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Entry: Frum's Mishagas Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/frums_mishagas#9457 Post contents: If Observer is embarrassed by Dr. Gottfried, than I’d guess he is proud of George Koval, now revealed as one of the most important spies in history, having passed America’s nuclear secrets on to Uncle Joe Stalin. I guess a fellow motivated to help Uncle Joe must not have done it out of any evil motive. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/us/12koval.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print November 12, 2007 A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor By WILLIAM J. BROAD 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. 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. Sent at: 2008 07 09