Tale of American-born spy for Soviets Revealed

[peejay 327]

Tale of American-born spy for Soviets finally surfaces

Posthumous honor by Putin triggers interest in intelligence officer

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

New York Times

He had an all-American cover — born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. He was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar, trained by Stalin's ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Koval, who died last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, appears to have been one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who in World War II had penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Koval as "the only Soviet intelligence officer" to infiltrate the project's secret plants, saying his work "helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own."

Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends of Koval's have raced to tell his story — the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. U.S. intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.

A regular guy

The spy's success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and re-immigration to the Soviet Union. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, relaxed familiarity with American mores and no accent.

"He was very friendly, compassionate and very smart," said Arnold Kramish, a retired physicist who studied with Koval at City College and later worked with him on the bomb.

Stewart D. Bloom, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who also studied with Koval, called him a regular guy.

"He played baseball and played it well," Bloom recalled. "He didn't have a Russian accent. He spoke fluent English, American English. His credentials were perfect."

Once, Bloom added, "I saw him staring off in the distance and thinking about something else. Now I think I know what it was."

Groomed in Russia

Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Soviets, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were "walk-ins" — spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than rigorous training.

By contrast, Koval was a mole groomed in Russia by the feared GRU, the Soviet agency for military intelligence. Moreover, he gained wide access to America's atomic plants — a feat unknown for any other Soviet spy. Nuclear experts say the secrets of bomb manufacturing can be more important than those of design.

Historians say Putin may have cited Koval's accomplishments as a way to rekindle Russian pride. As shown by a New York Public Library database, the announcement has prompted detailed reports in the Russian press about Koval and his clandestine feats.

"It's very exciting to get this kind of break," said John Earl Haynes, a Library of Congress historian and an authority on atomic spying. "We know very little about GRU operations in the United States."

The story of how Koval became a spy centers on his family, who had come from Russia and decided to return.

He was born in 1913 in Sioux City, Iowa, which had a large Jewish community and a half-dozen synagogues. In 1932, during the Great Depression, his family immigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland.

Henry Srebrnik, a Canadian historian at the University of Prince Edward Island who is studying the Kovals for a project on American Jewish Communists, said the family belonged to a popular front organization, as did most American Jews who immigrated to Birobidzhan.

The organization, he said, was ICOR, a Yiddish acronym for the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. He added that Koval's father presided over its Sioux City branch as secretary.

By 1934, Koval was in Moscow, excelling in difficult studies at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology. Upon graduating with honors, he was recruited and trained by the GRU and was sent back to the United States for nearly a decade of scientific espionage, from roughly 1940 to 1948.

FBI involvement

After the war, Koval fled the U.S. when American counterintelligence agents found Soviet literature hailing the Koval family as happy immigrants from the United States, said a Nov. 3 article in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, a Russian publication.

In 1949, Moscow detonated its first bomb, surprising Washington at the quick loss of what had been an atomic monopoly.

In the early 1950s, Kramish said, the FBI interviewed him and anyone else who had known Koval, asking that the matter be kept confidential.

Bloom at the time was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. "I was pretty amazed," he recalled. "I didn't figure George to be like that."

In Russia, Koval returned to the Mendeleev Institute, earning his doctorate and teaching there for many years, Rossiiskaia Gazeta said.

Koval reportedly died Jan. 31, 2006. By American reckoning, he would have been 92, though the Kremlin's statement put his age at 94 and some Russian accounts put it at 93.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headli...ld/5293338.html

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

We had a spate of those stories in the UK a few years ago - one involved a grandmother in her 70's or 80's who was a Soviet agent in 50's & 60's. She was still alive when the story broke, but I don't think she went to jail for it.

[franklie 0]

now that's a remarkable story.