November 12, 2007

It's time to rewrite the history books

From the New York Times:

A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor

He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by Stalin’s ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the project’s secret plants, saying his work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends have raced to tell Dr. Koval’s story — the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.

The spy’s success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and back. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, a relaxed familiarity with American mores and no foreign accent. ...

Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Soviets, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were “walk ins,” spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than rigorous training.

By contrast, Dr. Koval was a mole groomed in the Soviet Union by the feared G.R.U., the military intelligence agency. Moreover, he gained wide access to America’s atomic plants, a feat unknown for any other Soviet spy. Nuclear experts say the secrets of bomb manufacturing can be more important than those of design.

Los Alamos devised the bomb, while its parts and fuel were made at secret plants in such places as Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio — sites Dr. Koval not only penetrated, but also assessed as an Army sergeant with wide responsibilities and authority.

“He had access to everything,” said Dr. Kramish, who worked with Dr. Koval at Oak Ridge and now lives in Reston, Va. “He had his own Jeep. Very few of us had our own Jeeps. He was clever. He was a trained G.R.U. spy.” That status, he added, made Dr. Koval unique in the history of atomic espionage, a judgment historians echo.

Washington has known about Dr. Koval’s spying since he fled the United States shortly after the war but kept it secret.

“It would have been highly embarrassing for the U.S. government to have had this divulged,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb,” a biography of the project’s military leader. ...

George Koval was born in 1913 to Abraham and Ethel Koval in Sioux City, Iowa, which had a large Jewish community and a half-dozen synagogues. In 1932, during the Great Depression, his family emigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland.

Henry Srebrnik, a Canadian historian at the University of Prince Edward Island who is studying the Kovals for a project on American Jewish Communists, said the family belonged to a popular front organization, as did most American Jews who emigrated to Birobidzhan.

The organization, he said, was ICOR, a Yiddish acronym for the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. He added that Dr. Koval’s father served its Sioux City branch as secretary.

By 1934, Dr. Koval was in Moscow, excelling in difficult studies at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology. Upon graduating with honors, he was recruited and trained by the G.R.U. and was sent back to the United States for nearly a decade of scientific espionage, from roughly 1940 to 1948.

How he communicated with his controllers is unknown, as is what specifically he gave the Soviets in terms of atomic secrets. However, it is clear that Moscow mastered the atom very quickly compared with all subsequent nuclear powers.

In the United States under a false name, Dr. Koval initially gathered information about new toxins that might find use in chemical arms. Then his G.R.U. controllers took a gamble and had him work under his own name. Dr. Koval was drafted into the Army, and by chance found himself moving toward the bomb project, then in its infancy.

The Army judged him smart and by 1943 sent him for special wartime training at City College in Manhattan. Considered a Harvard for the poor, it was famous for brilliant students, Communists and, after the war, Julius Rosenberg, who was executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for the Soviets. ...

Something else about him stood out, Dr. Kramish said — he was a decade older than his peers, making everybody wonder “why he was in this program.”

Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was suffering severe manpower shortages and asked the Army for technically adept recruits. In 1944, Dr. Koval and Dr. Kramish headed to Oak Ridge, where the main job was to make bomb fuel, considered the hardest part of the atomic endeavor.

Dr. Koval gained wide access to the sprawling complex, Dr. Kramish said, because “he was assigned to health safety” and drove from building to building making sure no stray radiation harmed workers.

In June 1945, Dr. Koval’s duties expanded to include top-secret plants near Dayton, said John C. Shewairy, an Oak Ridge spokesman. The factories refined polonium 210, a highly radioactive material used in initiators to help start the bomb’s chain reaction.

In July 1945, the United States tested its first atomic device, and a month later it dropped two bombs on Japan.

After the war, Dr. Koval fled the United States when American counterintelligence agents found Soviet literature hailing the Koval family as happy immigrants from the United States, said a Nov. 3 article in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, a Russian publication.

In 1949, Moscow detonated its first bomb, surprising Washington at the quick loss of what had been an atomic monopoly.

But in a comment on the article, NYT reader James Haygood writes:

This is a fascinating article, to be sure. But it strikes me as what Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman would have called a "modified limited hangout."

We are asked to believe that George Koval, one of over ten million World War II draftees, "by chance found himself moving toward the bomb project." Then, despite being "a decade older than his peers, making everybody wonder why he was in the program,” Koval somehow received top secret security clearance. How could the background check have failed to reveal the eight-year gap in his resume while he was studying in the Soviet Union, and the fact that his parents were living in Siberia?

Koval's access to multiple bomb plants as a safety inspector was an obvious breach of compartmentalization, in which links between secret plants should have been restricted to top brass. A final preposterous fillip is that a G.R.U.-groomed, top-level Soviet spy would have been outed by "Soviet literature hailing the Koval family as happy immigrants from the United States" ... and that U.S. authorities who failed to detect this during the issuance of his security clearance suddenly woke up and exclaimed, "Oh, right, that's George's folks!"

This fanciful chain of one-in-a-million coincidences points to one logical explanation: namely, one or more Soviet operatives placed in the Army command to steer Koval into the atomic bomb project, despite his obvious security disqualifications. Let us hope that William J. Broad goes on to reveal the full picture behind this entertaining but hardly credible official cover story, which had to be concocted in a hurry after the Russians went public.

Broad's deadpan delivery of this highly-decorated confabulation seems to conceal a big Cosmic Wink.

— James Haygood, Nanuet, NY

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I only understand the effectiveness of Soviet spies because I can understand how I would have been one of them. On those grounds, you can paradoxically get retroactively conservative.

It would have been very easy to attibute Stalinist atrocities to propaganda...otherwise, I would have termperamentally sided with..."significant change requires extreme brutality, by human nature. Stalin is right, and furthermore he won the war, and probably does what is just." Americans and Britains weren't selling much of interest, back then. Wesrern leaders looked like a feeble little cabal of affluent interests...and that's what they were. Of course, their critiques of Stalin were also dead-on.

Stalin did win the war, btw.

Anonymous said...

Isn't it curious how one often has to wait for people to die before the truth comes out?

Too often, truth is treason to the living, and sometimes even to the dead.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, how do we know that certain people don't think that "America ... is not selling much of interest" right now?

I love that answer. After decades of denial it is, "of course "we" were spying. You didn't actually belive the stuff we were saying, did you?"

Fifty years from now it will be "of course we were pushing for the interests of Israel at the expense of the United States. Whatever gave you the impression otherwise?"

Yeah, yeah, we don't mean "everyone".

Anonymous said...

Yes: Chess



No: Checkers

Brian said...

It is amazing how so many are using this as an opportunity to defend the Rosenberg's simply because they were not as effective as Koval.

But perhaps they have a point.

Being the avid follower of Alan Dershowitz, I have to conclude that death may not have been best for the Rosenbergs. Torture would have been a better response, so as to elicit the names of all of the other spies they were working with. Perhaps they would have given up Koval after extensive waterboarding?

Ethel would have been relatively easy to break, one would think.

Clearly more was at stake then than now, so if torture was ever justified is was at that time.

Anonymous said...

Given how blabby American government is, isn't it odd that it is capable of keeping secret some of its own incompetence? Could that be because it is incompetence that nonetheless shines an unforgiving light on the Left?

Anonymous said...

Was there a single communist spy who wasn't Jewish or married to a Jew in the Manhattan project?

Even the 40s spy's that weren't Jewish had some Jewish connection. Chambers was married to a Jew, and was converted to Communism by Jews at Columbia while Hiss came to Communism through Frankfurter at Harvard.

Koval, Hall, Rosenberg, Oppenhemier, White, the list goes on and on.

togo said...

Would make a great Hollywood movie, think it will ever be made? Not likely, communism has gone down the memory hole for some reason.

Anonymous said...

I found the comment of James Haygood of New York to be more interesting than the story of the spy, which makes me tend to believe that what he posits is close to the truth.

Anonymous said...

>This fanciful chain of one-in-a-million coincidences points to one logical explanation: namely, one or more Soviet operatives placed in the Army command to steer Koval into the atomic bomb project<

the nyt reader is correct. the fanatical jewish-american support for the soviet union is the great scandal of the 20th century. the rosenbergs were the tip of the iceberg. it was so much worse than the public is led to believe. the yalta conference stands as towering evidence that the roosevelt administration was a compromised government acting in the interests of the soviets to the extent possible.

google "venona project". venona has been flushed down the memory hole by our commissars. the subject of this nyt article a supposedly isolated army officer was part of an organized fifth column that got away with it.

as has been pointed out here before a great website for information on "secular" jewish political activism in the usa is http://www.philipweiss.org/

Anonymous said...

Historians of the future may decide that much-reviled Senator Joe McCarthy wasn't as wrong as he has been made out to be.

Anonymous said...

I love how half the comments on the NYT board celebrate the guy for preventing Amerikkka frrom keepin a monopoly on the Bomb, while the other half use this to defend the Rosenbergs.

I always forget that the NYT is written by and for the inhabitants of the Twilight Zone...

Luke Lea said...

Steve,

You've written a lot about Jewish intelligence and influence. But what strikes me is how politically naive a lot of the smartest and the most influential Jews have turned out to be over a whole range of issues. Any theories?

Anonymous said...

Was there a single communist spy who wasn't Jewish or married to a Jew in the Manhattan project?

Relax. It may no longer be for the sake of the working masses, but these days illegal immigrants and Muslims (and illegal immigrant Muslims) are getting involved in the game too. Ain't multiculturalism great?

Anonymous said...

"Koval, Hall, Rosenberg, Oppenhemier, White, the list goes on and on.

11/13/2007 3:42 AM"

Other than the demented heresay ramblings of a retired (and probably senile) Soviet secret-policeman peddling a book-deal, there is no reason to suppose that Oppenheimer was a spy. Oppenheimer was a loyal American, and genuinely came to distrust the communists.

Klaus Fuchs - a german quaker by birth (and a communist by conviction), and one of the worst of the atomic spies.

Anonymous said...

Regarding Oppenhemier,

1) He was a member of the communist party.

2) His wife was a commie, His brother was a commie, his mistress was a commie, his sister-in-law was a commie. 2 of his graduate assistants were commies.

3) He recommended communists for the manhattan project. He knew his brother Frank had been approached by the GRU, but said nothing.

4) He didn't want to build the H-bomb, lax security didn't bother him, he wanted to "share" and he wanted to share the A-bomb with the Soviets.

5)Strauss (Jewish) thought he was disloyal. Teller thought him loyal but thought his refusal to go ahead on the H-bomb "strange". Hoover wanted him gone.

6) Had "Oppie" been a soviet spy he would have acted just as he did.

7) Had it not been for Chambers, we'd still be arguing whether Hiss was a spy. Truman knew the truth about Hiss and White but kept it a secret.

8) Maybe "Oppie" was a loyal American but commonsense says no.

Anonymous said...

Klaus Fuchs - a german quaker by birth (and a communist by conviction), and one of the worst of the atomic spies.

Good example. Fuchs wasn't he only one spying at Los Alamos. Theodore Hall (who was Jewish) and others were also doing the same. Another spy, Lona Cohen, relayed information between Hall and Soviet handlers. Cohen and her husband were part of the British-based Portland Spy Ring. Other members of this ring were Gordon Lonsdale, Ethel Gee, and Harry Houghton. None of the latter three were Jewish to the best of my knowledge.

Anonymous said...

The factories refined polonium 210, a highly radioactive material used in initiators to help start the bomb’s chain reaction.

Good old polonium-210, still popular with "ex"-KGB man Vladimir Putin when he wants to kill somebody.

Anonymous said...

Gordon Lonsdale real name was Konon Trofimovich Molody. He was part Jewish and lived in California for 10 years with his aunt before going back to the USSR prior to WW II.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, commenters, for making it totally impossible for anyone who isn't already convinced of the power of the Israel lobby to read this post without freaking out.

If you all know so much about Soviet propaganda and how effective it was, how come you can't learn anything from it?