Soviet spy filches wartime atomic secrets in Dayton and gets away with it
“Sleeper Agent - the Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away” by Ann Hagedorn (Simon and Schuster, 260 pages, $28).
World War II ended after the United States detonated atom bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the late summer of 1945. The technology that went into crafting those bombs was shrouded in utmost secrecy. As that war finished the Cold War started and the Soviets, our former allies, hurried to devise nuclear weapons of their own.
Our scientific community thought the Soviet nuke program lagged far behind ours. Their assumptions were wrong. The USSR built their own atomic bombs rather quickly.
How did they do it? In hindsight it seems obvious that Soviet spies stole many of our secrets. In her new book “Sleeper Agent — the Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,” Oakwood native Ann Hagedorn gives us the biography of a Soviet spy who was quite effective and never got caught.
George Koval grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. Koval’s family had fled from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe. The United States was then in the process of restricting the flow of Jewish refugees — that’s why the Kovals landed on our shores at Galveston, Texas, where entry was somewhat smoother.
The Kovals had socialist ideals; young George was active in political actions. As a teenager he was arrested for participating in political protests. Otherwise George was an All-American boy, a skilled baseball player, and an exemplary scholar. He graduated from high school when he was only 15 years old. George was also a Communist.
In 1932 the Koval family had had enough of America. They relocated to a sparsely settled region of the Soviet Far East. Their brilliant son George continued his education in chemistry and the sciences.
In 1939 the Red Army recruited George to become a Soviet military intelligence officer. He was perfect for the job. A brilliant scientist, his English was flawless. Returning to the U.S., he began his infiltration by enrolling at Columbia University, a hotbed of atomic scientists.
Hagedorn explored every available aspect of Koval’s career as a spy. If they had checked into his background they would have never allowed him the access to atomic secrets that he acquired. But they didn’t. He pretended that he and his family had never even left Sioux City.
His job at the top secret atomic labs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., provided Koval with nuclear secrets which he passed to his spy network. In 1945 Koval came to Dayton, where a secret facility in Oakwood was purifying rare, highly radioactive polonium to make crucial triggering mechanisms for the bombs.
Koval had a sixth sense for peril. In 1948 he slipped away and returned to Russia, forever. Did the secrets he revealed allow the Soviets to speed up their atomic program? It seems likely. Near the end of Koval’s long life a former colleague asked if he had any regrets about spying? He didn’t.
The period he spent in Dayton will be of particular interest. Hagedorn has written another gripping, impeccably researched work of history. George Koval; the spy that got away.