Volume 21, Number 21 & 22 · January 23, 1975
Another CIA Plot?
By William Shawcross
Operation Splinter Factor
by Stewart Steven
Lippincott, 249 pp., $7.95
Noel Field was an amiable and naïve fellow-traveler who, while working with the OSS during World War II, made friends with a number of communists who later became leaders in Eastern Europe. In 1949 he was lured to Prague by the Czechoslovak authorities and arrested. His wife Herta, his brother Hermann, and his 'foster daughter' Erica Glaser all went to look for him; Erica was arrested in East Germany, Hermann in Warsaw. They were each of them tortured, and Noel Field 'confessed' that as an American agent he had recruited many Party leaders to serve Washington. This 'confession' was one of the main pieces of evidence in the European show trials between 1949 and 1953 in which so many communist leaders were destroyed.
Review, 2008 words
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