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Georges Abramovich Koval ["Delmar"]

Two spies are known to have worked in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project, George Abramovich Koval ["Delmar"] and Alfred Dean Slack, Koval was by far the most significant. Koval is not listed among the “Rosenberg Network”, suggesting he was operating independently as an official Soviet spy. George Koval [Georgii Koval] was the only Red Army intelligence officer to successfully gain security clearances within the Manhattan Project. Working in both Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Dayton, Ohio, Koval was instrumental in the Soviet Union’s development of their first atomic bomb.

A Soviet intelligence officer who worked from within the Manhattan Project and obtained secrets of the US atomic program for the USSR. A man from the first pages of Solzhenitsyn's novel. A modest associate professor at the Moscow Chemical Technology Institute, posthumously awarded the title Hero of Russia. Before the war, many Jews, including those from abroad, sincerely believed in the ideals of socialism and ardently supported the Soviet government. It is not surprising that among Soviet Jews there were so many genuine enthusiasts, outstanding cultural figures, heroic soldiers and famous intelligence officers.

Having been born a U.S. citizen, educated in Russia, he was recruited by the Main Intelligence Directorate (known generally as the GRU) in 1940 for their race to acquire the secrets of the atomic bomb. American-born George Koval used his scientific background to gain assignments at Manhattan Project sites. Koval’s deep penetration of the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and especially at Dayton, Ohio, remained undisclosed for more than 50 years. Klaus Fuchs provided the most damaging information about the work in Oak Ridge, gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation of uranium. His information, confirmed by Koval when he was assigned to Site X, convinced the Soviet Union to select a plutonium-based atomic bomb. Koval's explanation of the industrial process for making polonium in his March 1949 report to Beria was later described by two historians as having "made a difference in the arms race".

Koval’s story was revealed to the world in 2007, a year after his death, when Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded him the Gold Star of the Hero of the Russian Federation. According to the Kremlin, Koval was “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the Manhattan Project’s most secret facilities, whose work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

“He stole an atomic bomb,” explains Vladimir Khomenko, president of the Judo and Sambo Federation of the Jewish Autonomous Region, one of the organizers of the Georges Koval Sambo Tournament, which recently took place in Birobidzhan. “From the United States of America, in the first half of the forties.” Well, not all of it, not all of it, - corrects Valery Gurevich, a Birobidzhan regional historian and public figure. "Let's not attribute too much to Georges Abramovich. There were people besides him."

Georges Koval, in the documents that escaped from under the GRU seal, is the only Soviet illegal who managed to work in the 1940s not near the Manhattan Project, but inside it. And at two sites - in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and in Dayton, Ohio. Under his own name and with his own documents: George Koval, born in 1913 in Sioux City, Iowa, completed two courses at the state university, majoring in technical subjects. Of course, Georges Abramovich kept silent about the fact that Koval moved to the USSR with his parents in 1932, graduated with honors from the Moscow Chemical Technology Institute.

In 1939, Koval attracted the attention of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. The decisive event that determined the future of Georges Koval was an unexpected invitation to an interview at the Main Intelligence Directorate, where he was offered a position as a full-time employee. In a classified reference for Georges, requested from the Moscow Chemical Institute a year before his graduation, it was noted: "Student Zh.A. Koval... has a conscientious attitude towards his studies, has been a member of the Komsomol since 1936, is politically developed, takes an active part in public work, has a number of relatives abroad, but has had no ties with them since 1937." Since Stalin's repressions had significantly depleted the ranks of the security agencies, their new leadership had to hastily replenish their ranks with university graduates and young officers. And in 1940, after training there, began intelligence work in the United States under the alias "Delmar". Initially, he was engaged in collecting information on the development of new chemical poisoning agents.

Koval was unable to avoid being drafted into the American army, but this turned out to be a stroke of luck. In 1942, thanks to a certificate of incomplete college education, he was sent to Fort Dix to serve in the engineering troops, and after an IQ (intelligence quotient) test, he was sent to closed courses to train specialists to work at facilities related to the production of radioactive materials. The classes were held at the City College of New York (jokingly called "Harvard for the poor"). In August 1944, Private Koval was sent to one of the "ghost towns" of Oak Ridge (Tennessee) after completing his training.

"Delmar" managed to get into the so-called "dead zone" where production was going on. Sometimes even leading American and British physicists working under the leadership of the great Robert Oppenheimer were not allowed into it. Each of them had his own, usually very narrow, area of ??work. And before the eyes of private, then sergeant of the US Army George Koval, a relatively complete picture of the manufacture of a deadly weapon was being formed, which the Allies did not even think of telling "those Russians".

Radiograms to the Center with reports of what Koval had learned became an important discovery for the GRU leadership, which had previously known nothing at all about Oak Ridge as a center for industrial nuclear reactors. Delmar subsequently met with the new resident Clyde, who reported to Moscow, based on his words, about the structure, process, and scale of production of polonium from bismuth and their use in the manufacture of nuclear charges. The information transmitted by Zh.A. Koval in December 1945 – February 1946 to Moscow about the use of polonium by the Americans in their first bomb gave Soviet scientists an idea and showed the correct way to solve the problem associated with the neutron fuse.

Based on this data, the head of the NKVD Department "S", Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov, compiled anonymous reports to Academician Kurchatov, who studied them and then set new tasks for foreign intelligence. Subsequently, during the testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 at the Semipalatinsk test site, a neutron detonator made according to Delmar's description was used.

For many decades, under the portrait of the MKhTI associate professor on the board of veteran teachers, it was written: "Private." With whatever epaulettes he left for military intelligence service, he returned with the same rank. Although in the American army, G. Koval rose to the rank of sergeant in a few "atomic" years. With two American medals for World War II. And with good prospects for further work.

However, “I felt that it was becoming dangerous,” Georges Koval told his closest colleagues at the Moscow Chemical Institute much later. “I was offered to join a new project, but I understood that this time the test would be much more serious than when I was selected from among the army conscripts during the war because of my high IQ. And I decided to leave. In 1948, I took a vacation and went to France. From there to Czechoslovakia. And then to the USSR.”

The first Soviet atomic bomb was tested a year later, near Semipalatinsk, in 1949. Just four years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “What Georges Abramovic has accomplished in the US over the past eight years is priceless,” emphasizes Tatyana Tomashevich, director of the V.I. Knipel Museum and Exhibition Center, Smidovich village, Jewish Autonomous Region.

The FBI had started hunting for "Delmar" since the early 1950s. Some documents report that “Koval was afraid of illegal work in the US… The GRU invested a lot of money in his legalization and received nothing from Koval in return.” Other documents, however, make it easy to determine the range of questions posed to subordinates by none other than John Edgar Hoover, the founder and first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, back in the mid-1950s.

There are at least two museums in Russia with separate exhibits dedicated to Georges Koval. The first is in the new building of the Main Directorate of the General Staff, formerly the GRU. The headquarters opened in 2006 with the participation of Vladimir Putin. In the departmental museum, the Russian president saw a stand with a text about the outstanding role of a secret GRU officer under the pseudonym "Delmar" in ensuring nuclear parity between the USSR and the USA. He learned that Georges Koval had died several months earlier. The decree on awarding Koval Zh.A. the title of Hero of Russia (posthumously) was issued the following year: "He was in an illegal position on a special mission to the USA, worked at American military-industrial facilities where components of the first atomic bomb were produced. He collected information on the production of nuclear materials and sent it to Moscow"... The second museum is in the station settlement of Smidovich: Trans-Siberian Railway, about halfway between Birobidzhan and Khabarovsk. It takes longer to get here from almost anywhere than to the GRU headquarters, but it is much easier to get there. Moreover, it was here in 1932 that the family of carpenter Abram Koval, who came from the state of Iowa, settled - he, his wife, and three sons.

What exactly were the Kovalis fleeing from when they left the “land of opportunity”? First, from the Great Depression. Second, from the anti-Semitism that developed with it in the regions. Georges Abramovich repeatedly said that “in Sioux City, on one side of the street there were houses, and on the other side was a city park. And almost opposite our house, on the gates of the park, there was a sign: “No blacks, Jews, or dogs allowed!”

Hence the question: where exactly did they flee and why? Since the late 1920s, there was a Soviet project to attract Jews from all over the world to the USSR, to the Far East and other regions. The project was entirely international. On the Soviet side, there was the state-owned KomZET, the Committee for Land Settlement of Jewish Workers. On the other side, there were Jewish societies like IKOR, the “Organization of Jewish Colonization in Russia,” helping with relocation and settlement. For example, the Koval family, and many others.

Thousands came to the Union – from the USA, Europe, South America, Palestine. Only hundreds remained in the USSR – some had left back in the thirties, others had fallen under repression at the same time. The Iowa Kovalis are among the survivors and those who remain. Although their agro-commune called Sotsgorodok (milk and meat) fell apart back in 1934: among the reasons were several crop failures in a row and the very conditional adaptability of Jewish city dwellers to agricultural work. However, a carpenter is a carpenter everywhere. His son Georges, with his albeit incomplete, but quite higher technical education, first felled trees for the construction of the Socialist City, then worked as a shingle splitter (“pick shingles,” suggests Tatyana Tomashevich), and ended his rural life as a mechanic-repairman.

The answers offered by Russian "Kovaleved" researchers over the past two decades are much more specific. How did he end up in the US? In the early 1940s, on a tanker via San Francisco. According to a legend developed by military intelligence - a new passport, a new name, a new biography. It was of no use later: Private Koval was unable to get a job in Moscow that was needed in the development of chemical weapons with false documents. He resorted to a backup option - "George Koval, Iowa, studied at the university until the Great Depression hit, spent the thirties here and there" - fortunately, the Kovals had many relatives all over America and even in Argentina; try to check them all, and the Manhattan Project needs a qualified technician right now... Well, even in intelligence, honesty can be the best policy, even when it borders on impudence.

Former colleagues interviewed by American journalists after Koval was awarded the award pointed out: "He had a personal service jeep" - since the ends between the objects were not small. "Nobody of us had one, but technician-sergeant Koval did." So, when Georges Koval, many years later, called himself "the first Soviet person who held a container with American weapons-grade plutonium" - here, too, everything is honest. As with the drawings of the neutron fuse for the bomb. And much more.

Did Georges Koval and his intelligence chiefs have a plan? Most likely, they didn’t. Firstly, no one on the Soviet shores oriented him toward American atomic secrets, only toward chemical weapons. Secondly, Koval was drafted into New York for training in near-atomic sciences, just as he had been drafted into our military intelligence. Here, into the Soviet army, there, into the American one. Our intelligence officers liked the combination of an American biography and excellent studies at the Moscow Chemical Institute. The curators of the Manhattan Project were more or less the same; only instead of a Moscow university, they took two courses in technical disciplines at the University of Iowa.

How and with whose help did Koval manage to get into the Manhattan Project facilities - Oak Ridge and Dayton, questions from the FBI director. What kind of secret information could he have had access to? Was all this the result of a carefully planned operation [by Soviet intelligence]. How did a Soviet military intelligence agent manage to penetrate the United States without attracting attention to himself. Who helped him to legalize himself - and so on.

Yevgeny Dmitriev once told the biographer of "Delmar" what he could only have learned from a "private General Staff officer." Namely, about the process of transferring American atomic secrets after Koval's return from the States: “It happened something like this. Georges was sitting in one room. In another, behind the wall, were Kurchatov, Khariton and others who were pushing our atomic project. Six people in all. And one of the six would write a question on a piece of paper: ‘How did they do this and that?’ And a special messenger would take the paper and take it to Georges. Georges would write an answer. And so they worked all day. And not just one day.”

"While working in the US, Georges obtained plutonium samples [from the Americans] using a runny nose," recalled Gennady Yagodin, former rector of the Moscow Chemical Institute and later Minister of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education of the USSR. "He brought clean handkerchiefs with him [to the Manhattan Project laboratory] and, knowing that plutonium is well absorbed by the mucous membrane, he blew his nose all day and saved all the dirty handkerchiefs. And only then "here" were the plutonium samples extracted from them, absorbed by the mucous membrane of the mouth-nasal cavity of Georges, who had a cold!"

"These days in New York, Soviet agent Georgy Koval will receive in a radio parts store... important technological details for the production of an atomic bomb." The first pages of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle (1954-1958): a Soviet diplomat-traitor calls the American embassy from a street phone booth to warn the US about a hunter of nuclear secrets. A recording of the conversation ends up in the hands of state security agencies, and a search begins for the caller. By voice, in a special sharashka laboratory located near Moscow, with the help of prisoners capable of carrying out such a task.

"Soviet agent Georgy Koval" and "atomic bomb" are quite a few coincidences for a literary assumption. In the memoirs "Assuage My Sorrows" by the writer Lev Kopelev there is a chapter about his years of imprisonment in a sharashka and his joint work with prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the "voice portrait" of a traitor. There you can find the repeated "Georgy Koval" and the characterization of the caller:

"Such a scoundrel. Such a bastard. We can't let him get away. We have to check and double-check everything conscientiously. If an innocent person gets accused because of us, it would be terrible. And that son of a bitch will continue to spy." Solzhenitsyn, Kopelev further emphasizes, "shared my disgust for the American interlocutor. Among ourselves we called him "bitch", "scumbag", "b****", etc." Both prisoners' sympathy for "Georgy Koval" is evident. Both then and much later - in completely different circumstances.

In the documents on the "Koval case" received by Andrei Shitov from the FBI, there is an entire block devoted to both the preparation for the interview and the interview itself with... The name is once again redacted, but the address of the interlocutor is indicated - Cavendish, Vermont, where the Solzhenitsyns lived. The meeting between the bureau's special agent and the "interlocutor" took place on April 19, 1978. No notes were taken, the result of the conversation is described in the final FBI document: "The interlocutor, apparently, was very reluctant to discuss this topic. There is no need to insist on this matter any further."

One of the working versions of the "Kovaleved" is that the call was made by the Soviet secret services. The motive is logical: Koval is already in Moscow, out of reach. And it wouldn't hurt to cover up the rest of the USSR's "atomic" agents in the US in a similar way. The time and quality leap in the creation of the Soviet nuclear bomb was too great not to raise questions among the Americans. If they start looking into it, they will find out: yes, such a person worked on "Manhattan". The clearance, as has already been said, was extremely broad. But he has already left America with nuclear secrets, there is no point in looking for someone else.

If that was the case, then judging by the arrests of, for example, Klaus Fuchs (14 years in prison, served nine, went to the GDR) and the Rosenbergs (executed in the electric chair), it didn't quite work. On the other hand, who knows how many Soviet intelligence officers managed to remain in the shadows thanks to that call?

The illegal "Delmar" had many reasons to worry after returning from the USA. In the late 1940s, after finishing his special mission, he was reinstated in graduate school, and after defending his thesis, he planned to teach at the Moscow Chemical Institute. But the campaign against the ‘cosmopolitans’ was in full swing. Unexpectedly, the young scientist had problems finding a job. He was not accepted for a job in his field at any institute or plant. It seemed too suspicious to officials from special departments and personnel officers that a man had served in the army for 10 years in an unknown place and as an unknown person, had neither an officer's rank nor any solid military awards, and, moreover, was Jewish by nationality and an American by birth.

In Koval's autobiography, his position from the late 1930s to the late 1940s is listed as "cipher clerk of the General Staff, private" (thank you, not "clerk at headquarters", as in that movie). The personnel officers at the Moscow Chemical Institute - where Georges Koval finally got a job, for which he had to contact his former superiors in military intelligence - were sure for decades that "he had not fought at all". Koval, bound by subscriptions, could not give a coherent answer to the question: "Why, after ten years of service, with a higher education, did you not become at least a lieutenant?"

It is 1959, the first exhibition of US achievements in Moscow, with an accompanying visit by Vice President Richard Nixon. The program of the visit includes a visit to the Moscow Chemical Institute, with the interpreter from the Institute, Georges Koval. Of course, every delegation includes members of the secret services, and the accent of the Soviet interpreter will certainly end up in the reports. Therefore, as Nikolai Kharitonov, an associate professor at the Institute, recalls, "he was unnerved by every rustle in the silence of the night. At the end of the forties, after his return, he was told that "our people" had come for him. And later, they were already getting to him "from there."

Only in 2000, the elderly pensioner Zh. Koval was accepted as a member of the Council of Veterans of Military Intelligence and awarded an honorary badge for his service in it, and they began to provide him with financial assistance. But for the public, Koval still remained incognito. In 2002, V. Lotta's book "GRU and the Atomic Bomb" was published, in which Koval was mentioned for the first time, and even then under a code name. And only shortly before his death, Zhorzh Abramovich said to one of his colleagues: "Now you can talk and write about me."

Georges Koval lived to be 92. After retiring from the institute (well after seventy: colleagues wouldn't let him) he lived, strictly speaking, on a pension similar to the nineties.

On 02 November 2007, President Vladimir Putin handed over to the GRU (military intelligence) Museum the Gold Star medal and Hero of Russia certificate and document bestowed on Soviet intelligence officer George Koval. Putin presented the Hero of Russia medal, certificate and document to Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov for permanent display at the Russian Armed Forces General Staff GRU (military intelligence) Museum. Speaking at an official ceremony, the President said that George Koval had made an immense contribution to strengthening Russia’s defence capability.

"Mr Koval, who died in 2006 at the age of 94, was the only Soviet intelligence officer to penetrate the U.S. secret atomic facilities producing the plutonium, enriched uranium and polonium used to create the atomic bomb. Despite the top–secret regime at the facilities and strict control over staff, Koval managed to send descriptions of the sites back to Moscow, along with information on their areas of work and the processes and production volumes of the elements in question.

"Mr Koval, who operated under the pseudonym Delmar, provided information that helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own, thus ensuring the preservation of strategic military parity with the United States. A presidential decree has awarded Mr Koval the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration (posthumous) for his courage and heroism while carrying out special missions. "