George Koval

George Koval (Russian: "Жорж (Георгий) Абрамович Коваль", Zhorzh (Georgij) Abramovich Koval, December 25, 1913 - January 31, 2006) was a Soviet intelligence officer, operating under the code name "Delmar", whose espionage assisted the Soviet Union with the development of atomic weapons. The Russian government has claimed that he provided descriptions of US sites producing materials for atomic weapons, and on the processes and production volumes of polonium, plutonium, and uranium used in US atomic weaponry.

Koval died January 31, 2006 at the age of 92, but on November 2, 2007 he was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration for "his courage and heroism while carrying out special missions" [ [http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/text/news/2007/11/150176.shtml President of Russia ] ] [cite news |first=William |last=Broad |authorlink= |coauthors= |title=A Spy's Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/us/12koval.html |quote= |publisher=New York Times |date=November 12, 2007 |accessdate=2008-05-11 ]

Koval family

In the early years of the 20th century, Abraham Koval left his home town of Telekhany in Belarus in the Russian Empire to immigrate to the United States. He was leaving his fiancé behind until he could save enough money to bring her over to the New World. In fact, his future wife had informed him that she would agree to marry him only if he bought his own house.

When Abraham arrived in New York, the only person he knew in the States was a friend who lived in Sioux City, Iowa. They got in touch and Abraham moved to the Midwest in 1910. He was a carpenter by trade and quickly learned sufficient English to operate his business. Within a year, he had saved enough money to buy a house and pay for his fiancé's voyage from Russia to Sioux City.

Soon after Abraham's fiancé arrived, they were married and had three children. Their middle child was born on December 25 1913. They named him George.

Back in Belarus, Abraham's wife had been a part of the socialist underground. Although her father was a Rabbi who disagreed with the atheism preached by the communists, Abraham's wife had been working at a factory since she was ten and was converted to socialism by her coworkers. She welcomed the news of the Bolshevik revolution in her old country. Furthermore, having no other relatives in the United States, the couple maintained correspondence with their extended family in the USSR.

In the 1920's, the Soviet Union created a Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, in the Soviet Far East, where Koval's relatives decided to move. The Kovals were involved with a pro-Soviet movement called the ICOR (transliterated acronym for "Yidishe Kolonizatsye Organizatsye in Rusland" or Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia, which it also called itself in English). This group, organized by American Jewish Communists in 1924, supported, through money and publicity, the development of the Jewish Autonomous Region, the Communist "answer" to the Palestine project then being undertaken by the Zionist movement. [Srebrnik, Henry (2001). "Diaspora, Ethnicity and Dreams of Nationhood: North American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project". Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds. "Yiddish and the Left", Oxford: Legenda Press. 80-108. ] George's father Abraham had been the secretary of the Sioux City ICOR branch in the 1920s.

In 1932, the Kovals left Sioux City to join their extended family in Birobidzhan. The region was undeveloped at the time and Abraham's services as a carpenter were in high demand. Thus, as soon as he joined the Communist Party, he was able to get a job and his family was issued living quarters by the Birobidzhan commune.

George Koval

When Abraham moved his family to Birobidjan, George was 18 years old. He found a job at a local lumber mill, but had greater ambitions. Two years later, George entered Moscow University of Chemical Technologies, from which he graduated in 1939. That same year, he got married, was accepted into a graduate program at his University, and received summons from the Red Army Conscription Committee (deferred for the duration of his graduate education.)

Also in 1939, Stalin’s Great Purge came to an end. The Red Army officer corps and the NKVD were decimated and both institutions were recruiting heavily. In particular, the Military Intelligence arm of the Red Army – the GRU – had just lost its New York bureau coordinator Achilles. Achilles (a.k.a. Arthur Adams) was recalled to Moscow in 1938 as part of Stalin’s purges and sentenced to forced labor (essentially a death sentence at the time.Fact|date=November 2007) American-born George Koval was a perfect candidate to replace him. After a background check, the GRU recruited George, gave him the codename “Delmar” and began his training.

Delmar

While Delmar was in training, the GRU discovered that Achilles was still alive and able to return to his old post. They deemed that having an experienced operative would be better than assigning a new recruit to the post. Thus, with Achilles’ position now unavailable, Delmar was given a low-priority assignment to gather any available information on US chemical weapons research.

Before 1943, Koval was not able to gather any valuable information. However, that year he was drafted into the US Army and they provided the opportunity he needed. Delmar (who had the equivalent of a Degree of Bachelor of Science in Chemistry) had fake documents that showed he had an Associates Degree in Chemistry from a local community college. Thus, the US Army sent him to the City College of New York to learn more about the maintenance of equipment that handles radioactive materials.

After his graduation from CCNY in 1944, Delmar was assigned by the US Army to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. At that time, due to efforts of General Groves (who was in charge of security at Atomic R&D facilities), most of the world, including the GRU, was unaware of Oak Ridge’s existence. On-site security remained tight and Delmar was only able to pass information to Moscow Headquarters when he was allowed to leave Oak Ridge on his semi-annual leaves.

Koval’s contributions to the Soviet atomic program began immediately upon arrival at Oak Ridge. Once the USSR began rebuilding after World War II, it built its own military research towns (such as Chelyabinsk-70 and Arzamas-16) using Oak Ridge as a model. Then, over the years, Delmar prepared countless reports on the process utilized in the production of plutonium and polonium, scientific and security procedures, as well as quantity and quality of the materials produced.

In 1945, Delmar was promoted to Staff Sergeant (US Army) and transferred from Oak Ridge to Dayton, Ohio. In his new post in the Health Physics branch of the Medical Department assigned to Unit III of the Dayton Project, Delmar now had even greater access to the top secret project. [Bernard Wolf to Major Ferry, "Medical Program at Units #3 and #4, Monsanto Chemical Co., Dayton, Ohio as of July 1, 1945," 3 August 1945. RG 326, 4NN-326-87-6, Box 14, "Monsanto Chemical Co.," National Archives and Records Administration - Southeast, Morrow, Georgia.] From Ohio, Delmar informed Moscow on the progress of the research as well as information on countless smaller facilities spread across the United States that were involved in R&D or production of atomic weapons.

After Japan’s surrender, Staff Sergeant Koval was demobilized. He was offered an opportunity to remain at Dayton in a civilian capacity, but he refused. At that time, a Soviet agent named Igor Gouzenko had defected and informed the United States of the Soviet success in penetrating the Manhattan Project. This led to much tighter security measures across US facilities and tremendously increased the potential of Delmar’s capture. Although the GRU continuously attempted to get Delmar to accept a civilian post in Dayton, Koval found ways to avoid the assignment and pleaded to be allowed to return to his wife in Moscow. In 1948 his wish was granted.

It has been reported that Koval fled the United States when US counterintelligence discovered Soviet propaganda hailing the Koval family as "happy immigrants" to Birobidzhan. [ [http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/11/sports/agent.php?page=1 An American 'regular guy' was a Russian top spy] by William J. Broad, International Herald Tribune November 11 2007]

Post-Delmar

On August 29, 1949 at 7:00am local time (soon after Delmar's return in 1948), the Soviet program exploded RDS-1, their first test weapon. Meanwhile, George Abramovich Koval received his Ph.D. in Chemistry and became a professor at his old university in Moscow. After his retirement (probably in late 70's), he led a solitary life. Most of his human contact consisted of postal and email correspondence with scientists who by 2002 were residing in the United States and Israel.

Most contemporary historical accounts of the Soviet atomic program have downplayed the role of espionage in the development of the first Soviet bomb, emphasizing instead that the espionage information was not widely diffused throughout the program (Lavrenty Beria, chief of the Soviet atomic program, trusted neither his espionage data nor his scientists, and forced the scientists to re-do most of the research without knowing about the espionage information in the first place) and that the acquisition of uranium was the chief limiting factor in the production of the Soviet bomb. [David Holloway, "Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956" (Yale University Press, 1995), ISBN 0-300-06664-3] [Alexei Kojevnikov, "Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists" (Imperial College Press, 2004), ISBN 1-86094-420-5]

His Russian neighbors remember him as a polite, respectful, and private intellectual. He died in his Moscow apartment in 2006 at the age of 92. On November 3, 2007 he received his last award -- a posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation bestowed upon him by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

References