Sleeper Agent

The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away

Ann Hagedorn

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501173967
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

This "historical page-turner of the highest order" ( The Wall Street Journal ) tells the chilling, little-known story of an American-born Soviet spy in the atom bomb project during World War II, perfect for fans of The Americans and nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. Born in Iowa, schooled in science at Columbia University, and as American as baseball, George Koval was the ultimate secret agent. Because he had security clearances to the Manhattan Project, he was able to pass invaluable classified information that helped Soviet scientists produce an atomic bomb years earlier than US experts had expected. The FBI only identified him several years after he had returned to the Soviet Union, and in 2007, Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded him Russia's highest civilian honor for his contribution to the Soviet atomic bomb program.As William J. Broad wrote in The New York Times, Koval was "one of the most important spies of the twentieth century, " but because of his success he is also the least known. Sleeper Agent is his fascinating story, a real-life thriller as gripping as any spy novel and "worthy of John le Carre" ( The New York Journal of Books ).

PART I THE LURE

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: “It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

CHAPTER ONE THE DREAM ON VIRGINIA STREET

The first Sioux City residents to greet Abram Koval must have been the newsboys peddling the latest editions of Iowa dailies in a high-pitched “buy-a-paper-mister” cry while pushing across a crowded train platform. It was early May in 1910 and Abram was coming from Galveston, Texas, where he had just entered America for the first time. A month before, at dawn, he had departed from the Russian village of his birth, leaving behind his parents and siblings, and his future wife who would one day be the mother of his children, among them their son George Abramovich Koval. In a nearby town, Abram had boarded a train with dozens of men, women, and children, pressed against windowless walls, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, for an eight-hour trip to Bremen, Germany. There he registered for the April 7 transatlantic trip to America on the SS Hannover and spent two nights in a dormitory, most distinctive for its walls blackened with swarms of flies and its rows of tightly connected cots crammed with people of both genders and all ages—mere practice for his upcoming five-thousand-mile journey to Galveston in steerage with nearly 1,600 closely lodged passengers.

On April 28, Abram walked down the gangplank of the S.S. Hannover at the port of Galveston, known as the Ellis Island of the West, where he was officially listed as “Abram Berks Kowal” on an immigration form noting his destination as “Sioux City, Missouri.” One week later, he deboarded the train at his new home in Sioux City, Iowa—on the Missouri River—where the sight of the newsboys and the hum of their high energy must have refueled his sense of purpose.

At the time of his journey, twenty-seven-year-old Abram Berko Koval was an experienced carpenter whose tireless work ethic and solid reputation had made him the very marrow of what was known as the Galveston Movement. This was a cause organized largely by prominent Jews in New York City, such as Jacob Schiff and Cyrus Sulzberger, who were trying to protect the rights of Jewish immigrants to enter America by diverting them to towns far west of New York City. Their goal was to prevent immigration restrictions that were under discussion because of prejudices rising out of the recent influx of Jewish immigrants to the US: one hundred thousand a year, beginning in 1905, and mostly crowding into the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

By the summer of 1906, their plan had begun. Galveston was chosen because it was in the West and it had a direct passenger shipping line, the North German Lloyd Shipping Company, from Bremen. Also, Galveston was a large terminus for railroad lines to and from every major city in the West and Midwest. By 1910, Schiff and his colleagues had placed nearly ten thousand Russian immigrants in sixty-six cities and eighteen states, all coming through Galveston, often after being recruited back home.

Working out of the Jewish Emigration Society, which was Schiff’s organization based in Kiev, the Russian recruiters were looking for young men, like Abram Koval, who would adjust well and contribute to communities across America: healthy, under the age of forty, and skilled as ironworkers, tailors, butchers, shoemakers, and carpenters. To attract them, the society offered vouchers to cover most of the costs of the journey, including the travel from hometowns to Bremen, plus the lodging for a night or two there, and the ship passage.

And for Abram, the decisive push to leave home may have been the visits of the society’s recruiters, who must have stirred his hopes for a better life as they presented an array of opportunities in America. His village of Telekhany, in Belarus on the outskirts of Pinsk, was located within the Pale of Settlement, a tier of provinces in European Russia and Russian-held Poland where nearly four million Jews lived. In the Pale, there were restrictions that stifled the lives of Jews, especially their economic progress, including the inability to purchase land, to own businesses, and to enter professions. Their education was limited by a 10 percent Jewish quota in the secular schools, diminishing their chances to earn degrees that could lead to financial security. And for the men, there was also the six-year requirement to serve in the Russian army, plus nine years in the reserves.

To leave or not to leave was a timeless question, echoing out of the pasts of all oppressed people. How to escape, where to go, and when. The answers would come to Abram as the recruiters of the Galveston Movement offered hope and the realities surrounding him generated fear. Leaving Russia in 1910 meant escaping the pervasive anti-Semitism of Czar Nicholas II’s Russia and the ongoing threat of violence against Jews. What most compelled Abram’s departure were likely the same brutalities that had driven the unprecedented influx of Russian Jews to New York beginning in 1905.

In October that year, the czar had signed a document to end a general strike that was paralyzing his vast Russian empire. Known as the October Manifesto, it would, if implemented, require the czar to surrender the basic rights of his supreme power and transform his autocracy into a constitutional monarchy with the freedoms of speech, assembly, and conscience. No longer could one man alone make the laws that governed the lives of his people. There would be a parliament out of his control and elected by all classes, including workers like Abram whose voice could then be heard, as the manifesto assured Jews the right to vote and to be elected.

The next day thousands upon thousands of Russians who viewed the manifesto as the first Russian constitution took to the streets in hundreds of towns and cities to celebrate the triumphant outcome of what would be known as the Russian Revolution of 1905. But in the Pale, the joy was exceptionally brief. For there, by midafternoon, the rejoicing masses were silenced by mobs of armed ruffians and local police, causing the storied day to be described in the Pale not as a victory for the masses but as a pogrom, a storm of human violence targeting the Jews of the Russian Empire.

In the weeks that followed, there were 694 pogroms in 660 Russian towns—the majority occurring within the Pale. At least 3,000 Jews were killed and 2,000 critically injured. Reports of the wounded reached levels of more than 15,000 men, women, and children. In most afflicted towns, Jewish homes were robbed and burned; shops and synagogues were looted; and witnesses reported murders of babies and rapes of women and girls.

Russian authorities denied any secret plans to punish Jews in the aftermath of the czar’s signing of the manifesto. Instead, they claimed that the pogroms were a mobilization of the Russian people in support of the czar and that the violence had erupted from the passion of his followers expressing what they did not want to lose: their czar and imperial Russia. But with time, the truth would surface: the massacres had to have been planned in advance by anti-Semitic, counterrevolutionary leaders. And it would one day be clear that false information created to set the blame on the Jews for the many failures of the czar’s regime was at the core of the pogroms—for example, the discovery of a printing press hidden at police headquarters in Saint Petersburg producing anti-Semitic pamphlets during October and November 1905.

This was an age-old scenario: Repress the unwanted and when they revolt, blame them, the victims, for the ensuing carnage while allowing counterrevolutionary thugs to kill them and be lauded for saving the empire. The unseen irony beneath the thick crust of denial in czarist Russia was that oppression was and always would be the fuel for awakening class consciousness, inciting revolts against oppressors and crushing empires. To be sure, with the mounting anti-Semitism, Jewish radicalism in Russia only grew stronger. By 1906 many Jews in Russia hoped for and worked toward the collapse of the Russian autocracy, some as part of revolutionary organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the czar and even trained in armed resistance to defend Jewish communities against mob violence. One major player in the upsurge of political activism was the General Jewish Labor Union, known as the Bund. Abram Koval had been a member since his late teens.

What drove the young to the Bund was its uplifting solidarity. Their discriminated ethnicity, their working-class roots, their impoverished conditions were no longer shameful. These were not weaknesses, but rather the traits that could empower them as they pledged to change the world by ending oppression. Through solidarity, they could develop an identity based in dignity and hope—not fear and disgrace. This was a generation that would plot to overthrow the czar, who was the symbol of Jewish oppression.

Another member of that fiery generation was Abram’s future wife, Ethel Shenitsky. Born in Telekhany, she was the daughter of a rabbi who did not want his daughter mingling in any rebel group promoting socialism—like the Bund. But to young Ethel, socialism had effectively replaced the religion her father had spent years teaching her. As her son George would one day write: “My mother was a socialist long before most people knew the meaning of the word.” This was disgraceful to Ethel’s father, whose anger was deep enough that on one occasion he grabbed his daughter’s thick brown hair and dragged her across a yard into the local synagogue. Neither time nor age would ease the tensions.

Ethel’s beliefs only grew stronger as Russian authorities tightened the rules for Jews. Year after year, there was more surveillance, bringing daily dangers to those who were active in what might be considered revolutionary activities. Curfew was at 8 p.m. No assembly was allowed. And there were growing numbers of arrests, mostly of so-called revolutionaries. Worse still, there were vile efforts to force Jews out of the empire. For example, there were accounts of families pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and, with scarcely any time to dress, driven to a central police station, then herded out of the city in groups by soldiers on horseback. By 1910, there had been reports of local authorities “even taking babies from their mothers, leaving the parents the choice of abandoning their homes or their children.” Such expulsions were later referred to as the “bloodless pogroms,” but their power in pushing Jews out of Russia was as painfully mighty as the bloodiest pogroms.

When and where Abram and Ethel first met isn’t known. But they were together by the time the recruiters from Kiev had reached out to Abram. And soon they had a plan. About ten months after Abram first arrived in Iowa, Ethel joined him. Then on June 3, 1911, they were married in Sioux City, a fast-growing trade center whose early-twentieth-century investors envisioned its potential as a second Chicago. For the Kovals, it was a smart start.

By 1911, one hundred passenger trains moved daily through Sioux City’s three railway stations. It housed the second-largest stockyard in the nation and three major meatpacking plants. It had a population of nearly fifty thousand. And for the city’s Jews, of whom there were three thousand, Sioux City had become a regional nucleus. In this town surrounded by the cornfields and tall grass of America’s Great Plains, there were four Orthodox synagogues; more than a hundred Jewish-owned businesses; hundreds of Jewish tradesmen supplying some of the city’s best carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, bakers, masons, and electricians; and dozens of Jewish newsboys helping to support their immigrant families.

Until Ethel had arrived, Abram rented a small, sparsely furnished room at a boardinghouse about a half mile from what was known as the East Bottoms, where new immigrants, Jewish and non-Jewish, often lived in tenement-style apartment buildings. Then, after their marriage, the Kovals moved to a small house on Virginia Street, even farther from the ghetto-like settlements and four blocks from the off-white three-story wood-frame Victorian duplex they soon would share with one of Abram’s sisters and her husband, also recent émigrés. This was the house at 619 Virginia Street, which the Kovals would one day own. It was where they would raise their three boys: Isaiah, born on July 22, 1912; George, December 25, 1913; and Gabriel, January 25, 1919.

For a while, the Kovals would be among the best examples of what the Galveston Movement recruiters had envisioned. From the Pale of Settlement to the house on Virginia Street, they were living what many thought was the American Dream.

CHAPTER TWO “NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH”

George Koval grew up in a family who believed learning was the key to all dreams. His parents and aunts and uncles set the examples by reading, apprenticing, listening, and storytelling. Yiddish was often spoken at home, though both Ethel and Abram learned English and they instructed their sons to read English out loud, even to recite verses of poetry. They also encouraged the boys to attend plays and musicals, vaudeville shows and skits, as well as sporting events at Sioux City’s Jewish Community Center, which was walking distance from their house and adjacent to a ballpark.

George may have learned the rules of baseball in the alley behind Virginia Street or on the often muddy playing field near the Jewish center. Sioux City baseball fans still talked about the 1891 “world series” when the Sioux City Huskers beat the Chicago Colts in a tie-breaking game. There was also the time when his high school principal let students leave early to attend a 2:30 p.m. exhibition game at the Sioux City Stock Yards Ball Park that featured the “home run twins” of the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. At the end of the seventh inning, Ruth called the game and then, with Gehrig, motioned the young fans to the outfield where the kids caught fly balls with their heroes.

In a setting of baseball, newsboys, skits, and plays, George’s childhood appeared to be quite normal. But as he would later realize, as a Jew of Russian descent coming of age in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a continuous reel of politics and prejudice running in the background of his life from the start.

He was three years old when the Russian revolutions of 1917 headlined the Sioux City newspapers. In March, there were the stories about the end of the imperial autocracy, the demise of Czar Nicholas II, and the bloody struggle to define a new Russia. “COMPLETE END TO THE REIGN OF ROMANOFF DYNASTY IN RUSSIA,” read the banner headline in the Sioux City Journal on March 17. Though he likely wouldn’t remember any details, he must have felt a jarring wave of high emotions in the Koval household, for the collapse of the empire meant the end of the Pale of Settlement. Then in early November—late October on the Russian calendar—in what would be known as the October Revolution, the radical socialist party, the Bolsheviks, seized power and began to usher in the world’s first attempt to create a Communist system, which, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, pledged to criminalize anti-Semitism and to allow Jews full participation in society.

In America, however, only a few months later, George’s parents appeared to be trapped once again in a tangle of distorted biases, for in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Russian Jews in America were quickly labeled as Bolsheviks—America’s new enemies. The allegation was that the Jews in Russia, as activists for workers’ rights and socialism, were the wicked plotters of the revolution and now must be conspiring to overthrow the American government. The alleged Jewish participation in the Bolshevik revolution, and the equating of Russian Jews with Bolsheviks, would spark a new generation of anti-Semitic hatred in America—targeting people like the Kovals, who were socialists and firm believers that capitalism could never eliminate poverty or oppression.

By the end of 1919, when George turned six, the post–World War I paranoia known as the Red Scare had begun to escalate. This new war was against Bolsheviks, socialists, Communists, trade unionists, and immigrants. And by the 1920s, hysteria, like a heavy fog, blocked any vision of the truth. America was off-balance and edgy, with the postrevolution suspicions taking hold and anti-Semitism as well as xenophobia invading America—not Bolshevism.

Part of the xenophobia took the form that Jacob Schiff and his colleagues in the Galveston Movement had fought so hard to prevent: immigration quotas that could significantly diminish Jewish entry into the US. In 1924, the restrictionists gained considerable ground with a law that radically reduced the arrival of people fleeing oppression from Eastern Europe and Russia. In Sioux City, it nearly halted the Jewish community’s growth. And worse still, the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise in the Great Plains states.

Soon, as many as five million Americans were drawn to the racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic dogma of the Klan. Clad in white robes and peaked hoods, Klan members flaunted their supposed superiority over “other” Americans. And in the heart of the new “Ku Klux Klan belt” was Iowa, where the Klan was warning residents of Des Moines and Sioux City to beware of the Jewish conspiracy trying to control America.

By the summer of 1924, when George was ten years old, Iowa could estimate about forty thousand Klan members statewide in more than a hundred “klaverns,” the Klan name for local branches. In Sioux City, where the number of new recruits was growing, fiery pine crosses could be spotted on the summits of hills where initiation ceremonies would take place shortly after dark. One Saturday that summer, Klansmen assembled on a highway at the east end of Sioux City for a giant parade of floats, banners, and masked participants, who moved through the main streets of town, as they would do multiple times in 1924.

So it was that George’s childhood introduced him to the ignorance and biases that would surround him for many years of his life. In the 1920s, American Jews were rejected for jobs at banks, public utilities, and at large local companies owned by non-Jews. Newspapers carried ads for jobs specifically stating “Christians Only Need Apply.” An array of clubs denied their entry. And there was what historians would describe as “the greatest barrage of anti-Semitism in American history”: a ninety-one-part series about “the Jewish menace” published in the Dearborn Independent, the personal weekly newspaper of industrialist Henry Ford.

During the nearly two-year run of the series, front-page stories exposed what the publication defined as “J...