US embarrassed as Putin honours spy who came in from the cornfields

US embarrassed as Putin honours spy who came in from the cornfields

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

Published: 13 November 2007

In Sioux City, Iowa, they are calling him the spy who came in from the cornfields. But, in Russia, the man the neighbours remember as a polite and private intellectual is being feted as one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

When George Koval died in his Moscow apartment last year, at the age of 92, no obituaries were published detailing his wartime double life of treachery as a deep-cover agent of Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU.

He penetrated America's most secret atomic facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Dayton, Ohio – where the plutonium, enriched uranium and polonium used to create the atomic bomb were developed. Such was the embarrassment of US intelligence at its total failure to protect the country's secrets that it has maintained a blanket of secrecy over the Koval affair, which it had known all about for 60 years.

But, 10 days ago, Russia's President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer himself, surprised historians by bestowing a posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation on Koval.

With that, the cat was finally out of the bag. Koval, aka Agent Delmar, was hailed as "the only Soviet intelligence officer" to infiltrate the Manhattan Project, the secret plan to develop the first nuclear weapon by the US, Canada and the UK. Mr Putin's announcement said his work "helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own."

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3155089.ece