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    True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy
    True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy
    True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy
    Audiobook8 hours

    True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy

    Written by Kati Marton

    Narrated by Amanda Carlin

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    “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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781508222378
    Author

    Kati Marton

    Kati Marton is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy and Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An award-winning former NPR correspondent and ABC News bureau chief in Germany, she was born in Hungary and lives in New York City.

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    • 3/5
      This is a life of Noel Field, who began as an idealistic Quaker son of an American Quaker living in Switzerland, and became a Soviet spy in Europe and America from the 1930s to the early 1950s; he remained a committed Stalinist even after Stalin's Hungarian security used him as a tool to destroy many of his friends in the Eastern European Communist parties who were, in Stalin's view, too nationalistic and or cosmopolitan.While working for the US State Department in the 1930s. Field was apparently active in the same Communist or fellow-traveler circles as the better known and more controversial Alger Hiss; unlike Hiss, as far as i know, no one doubts Field was a Soviet operative. He later worked for the dying League of Nations in Geneva and then for an ostensible relief organization whose undisclosed purpose was rescuing and protecting Communists from fascist threats as more of Europe came under fascist control.. The tone is one of hard-edged contempt for Field and his cause; it also includes some superfluous comparisons with the attitudes of modern jihadists.