Most students of the Cold War are familiar with Noel Field, the one-time U.S. State Department officer, League of Nations employee, and Unitarian relief director in war-torn Europe, who disappeared, along with most of his family, behind the Iron Curtain in 1948. A long-time Soviet spy, Field was kidnapped, tortured, and portrayed as a dangerous U.S. double agent who had cleverly recruited scores of East European Communists as U.S. spies. Numerous men and women he had known and others of whom he was ignorant were imprisoned or executed as Iosif Stalin eliminated any perceived enemies in his satellite countries.
Far fewer will be aware of Noel's father, Herbert Haviland Field, a fascinating, complicated, and visionary U.S. citizen who devoted much of his life to an effort to create a new scientific information system. In one of the weird coincidences of the history of espionage, Herbert worked as an agent for...