Sleeper Agent
The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hagedorn (The Invisible Soldiers) unearths the little-known story of Soviet spy George Koval (1913–2006) in this doggedly researched account. Posthumously awarded Russia's highest civilian honor, Koval flew so far under the radar that Vladimir Putin hadn't heard of him before attending a Moscow exhibition on Cold War–era spies in 2006. Culling FBI reports, school yearbooks, and immigration forms, Hagedorn details Koval's early life in Sioux City, Iowa, where he was born to Russian Jewish immigrants, who, in the face of rising American anti-Semitism in the 1930s, returned to their native country to join a collective farm in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia's Far East. After WWII began, Koval, who had been pursuing a chemistry degree, was recruited by military intelligence and sent back to the U.S. in 1940 as a spy. He infiltrated Manhattan Project facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio, supplying his handlers with classified information about the production of enriched uranium, plutonium, and polonium. After fleeing the U.S. in 1948, Koval became a teacher at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow; Hagedorn suggests that embarrassment over his escape led the FBI to keep his case quiet. Enlivened by its brisk pace and lucid scientific details, this is a rewarding introduction to a noteworthy episode in the history of Soviet espionage.
