Search Results - Koval, George

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 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration for his service. Provided by Wikipedia