George Koval

He married Lyudmila Ivanova, a fellow student while studying at the ‘Mendeleev Institute’.

On January 31, 2006, he died in Moscow.

On December 25, 1913, he was born in Sioux City, Iowa, USA in the family of Jewish immigrants Abram Koval and Ethel Shenitsky Koval as one of their three sons.

His father was a carpenter and came from Telekhany in Belarus to the USA and settled in Sioux City in 1910.

His parents were in contact with their extended family in the Soviet Union. He studied at Central High School’, participated in debates and became a member of the ‘Honor Society’ there. In 1929 he completed his graduation.

His parents became associated with ‘IKOR’, the ‘Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union’, that was set up in 1924 by American-Jewish Communists to aid Jewish settlement in Birobidzhan in Soviet Union. His father remained secretary of the organisation in its Sioux City branch.

George Koval had a strong belief in Communism since early life and would often express such views openly. Later he became a member of ‘Young Communist League’ and was its delegate in August 1930 during Communist Party’s Iowa convention.

The ‘Main Intelligence Directorate’ of Soviet Union, the ‘GRU’ spotted him and selected him after a meticulous review for their American mission. He was given specialised training by ‘GRU’ and in 1939 he was commissioned by the Soviet army for a while. He was delegated with codename ‘Delmar’.

In 1940 he was sent to the U.S. where he was inducted as deputy command of the local wing of ‘GRU’, which conducted its functions under the cover of a supplier company, ‘Raven Electric Company’. Koval also took a cover job there.

He was initially assigned to extract information on chemical weapons research of America.

He was enlisted in the US Army in 1943. He placed fabricated documents showing that he attended a local college and received an Associate Degree in Chemistry.

He was trained at Fort Dix in New Jersey and then sent as a non-military in the 3410th Specialized Training and Reassignment Unit at the citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb, although the ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ of America approximated that the Soviets would not be able to accomplish such mission before 1950 to 1953. The Soviet Union sources mentioned that Delmar’s (Koval) espionage in the ‘Manhattan Project’ drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons”.