The Most Successful Spy You Never Heard Of

[Mike Ellis]

Those of you who don't read the Smithsonian should take a moment to read this article. This man, out of his religious convictions and support for Communism, played THE key role in allowing the Soviet Union to build the bomb. Without his thieving, the Soviet system might have economically collapsed under the strain of trying to develop the bomb, and multiple generations of Americans might not have gone to sleep each night with Russian nukes targeted upon them.

I hope he is roasting in Hades at this very moment, and that the Devil's legions will use him for pitchfork practice through all eternity.

George Koval: Atomic Spy Unmasked | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

George Koval: Atomic Spy Unmasked
Iowa-born and army-trained, how did George Koval manage to steal a critical U.S. atom bomb secret for the Soviets, that is only now coming to light?
By Michael Walsh
Smithsonian magazine, May 2009

The old man had always been fiercely independent, and he entered his tenth decade with his mind clear, his memory keen and his fluent Russian still tinged with an American accent. His wife had died in 1999, and when his legs began to go he had trouble accepting help from his relatives in Moscow. He gradually withdrew from most human contact and died quietly on January 31, 2006, at age 92, taking his secrets to the grave.

A singular confluence of developments forced Zhorzh Abramovich Koval out of obscurity. First, over the past decade Western intelligence analysts and cold war historians began to grasp the role of the GRU, the Soviet (now Russian) military intelligence agency, in the development of the USSR's nuclear weapons program in the 1940s. Then in 2002, Russian historian Vladimir Lota published The GRU and the Atom Bomb. The book, which has yet to be translated into English, recounts the exploits of a GRU spy code-named Delmar, who, with the exception of the British scientist Klaus Fuchs, may have done more than anyone to help the Soviet Union achieve its sudden, shocking nuclear parity with the United States in 1949.

Most tellingly, in November 2007 Russian President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval, who had mustered out of the Red Army as a lowly private in 1949, a gold star marking him as a Hero of the Russian Federation—then publicly named him as Delmar. The spy's identity had been such a closely held secret that Putin himself, a former KGB officer, may have learned of it only in 2006, after he saw the man's portrait at a GRU museum opening and asked, in effect: who's that?

(snip)