George Koval - Later Years

Later Years

After World War II, Koval was discharged from the Army. He returned to New York and CCNY, where he received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering on February 1, 1948. Telling his friends he was thinking about taking a trip to Poland or Israel, Koval secured a passport for six months' travel to Europe. According to the Russian publication Российская Газета (Rossiiskaia Gazeta), he might have left because American counter-intelligence agents had discovered Soviet literature about his parents after being tipped off about the leak by a Soviet defector. He left by sea in October 1948 and never returned to his birth country. In Russia, he left the Soviet military with discharge papers as an untrained rifleman and the rank of private. His foreign background and service record made him "a very suspicious character", he wrote to Kramish. Turned down for education and research positions, Koval turned to his old GRU contact, who secured him a job as a laboratory assistant at the Mendeleev Institute. Eventually, Koval managed to obtain a teaching job there; his students often laughed at his foreign pronunciations for technical terms.

While other spies such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs were caught after the war, Koval apparently went unscrutinized for years. Among the reasons given for his maintained cover was that inter-service politics undermined efforts to perform proper security checks on employees. Another possibility is that the US government chose scientific ability over clear records and political sympathies. In the 1950s, the FBI investigated his wartime activities and interviewed his former colleagues, leaving them with the impression that he might have been a spy. The matter was kept confidential for sixty years as the US was afraid of the damage that would result from the exposure of Koval's activities.

Koval described his 57 years of post-spy life living in Russia as "uneventful". His family knew he had done work for the GRU, but the subject was never discussed. He did not receive any high awards upon his return, a fact that bothered him. Bigger awards went to "career men", he told Kramish. However, he ended his correspondence by saying that he was not protesting his treatment; " that I did not find myself in a Gulag, as might well have happened". Koval died in his Moscow apartment on January 31, 2006, at the age of 92.

Koval's activities as a spy began to emerge after the publication of a 2002 book, The GRU and the Atomic Bomb, which mentioned Koval by his code name and listed him as one of a handful of spies who evaded counterintelligence groups. On November 3, 2007, he received the posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation bestowed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. When Koval was honored, the Russian presidential proclamation stated, "Mr Koval, who operated under the pseudonym Delmar, provided information that helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own".