The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  *

  When Charles Joy followed Martha and Waitstill Sharp in the USC’s Lisbon office, he expanded ties his predecessors had formed with Fry’s group in Marseille, and developed as well USC efforts to get medical supplies into unoccupied France and operate medical and dental clinics for refugees. The work with medical supplies was so successful that the International Red Cross began using the USC as its distributor of such material throughout southern France. In time it became apparent to the Lisbon office that its increased involvement in Marseille required an office there and a resident director overseeing operations.

  Through Donald Lowrie of the International YMCA, Joy learned of Noel Field, a tall, lean, attractive American who had been raised in Switzerland, graduated from Harvard (as had Joy), worked for the U.S. State Department, and in 1936 left government service and came to Geneva with the League of Nations. During Spain’s civil war he had served as a League representative in the country, and later he had an active role in repatriating foreign fighters who had joined the Republican cause. That Field had a Quaker background was no disqualification in Unitarian eyes, and Joy’s superiors in Boston were delighted to find an American with Field’s experience who was fluent in French and German and already located in Europe. Unknown to Joy, the USC leadership, and many others who knew him, Noel Field had for some years led another life as a dedicated Communist.

  After Field and his wife, Herta, were hired to run the new Marseille office with a joint yearly salary of $5,750, they took an apartment in a shabby furnished house and plunged into the work. Both to the Lisbon office and to Unitarian officials in Boston, the couple seemed motivated wholly by selfless devotion to refugee assistance. That Noel Field was known to give away his ration tickets and spend part of his salary taking hungry exiles for meals in black-market restaurants only added to their appeal in USC eyes.

  A continuing chore of the Marseille office was purchasing medical supplies from French pharmacists, as required by Vichy, and getting them to a free clinic operated in Marseille, to a hospital in Toulouse, and to infirmaries that had been set up in area concentration camps. When concern surfaced in Boston that medical supplies sent to the camps might wind up in German hands, a Unitarian minister from Staten Island, Howard L. Brooks, was sent to Marseille on a temporary mission to work with the Fields while also checking on the distribution process. After reaching Lisbon, Brooks spent some time observing Charles Joy’s USC operation—and enjoying a city he found colorful, vibrant, and given over to pleasure yet tense with rumor about an imminent Nazi invasion. German tourists roamed the streets, though few believed they were really tourists, and there was repeated talk of Panzer divisions poised on the Spanish border, even an armored division in Spanish Morocco prepared to set sail for Portugal. A U.S. Coast Guard vessel lay in the Lisbon harbor to evacuate up to two hundred Americans in event of a German incursion.

  In Marseille Brooks found that medical supplies for the camps were delivered by car by a refugee medical doctor on the USC staff, René Zimmer. When Brooks accompanied him on a two-week tour, he found that the supplies indeed reached those they were intended for, though frightful conditions in the camps created an urgent need for food and clothing as well as medicine. Back in Marseille, Brooks joined the USC staff in a host of other ongoing chores.

  There were [he noted] the education projects in the concentration camps. Also, there was a rehabilitation program for Lorraine refugees at Puycelci [a village in the south of France] which required much time and thought. Finally, there was the intricate package system whereby we sent to internees the permitted 500 grams of food, whenever possible, as provided by our Lisbon office… . One of Mr. Field’s important duties was to check constantly that these parcels were properly delivered.

  Brooks also found time to get involved with Varian Fry in work that, due to his committee’s covert tactics, caused him to be “ostracized by other relief workers who secretly admired his work.” Brooks went beyond admiration by spending time each day at the CAS office so, as he put it, “at least one American would be working there.” Dangling at the time between waiting for a successor who never arrived and Vichy authorities preparing to expel him, Fry would remember that he “tried to get one or two of the other American relief workers to step into my shoes, but with the exception of Howard Brooks of the Unitarian Service Committee, no one would, and Brooks could do so only for a very short time—after that he had to return to the States.”

  When Brooks finally did go home, he brought with him a favorable opinion of Noel Field, both personally and as head of the USC’s Marseille office. He apparently had no awareness that Field was a Communist, and for good reason. After Brooks met with a destitute German Communist and gave him money, Field had chided him for dealing with a political figure and thereby putting the USC at risk in the eyes of Vichy authorities. Nonetheless some in Marseille had begun wondering about Field. Donald Lowrie was told by Czechs he had known in Prague that Field had ties to Communists, and he passed on what he heard to Hugh Fullerton, the American consul. Members of Fry’s committee had also noticed Field’s interest in Communists and had gotten into the habit of referring those who came to them to the Unitarians. But there was no firm knowledge about Field’s political loyalties, and in Marseille at the time more pressing matters claimed attention.

  In fact, while Field was running the USC office he was also deeply caught up in Communist activity. He made frequent trips to Switzerland for meetings with party members from various countries and became involved, among other things, in sending Unitarian food parcels to German comrades held in concentration camps and helping German Communists in France make illegal escapes to Switzerland. Under instructions of a Communist leader in Marseille, Field also sent Unitarian parcels and money to people the local party was caring for, afterward carefully listing the names so he could make proper accounting to headquarters in Boston.

  Through his various activities Field learned of Communist undergrounds in Western and Central Europe, information that had value for the Allied wartime effort. Just as Charles Joy had found him for the USC in Marseille, another Unitarian leader came forward to draw him into American intelligence operations. Robert Dexter, who while serving as the USC’s executive director was now running, in conjunction with his wife, the group’s Lisbon office, was also secretly working with the American OSS and reporting to Allen Dulles, the agency’s European chief based in Bern under the cover of special assistant to the American ambassador. Elisabeth Dexter later disclosed that her husband’s work for Dulles “was to carry a large sum of money for the OSS to a well-known labor leader in France, and do several other errands, and he was to contact OSS men in Madrid and in Marseille for further information and to make reports.” Others in the USC hierarchy may have known and approved of Dexter’s cooperation with the OSS. There was no question, at any event, of the USC’s position in the war effort.

  Robert Dexter was seemingly unaware of Field’s ties to Communists, but he knew that Field’s work with refugees in Marseille had given him contacts that might interest Dulles. He took Field to Bern to meet the spymaster—the two had first met during World War I when Dulles, then doing intelligence work in Zurich, often visited the home of Field’s father, an eminent expatriate biologist, and his British mother—and Field signed on with the OSS. The decision apparently caused him no ideological conflict since the agency and the Communists were united in the fight against Nazi Germany. Nor apparently did it matter to Dulles, given the Allied alliance with Russia, that Field might also be receiving orders from Moscow. Field seems never to have been on Dulles’s payroll, though he was given money that in turn was passed on to Communists; his main effort was as a middleman bringing potentially valuable people to OSS attention.

  When the Allies landed in North Africa and German troops poured into unoccupied France, Noel and Herta Field made a hasty retreat from Marseille to Geneva. (American relief workers who stayed behind in Marseille were told by the Germans to leave for Lo
urdes, from where they were moved to Baden-Baden in Austria and interned until, early in 1944, they were exchanged through Lisbon.) With permission of the USC, the Fields set up a Unitarian office in Geneva and were back in business as a relief center, working now with refugees in Switzerland. At the same time Noel Field carried on his involvement with Communist groups and with the OSS. With the Normandy invasion at hand, he helped organize French Communists in support of the military thrust. Later, following the liberation of France, the USC opened a Paris office while Field remained in Geneva with a new and challenging position of European director of the entire Unitarian service program.

  After the war ended Field went to Boston to report to USC leaders on his prolonged period of European relief work. There was great pride in what he had accomplished, and admiration for how little he had asked for himself. Questions arose about his zealous aid of Communists—at their most extreme, they asked whether as director of European operations Field had in reality turned the USC into what amounted to a Communist-front organization—but nothing at the time seemed genuinely serious or could not be explained as the carping of scattered individuals. Eventually, however, concern about Field, heightened by furor in the United States over Communist affiliation, reached a point where the USC sent a representative to Europe to investigate. Nothing was proven to full home-office satisfaction, yet Field was eased out of the USC by the closing, in October 1947, of the European director’s office. He was offered a position in Boston but declined, and in 1949 he vanished behind the Iron Curtain.

  *

  If Noel Field had a polar opposite it was Howard Wriggins. A member of the pacifist Society of Friends, Wriggins had sought and received conscientious objector status after graduation from Dartmouth in 1940, then entered a four-month training program with the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an honored nonsectarian organization with roots extending back to World War I. Another four months followed as an apprentice with the group’s refugee division in Philadelphia before Wriggins, age twenty-three, was sent to Lisbon in May 1942 to replace a man moving on to a Quaker post in Marseille.

  The AFSC’s Lisbon office had opened a year earlier, in the spring of 1941, the refugee flood off its peak but still high. The office director, Philip Conrad, was an older man, fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and with long relief experience. Wriggins operated as his assistant, the two working along with a secretary and a Portuguese errand boy in a converted apartment on a steep hillside above the Tivoli Hotel on the Avenida da Liberdade. The new man’s first task was familiarizing himself with the specialties of Lisbon’s other agencies so he could direct refugees turning up at the Quakers’ door to the best place for help. With limited financial means, aid groups cautiously doled out their services no matter how compelling the stories brought to them. At times, as Wriggins soon understood, a sympathetic hearing was the best he could offer.

  Especially trying were his monthly visits to Caxias prison to meet with refugees held for illegal entry into Portugal. He could do little for them beyond trying to connect them with a consulate, if their native country had one in Lisbon, and issuing scraps of clothing and food. His regular trips to Caldas da Rainha were only slightly less draining. Refugees could live anywhere in the city they could find housing but had to report daily to the local police; visits to Lisbon for any reason required a day permit, with return that evening. Wriggins’s task was get to know the thirty or so families there receiving Quaker aid and gauge funds needed for the following month. “The evidence for making a decision on how much a person needs,” he wrote of the work, “is very slight … hunch, guesswork … nothing you can be sure of. But a decision must be made and on the spot. At the end of a day of interviewing I quietly prayed to myself that I had done the best I could.”

  He also tried to help clients with decisions about the future, which meant appearing hopeful in order to maintain their spirits yet realistic about when and where they might be relocated. Time dragged on while papers to immigration officials were mailed back and forth. Transatlantic telephone calls for civilians were nearly impossible while telegrams were expensive and required getting typed messages to the post office in Lisbon. “The world is at war,” Wriggins recorded of the humanly demanding work,

  and I am comforting refugees, holding out hopes which, when I hold them out, I myself am almost convinced cannot be fulfilled. And the next time I see this person I may have to slap down one hope and substitute another to give them enough strength to go on. And it all must be done gently, since they are near the edge already, and a shock would be the last shove over the lip.

  In his refugee advocacy Wriggins dealt with two governments—Portugal as host country, the United States as favored overseas destination. His transactions with Portugal were largely a matter of maintaining good relations with both the local and secret police, and giving assurances that the Quakers’ clients would not become financial drains on the state. Although officials he met with were invariably polite and proficient in English or French, Wriggins was always aware that he was in an authoritarian state, that he was probably being watched, that phones could be tapped, that continuing his work required going about it with constant awareness of his situation. At times, though, his involvement with Portugal simply meant standing back and observing incidents of its stiff behavior as a neutral nation. At the dockside one day, seeing off some of their refugees, Wriggins and Conrad realized that a young couple they had worked exceptionally hard for could not be seen. They had entered Portugal illegally and been kept in separate jails; the AFSC had managed to get them papers, provide ship tickets, and persuade the police to transport them to the dock. Ultimately Wriggins and Conrad learned the couple were already safely aboard the ship but confined to the brig until departure because the police were unwilling to take responsibility for allowing them to leave the country.

  American authorities were equally polite yet inflexible about immigration matters. Even when national quotas allowed the issuing of visas, the procedure crept forward due to changing conditions before a passport was actually stamped. Prospective immigrants needed FBI clearance that could take months to get as well as affidavits from relatives in America or well-connected citizens offering a job or otherwise certifying they would not become public wards. The local consul issuing the visa could then weigh whether the affidavit was, in his view, sufficient; if not, the process began all over again. The renewal process for an expired visa was treated the same as a new application. In case after case, as Wriggins later became aware, he had witnessed in operation a State Department policy of intentional delay in granting American visas.

  The hindrance only increased with American entry into the war due to deepened security concerns that the Nazis might use refugees to infiltrate spies and fifth columnists into the country. Wriggins encountered the worry firsthand when he paid a courtesy call on George Kennan, then counselor of the Lisbon legation. At the end of Wriggins’s conversation with the “civil but severe” official, Kennan caught his visitor off guard by saying, “Of course you realize, Mr. Wriggins, that the activities of your committee and the others are tearing a hole in the security of the United States. You have no way of really knowing about the identity of the people you are helping. You have their stories but you have no way of confirming their veracity.” Wriggins answered: “Sir, if you sat listening to their stories the way I have, and saw the fear and anxiety in their eyes, I think you would be able to make some distinctions.”

  Following Operation Torch in North Africa and reduced concern in Portugal about a Nazi invasion, Wriggins found a slight easing of the country’s neutral stance. Earlier, refugees who had come to Portugal illegally would tell him their stories while peering anxiously out his office window to see if the police were arriving to arrest them. A French refugee now came to the Quakers with a story that illustrated a change of attitude, at least on the part of the police. After reaching Portugal illegally, he had made his way to a main Lisbon square to blend into the
crowd, unsuccessfully it turned out since a policeman took him by the arm and asked if he had proper papers. The refugee admitted the truth, then asked for directions to the French consulate. The policeman told him the consulate, under Vichy direction, would only send him back to France, and added: “You’d better go to the Quakers; they’re most likely to help you.” The policeman knew the address and gave the refugee directions.

  An unexpected effect of the North Africa landings put an ongoing program of the AFSC in jeopardy. In October 1942 it was learned that some thirty American women, all professionally involved in work for children, were coming from New York to Lisbon on a Portuguese liner to escort back to America a thousand French children who had been granted emergency visas through the efforts of the United States Committee for the Care of European Children. Once the children were across the Atlantic, the women would help establish them with foster families for the duration of the war. But with the North African invasion and subsequent German occupation of the south of France, the escape door for the children abruptly closed, leaving the women with nothing to do after they landed in Lisbon.

  To occupy them the AFSC’s office secretary showed them the sights of Lisbon and the beach communities, yet energetic and with duties back home, the women had not come to Portugal for touring. For one of them, the idle period was unbearable. Wriggins recalled a quiet, gray-haired lady who appeared at his office one afternoon and asked if she could speak with him; busy at the moment, he made an appointment to see her early the next morning. She did not appear, and later her shoes were found on a cliff above the sea. The Lisbon police reported finding a handbag on a rock in the wide crater of Boca do Inferno, Mouth of Hell, near Cascais, and said it was possible the owner—identified as Hazel Helen Mackay, who was on leave of absence from the Children’s Welfare Foundation of New York City—either fell into the sea or was overtaken by a wave.