True Believer

Stalin's Last American Spy

Kati Marton

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781476763774
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476763781
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

"Kati Marton's True Believer is a true story of intrigue, treachery, murder, torture, fascism, and an unshakable faith in the ideals of Communism….A fresh take on espionage activities from a critical period of history" ( Washington Independent Review of Books ). True Believer reveals the life of Noel Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American who spied for Stalin during the 1930s and forties. Later, a pawn in Stalin's sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades.How does an Ivy League-educated, US State Department employee, deeply rooted in American culture and history, become a hardcore Stalinist? The 1930s, when Noel Field joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement, were a time of national collapse. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs and many in Field's generation were seduced by its siren song. Few, however, went as far as Noel Field in betraying their own country.With a reporter's eye for detail, and a historian's grasp of the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, Kati Marton, in a "relevant…fascinating…vividly reconstructed" ( The New York Times Book Review ) account, captures Field's riveting quest for a life of meaning that went horribly wrong. True Believer is supported by unprecedented access to Field family correspondence, Soviet Secret Police records, and reporting on key players from Alger Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and World War II spy master, "Wild Bill" Donovan—to the most sinister of all: Josef Stalin. "Relevant today as a tale of fanaticism and the lengths it can take one to" ( Publishers Weekly ), True Believer is "riveting reading" ( USA TODAY ), an astonishing real-life spy thriller, filled with danger, misplaced loyalties, betrayal, treachery, and pure evil, with a plot twist worthy of John le Carré.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface: The Capture of Minds
• Introduction: The Trap
• Chapter 1: A Swiss Childhood
• Chapter 2: America
• Chapter 3: The Making of a Radical
• Chapter 4: The Convert
• Chapter 5: Spy Games
• Chapter 6: Spies in Flight
• Chapter 7: Desperate Comrades
• Chapter 8: Spain
• Chapter 9: War
• Chapter 10: Marseille
• Chapter 11: The Spy in Wartime
• Chapter 12: Child of the Century
• Chapter 13: Cold Peace
• Chapter 14: Man without a Country—1948
• Chapter 15: The End of the Line
• Chapter 16: Bloodlust Again
• Chapter 17: Kidnapped
• Chapter 18: Two More Fields Disappear
• Chapter 19: Erica Falls in the Net
• Chapter 20: The Prisons Open
• Chapter 21: Still Not Free
• Chapter 22: The Age of Suspicion
• Chapter 23: Twilight Years
• Chapter 24: Prague
• Chapter 25: Home at Last
• Chapter 26: The Stranger
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Credits
• About Kati Marton
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright