Spy story

Stalin's last American spy: new book tells the strange tale of Noel Field

And who was Noel Field? He was a Boston quaker, born in 1904, a brilliant mind who completed Harvard in two years and joined the state department. He was also a devout communist who died in exile in Hungary, far from Washington DC. As the title of Kati Marton’s remarkable new book has it, he was a True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy.

On a glorious October morning in New York, in a cafe on West 76th, Marton and I discuss that new book, her ninth. It mines a rich seam: spies and spying, central Europe between the wars and after, the devastating effects of totalitarianism, fanaticism and betrayal.

“I have a fascination with espionage that goes back to my earliest childhood,” she says. “I think I first heard the word ‘spy’, the Hungarian word for it, when I was six years old when my parents were falsely accused of being spies – for being good journalists really, the last independent journalists in Budapest in the 1950s.