George Koval

George Abramovich Koval (, Zhorzh Abramovich Koval; December 25, 1913 – January 31, 2006) was an American engineer who acted as a Soviet intelligence officer for the Soviet atomic bomb project. Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent reduced the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons.

Koval was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Jewish emigrants from the part of the Russian Empire that is now Belarus. As an adult, he traveled with his parents to the Soviet Union to settle in the Jewish Autonomous Region near the Chinese border. Koval was recruited by the GRU, trained, and assigned the code name DELMAR. He returned to the United States in 1940 and was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1943. Koval worked at atomic research laboratories and, according to the Russian government, relayed back to the Soviet Union information about the production processes and volumes of the polonium, plutonium, and uranium used in American atomic weaponry, and descriptions of the weapon production sites. In 1948, Koval left on a European vacation but never returned to the United States. In 2000, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation awarded Koval with a military decoration "For Service in Military Intelligence" for his service for the GRU. That year, he gathered his pupils for some sort of celebration and finally admitted that he was a Russian spy in the 1940s. On November 2, 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration for his service.

Early life George Koval's father, Abram Koval, left his home town of Telekhany, Russian Empire (now Belarus) to emigrate to the United States in 1910. Abram, a carpenter, settled in Sioux City, Iowa, which, at the turn of the 20th century, was home to a sizeable Jewish community of merchants and craftsmen. Many of these settlers had emigrated from the Russian Empire, in which Jews had been ruthlessly persecuted under the czar's anti-Semitic policies and pogroms. Abram and his wife Ethel Shenitsky Koval raised three sons: Isaya, born 1912; George (or Zhorzh), born 1913; and Gabriel, born 1919. According to Arnold Kramish, an American colleague he befriended and with whom he re-established contact in 2000, it was there that Koval assumed deputy command of the local GRU cell. This outpost operated under the cover of the Raven Electric Company, a supplier to firms such as General Electric. Koval told coworkers he was a native New Yorker and an only child. He ingratiated himself with everyone he met. Historian John Earl Haynes argues that Delmar's contributions were exaggerated, as part of what Michael Sulick describes as part of boosting Putin's "nationalist agenda".