Article on formerly unknown Soviet spy published

George Koval

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On November 2, 2007, some of Russia’s most senior military and intelligence officials gathered at the Kremlin to honor a Soviet spy whose name was until then completely absent from the annals of espionage history. Russian defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) chief Valentin Korabelnikov were among several officials who joined Russian president Vladimir Putin to pay tribute to George Koval. Koval was an American citizen born in Iowa to immigrant parents from Belarus. In 1932, Koval, his parents and two brothers, all of whom were US citizens, moved back to the then rapidly developing Soviet Union to escape the effects of the Great Depression. It was there that the young George Koval was recruited by the GRU, the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces. He received Soviet citizenship and returned to the US through San Francisco in October 1940. By that time, Koval was an accredited agent of the GRU, what intelligence professionals usually refer to as a sleeper agent. In 1943, Koval joined the Manhattan Project –the allied effort to develop the world’s first operational atomic bomb. In Soviet intelligence documents, Koval is referred to with the code-name Delmar. According to a new summary of Koval’s espionage role, published this month in The Smithsonian magazine, “with the exception of the British scientist Klaus Fuchs, [agent Delmar] may have done more than anyone to help the Soviet Union achieve its […] nuclear parity with the United States in 1949”. The article is available here.