, which made it easier for Communists in the federal government to recruit office colleagues for spying.

By the time Field began working for a Soviet intelligence agency in 1935, he felt part of a new family, a member of a “historic, clandestine movement.”

Field’s drift into communism is not surprising, but his blind, unquestioning submission is startling.  Most astonishingly, Field even refused to repudiate Stalin and Soviet atrocities after he and his wife were arrested in Czechoslovakia as part of a purge. He was accused of spying for America, and imprisoned for five years. He testified against former Communist colleagues. But instead of Stalin, Field blamed himself.

True Believer is a mesmerizing look at Cold War espionage and a chilling reminder of the destructive power of fanaticism.