Manhattan Project Spy for the Soviet Union George Koval FBI Files

Manhattan Project Spy for the Soviet Union George Koval FBI Files

1,892 pages of FBI files covering George Koval, the American born Soviet Spy code named "DELMAR" who infiltrated the Manhattan Project.

John Earl Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress and an authority on the cold war, says of Koval, "Koval was a trained agent, not an American civilian. He was that rarity, which you see a lot in fiction but rarely in real life—a sleeper agent. A penetration agent. A professional officer."

George Abramovich Koval (1913 – 2006) was an American who acted as a Soviet intelligence asset. According to various Russian sources, Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons. American intelligence estimated that the Soviet Union would have the bomb between 1950 and 1953. The first Soviet atomic bomb, code-named by the Americans as Joe 1, was detonated on August 29, 1949. The design was very similar to the first US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design. According to Michael Walsh in his May 2009 Smithsonian article, "George Koval: Atomic Spy Unmasked," the initiator for the plutonium bomb was, according to Russian military officials, "prepared to the 'recipe' provided by military intelligence agent Delmar [Koval]"

Koval was born in Sioux City, Iowa to Russian Jewish immigrants. in 1932 at age 19, he moved with parents to the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Union, near the Chinese border. Koval was recruited by the Soviet GRU (military intelligence), 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 was selected for the Special Engineer Detachment, which was a cover for the Manhattan Project. Koval was assigned to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Koval while working at atomic research laboratories, according to Russian sources, 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. Among the intelligence he sent was that Oak Ridge's polonium was being sent to another Project site at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In 1948, Koval left on a European vacation but never returned to the United States.

In 2002 a book was published, "The GRU and the Atomic Bomb," by Vladimir Lota, which mentioned Koval by his code name and listed him as one of a handful of spies who evaded counterintelligence efforts.

Koval died in his Moscow apartment on January 31, 2006, at the age of 92.

In 2007 Russian President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration for "his courage and heroism while carrying out special missions," and publicly named him as Delmar.


FBI FILES 

The FBI began investigating Koval approximately 8 years after he left the United States.

In the 1950s, the FBI investigated Koval's wartime activities and interviewed his former colleagues. The FBI was left with the impression that he had spied. The FBI’s nearly 2,000-page dossier shows neighbors recalled that young George spoke openly of his communist beliefs.

There is no reliable information on Koval’s espionage activities during his first years in New York. However according to his FBI file, his employer, Raven Electric Company, obtained several occupational draft deferments for Koval, representing him as its “key employee” and a board member. Raven Electric Company was later learned to be a cover for Soviet military intelligence.

 
CIA JOURNAL ARTICLE

Project SOLO and the Seborers: On the Trail of a Fourth Soviet Spy at Los Alamos by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes - September 2019. CIA's journal, "Studies in Intelligence."

 
KOVAL SCIENTIFIC REPORT

Determination of Particulate Air-Borne Long-Lived Activity by George Koval - June 22, 1945

A report produced by Koval while working at Oak Ridge.
 

HISTORY OF CLASSIFIED ACTIVITY AT OAK RIDGE

A History of Classified Activities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Abstract:

The major purpose of this report is to provide a brief history of ORNL’s major classified activities from 1943 until the present (September 2000). This report is expected to be useful to the ORNL Classification Officer and to ORNL’s Authorized Derivative Classifiers and Authorized Derivative Declassifiers in their classification review of ORNL documents, especially those documents that date from the 1940s and 1950s