Surprise! (Part 7 of It Pays to Remember))

Part 7

We are still learning things we never knew or even suspected.

In a 2007 front-page article in the New York Times,  Dr. George Koval was reported to be one of the most important spies for the Soviet Union in World War II.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/us/12koval.html

The subject was elaborated upon in May of 2009 in an article in the Smithsonian magazine:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Iowa-Born-Soviet-Trained.html

Koval had joined the US Army in 1942, and as a brilliant engineer, had been sent to the engineering-hungry Manhattan Project.

Then the President of Russia,Vladimir Putin, in 2007, announced that Koval was posthumously awarded the Russian highest medal “Hero of the Soviet Union” – and that George Koval was a famous and very successful spy for the Soviet Union.

Many of the names of spies for the Russians has been known – the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass – but George Koval?

Koval was unlike the rest. The others who had spied for the Russians had been ‘walk-in” spies – people who were Americans but secret Communists. Koval was also an American Communist but who lived in Russia, and who had been trained in spy tradecraft by the military intelligence agency, GRU, and sent back to the United States.

He is the only known Russian-trained spy to have penetrated the US atomic agencies, and Putin credits him as such.

Having been raised in Iowa, and with a degree from City College of New York, Koval was a brilliant student and fine baseball player. He spoke both Russian and idiomatic American with ease, since he was raised in the US.  CCNY students knew he was older than the norm, but what they did not know is that he had already graduated from Moscow’s prestigious Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology with honors. (After his spy days, Koval returned to get his Ph.D)

Koval was the son of Russian parents who had immigrated to Sioux City, raised their children, and then returned to Russia to live in a semi-autonomous region of Russia designated for Jews. (Birobidzhan, a Siberian city, designated as a secular Jewish homeland.)

Koval stole many secrets on US atomic weapons, and then in 1946 told friends that he was going on a European vacation —  but was never heard of again.

In the FBI spy hunts of the early 50s, his name came to the attention of the FBI as a possible spy, and some of his friends and colleagues were interviewed, but they all considered him an “All-American kid.”

By then, Koval was serving in the Soviet Army, got out, and lived a normal, low-level life in the Soviet Union until he died in 2006 at the age of 92 – unknown and unheralded until the President of Russia awarded Koval Russia’s highest honor.

Putin said Koval’s work, ““helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

Who knew?

Of course, the FBI knows the names of many hundreds of spies who were suspected, but there was never enough information to bring charges against them and they live their lives, even today in obscurity. It is doubtful that there is anyone as successful both at spying and at covering his trail as GRU agent, George Koval.

Some day, the files of the KGB and the GRU will be available for historians and we will learn the names of many more agents who worked to overthrow the US government.