George Abramowitsch Koval

George Abramowitsch Koval (code name Delmar ) (born December 25, 1913 in Sioux City , Iowa , United States , † January 31, 2006 in Moscow , Russia ) was a Soviet intelligence officer who provided important insights into the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb . According to the Russian government, Koval obtained information on processes and production volumes from US production facilities for the production of polonium , plutonium and uranium for US nuclear weapons. Based on the knowledge provided by Koval, the development time of the first Soviet atomic bomb could be significantly reduced at the end of the 1940s.

The Koval family

George's father Abraham Koval left his hometown Teljachany in what is now Belarus at the beginning of the 20th century and emigrated to the USA . The only person Abraham knew after arriving in New York City was a friend who lived in Sioux City , Iowa. He got in touch and moved to the Midwest in 1910 . Abraham, who was a trained carpenter, learned English quickly, which proved very helpful in his professional development. Abraham's fiancée, whom he had initially left behind, followed him to the United States a year later when he had saved up the money for her crossing. After their arrival they married and had three children, George was the second born.

Abraham's wife was active in the socialist underground in Belarus. Despite her father, a rabbi, who opposed the atheism preached by the communists, Abraham's wife had worked in a factory since she was ten and had been convinced of socialism by her colleagues there. She therefore welcomed the news of the October Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. Since they had no relatives in the United States, they exchanged letters with family members in Russia. George's father Abraham was secretary of the branch association of ICOR in Sioux City, an association for the Jewish colonization in the Soviet Union (Yiddish: Idishe Kolonizatsie Organizatsie in Rusland) in the 1920s.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union founded a “ Jewish Autonomous Oblast Birobidzhan ”, to which the relatives of the Kovals also moved. In 1932 the Kovals left Sioux City to follow their family members to Birobidzhan. Since the Birobidzhan region was completely undeveloped, Abraham Koval's skills as a carpenter were badly needed. After joining the Communist Party, he got a job and his family was assigned premises in Birobidzhan Commune.

Life

George was 18 years old when the Abraham Koval family moved to Birobidjan. He found a job at a nearby timber factory, but had greater ambitions. Two years later George began studying chemical technology at Moscow University , graduating in 1939. He married that same year and received a place for graduate studies at the university. During this time he received a draft notice from the Red Army, but was postponed for the duration of his studies.

In 1939 Stalin's Great Terror (Soviet Union) also came to an end. The officer corps of the Red Army and the NKVD had been greatly weakened as a result and both institutions tried to fill the gaps in their ranks by hiring new staff. The Red Army's military intelligence service (GRU) lost Achilles , actually Arthur Adams , the head of his New York office. Achilles was ordered back to Moscow in 1938 as part of the Great Terror and sentenced to a labor camp, which at that time amounted to a death sentence . American-born George Koval was the ideal replacement candidate for the GRU's New York office. After his family relationships had been checked, he was recruited by the GRU and prepared for the upcoming tasks under his new alias "Delmar".

Delmar

During Delmar's training, the GRU discovered that Achilles was still alive and able to resume operations in New York. The GRU found it more clever to hire an experienced agent rather than a newly trained foreign agent to run the New York office. Because the position of Achilles could no longer be filled by Delmar , Delmar was given the less urgent task of collecting all available information on chemical weapons research in the United States.

Before 1943, Koval was unable to collect any valuable information. That year, George Koval was drafted into the US Army under his real name and that gave him exactly the opportunities he needed. Delmar , who had a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry, had forged papers certifying that he was an associate's degree in a local college . So the US Army sent him to the City College of New York (CCNY) to complete his knowledge of maintaining electrical systems that were needed to process radioactive material.

After graduating from CCNY in 1944, George Koval, alias Delmar, was transferred from the US Army to Oak Ridge, Tennessee . Due to the efforts of General Groves , who is responsible for the safety of the nuclear research facilities , the existence of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was unknown in most parts of the world, including the GRU . The shielding of the National Laboratory was extremely strict and Delmar was only able to pass information on to Moscow headquarters during his semi-annual leave, which he spent outside of Oak Ridge.

Koval's contributions to the Soviet nuclear program began practically immediately after his arrival in Oak Ridge, where, as safety officer, he was responsible for the radiation protection of the employees and was able to move around quite freely. Following the example of Oak Ridge, military research complexes such as Chelyabinsk-70 and Arzamas-16 were also set up during the reconstruction in the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War . Over the years Delmar wrote countless reports on the processes for the production of plutonium and polonium , scientific and safety-related procedures and evaluations of the quantity and quality of the material produced. The information alone about the exact name, origin and proportions of the chemicals produced in Oak Ridge and shipped to Los Alamos were sufficient to determine a good mixture of the chemical materials necessary for the atomic bomb.

In 1945, Delmar was promoted to Staff Sergeant in the US Army and transferred from Oak Ridge to Dayton, Ohio , again as the safety and health officer. In his new post in the field of radiation safety in the medical department belonging to Unit III. of the Dayton Project , Delmar was given even greater access to extremely secret data. From Ohio, Delmar informed Moscow about the progress of the research results as well as about a seemingly endless number of smaller, all over the United States, involved in research and development on or production of nuclear weapons.

After Japan surrendered, Staff Sergeant Koval was discharged from the army. He turned down the offer to take up civilian employment in Dayton. At that time, a Soviet agent Igor Sergeyevich Gusenko defected and informed the United States authorities that the Soviets had successfully learned the secret results of the Manhattan Project . This led to a further tightening of the security measures at all US facilities and increased Delmar 's risk of discovery and arrest immensely. Although the GRU tried to persuade Delmar / Koval to accept the civilian job offer in Dayton, Koval repeatedly found ways to evade this task and asked to be allowed to return to his wife in Moscow. In 1948 his wish was granted.

It is reported that Koval fled the United States when American counterintelligence discovered the enthusiastic reports in Soviet propaganda about the Kovals family as "happy immigrants" to Birobidzhan.

After returning to the Soviet Union

Koval didn't have to wait long to witness the success of his efforts. Shortly after Koval's return to the Soviet Union in 1948, early in the morning of August 29, 1949 at 7:00 a.m. local time, the mixture based on the recipes from Oak-Ridge was the first atomic bomb to be built in the Soviet Union to be tested in Semipalatinsk . In the meantime, George Abramowitsch Koval had studied chemistry with a Ph.D. graduated and became a professor at his old university in Moscow. After his retirement in the late 1970s, he led a very withdrawn life, he was largely limited to contacts with other scientists by letter or e-mail, most of his correspondents lived in 2002 in the United States or in Israel.

His Russian neighbors remember Koval as a friendly, devoted and very discreet educated fellow citizen. He died in 2006 in his Moscow apartment, aged 92. On November 3, 2007, he was posthumously awarded the honorary title Hero of the Russian Federation , which was awarded to him by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the middle of the dispute over the deployment of American anti-missile missiles in Europe.

Web links

• George A. Koval at the Geroi strany internet project (Russian)
• George Koval: Atomic Spy Unmasked , smithoninan magazine, May 2009 (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ 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.
2. ^ ^{A b} William J. Broad: A Spy's Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor. In: New York Times . November 12, 2007 (English).
3. ^ William J. Broad: An American 'regular guy' was a Russian top spy. In: International Herald Tribune . November 11, 2007 (English).
4. ↑ President Vladimir Putin presented the Museum of the Military Intelligence Service (GRU) with the gold medal and the certificate of award to the Hero of the Russian Federation, issued to the Soviet intelligence officer George Koval ( Memento of February 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Official website of the President of Russia, 2 November 2007 (English).