Putin Toasts His Spy; From Sioux City to Birobidzhan And Back

International Herald Tribune:
(President Vladimir Putin of Russia and intelligence officers at a ceremony posthumously honoring George Koval, left, an American-born Soviet spy.(Red Star, left; pool photo by Dmitry Astakhov, via AFP-Getty Ima)

The all-American fellow was a Russian spy
By William J. Broad
Monday, November 12, 2007

He had 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 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. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.
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 foreign accent.
"He was very friendly, compassionate and very smart," said Arnold Kramish, a retired physicist who studied with Koval at City College of New York and later worked with him on the bomb project. "He never did homework."
Stewart Bloom, a senior 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," usually as shortstop, Bloom recalled. "He didn't have a Russian accent. He spoke fluent English, American English. His credentials were perfect."
Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Russians, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were "walk-ins" - spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than 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.
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 came 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 emigrated 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 emigrated 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.
How he communicated with his controllers is unknown, as is what specifically he gave the Russians in terms of atomic secrets. However, it is clear that Moscow mastered the atom very quickly compared with all subsequent nuclear powers.
In the United States under a false name, Koval initially gathered information about new toxins that might find use in chemical arms.
Then his GRU controllers took a gamble and had him work under his own name. Koval was drafted into the U.S. Army, and by chance found himself moving toward the bomb project, then in its infancy.
The army judged him smart and by 1943 sent him for special wartime training at City College of New York. Considered a Harvard for the poor, the school in Manhattan was famous for brilliant students and Communist radicals.
But Koval steered clear of all debate on socialism and Russia, Bloom said. "He discussed no politics that I can recall. Never. He never talked about the Soviet Union - never ever, not a word."
At City College, Koval and a dozen or so of his army peers studied electrical engineering.
Kramish said the army unit lived in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, across from City College, adding that in an odd coincidence, Koval called himself an orphan. Something else about him stood out, Kramish said - he was a decade older than his peers, making everybody wonder "why he was in this program."
Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was suffering severe manpower shortages and asked the army for technically adept recruits. In 1944, Koval and Kramish headed to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the main job was to make bomb fuel - considered the hardest part of the atomic endeavor.
Koval gained wide access to the sprawling complex, Kramish said, because "he was assigned to health safety" and drove from building to building making sure stray radiation did not harm workers.
In June 1945, Koval's duties expanded to include top-secret plants near Dayton, Ohio, said John Shewairy, an Oak Ridge spokesman. The factories refined polonium 210, a highly radioactive material used in initiators to help start the bomb's chain reaction.
In July 1945, the United States tested its first atomic device and, a month later, it dropped two bombs on Japan.
After the war, Koval fled the United States 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.
It added that he was a soccer fanatic even in old age and that people at the stadium who knew about his secret past would quietly point him out.
Koval's spy role began to emerge publicly in Russia in 2002 with the publication of "The GRU and the Atomic Bomb," a book that referred to Koval only by his code name of Delmar. The book offered few biographical details but said he was one of the few spies who managed to elude "the net of the counterintelligence agencies."
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.
Posthumously, Koval was made a Hero of the Russian Federation, the highest honorary title that can be bestowed on a Russian citizen. The Kremlin statement cited "his courage and heroism while carrying out special missions."
Kramish surmised that he was "the biggest" of the atomic spies.
"You don't get a medal from the president of Russia for nothing," he said. [link]

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