Many Americans are familiar with the names of the Soviet assets Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Few, however, have heard of George Koval, a devastatingly effective atomic spy during World War II who walked away from his exploits completely undetected by U.S. intelligence. Now writer Ann Hagedorn has told his story in “Sleeper Agent,” a historical page-turner of the highest order.
In the fall of 1944, she writes, Koval, a 30-year-old American electrical engineer, could be found driving his U.S. Army jeep daily around the site of the Manhattan Project labs in Oak Ridge, Tenn. There and later in Dayton, Ohio, Koval, who five years earlier had been recruited by Soviet intelligence, obtained data from top-secret research facilities that would help to produce the enriched plutonium used in the first Russian A-bomb, detonated in August 1949.
Koval’s father, Abram Koval, was a Russian Jew who had fled the pogroms of 1910 and ended up in Sioux City, Iowa, a location chosen for him by a Jewish settlement organization. Soon Ethel Shenitsky also arrived in Sioux City, and she and Abram married in June 1911. Their son George was born on Dec. 25, 1913.
